On school overcrowding, class size and AI

March 2, 2026

1.     On Friday, the NYC School Construction Authority released their February update to the five-year capital plan. It contains not a single penny of additional funding to relieve school overcrowding and continues to fund only 33,417 new school seats – though the SCA testified last year that at least 70,000 seats would be necessary to lower class size to mandated levels.

We are about to enter the fourth year of the five-year phase-in period of class size reduction in NYC schools, as required by the class size law passed by the Legislature overwhelmingly in June 2022. Yet there are nearly 500 schools that, according to the Department of Education, are too overcrowded at their current enrollment to meet the mandate of the law. These schools enroll nearly half of all students and more than a quarter million of students in economic need.

At the same time, the city has taken few if any steps to ensure that these schools will ever have the space to lower class size to required levels, whether by building enough new schools or annexes or by more equitably balancing enrollment between nearby schools, which would benefit both overcrowded and underenrolled schools, and potentially save billions of dollars and years of time in the process.

Moreover, many changes in school utilization, including new co-locations, were proposed and approved by the Panel on Education Policy last month in schools whose class sizes range from 58% to 74% in compliance. More changes in school utilization are proposed for votes in the coming months. Yet none of their Educational Impact Statements so far explain whether these changes would help or hinder efforts to lower class size. Instead, these documents assume current class sizes in the affected schools would remain forever, as their analysis of sufficient space are based upon “the current number of classes and class size a school is programming.”

Mayor Mamdani campaigned on his strong support for the class size law, and his understanding that smaller class sizes were a critical component of a quality education. Yet so far his administration has made none of the changes in policy or planning to indicate that they are seriously committed to ensuring that hundreds of thousands of NYC public school students are ever to be provided with these opportunities, no less within the timeframe of the law.

2.     The NYT ran an article today [free link] about the growing resistance to the expanded use of AI in NYC public schools, and our coalition’s call for a moratorium. Yet it didn’t mention any of the reasons for this resistance, including how the research shows that this technology poses a serious risk to student privacy, cognitive development, critical thinking, mental health and to the environment by accelerating climate change.

Please sign our petition if you haven’t already, and if you can, write a letter to the NY Times, explaining why you oppose the DOE’s current plan to expand the use of AI at letters@nytimes.com – and try to keep it to 150 to 200 words.

Thanks, Leonie