School Overcrowding and the Amazon Deal: Please Help Us Push for Better School Planning!

NYC does a rotten job of school planning. The Mayor has encouraged rampant development to occur throughout the five boroughs with little or no forethought as to where all the additional children living in these buildings will attend school. This has led to over 570,000 students attending overcrowded schools, according to the DOE’s own data.

Now the city and the state intend to give Amazon $3 billion in tax incentives while handing over a large DOE building for the new Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, a building which parents and neighborhood activists had been urging the city to be converted into schools and a community center instead — especially as their only elementary school is already bursting at the seams.

I wrote an oped on this issue in Gotham Gazette along with parent and LIC resident Sabina Omerhodzic, showing how this deal is symptomatic of how the education of our kids too often comes last in the Mayor’s estimation.  Please send a message now to the new Charter Revision Commission, urging them to consider a proposal to reform the process of school planning to ensure that new schools are built along with new development, and not years afterwards. A letter we sent to them last month, signed by many parent and community leaders is posted on my blog, as well as an account of what happened at a Town Hall meeting this week with Queens parents, revealing how little the Mayor and the Chancellor have dealt with this issue.

It is that time of the year again; please also donate to Class Size Matters if you want to help us continue our work leading the fight for smaller classes, an end to school overcrowding and stronger student privacy protections.   If you want to donate to our work on student privacy, please add that in the section which says “Designate your donation to a specific program or fund.” Earlier this fall, our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy released a new Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy, to go along with the Parent Toolkit we released last year. Please take a look and share it with your child’s teacher!

Thanks for your support as always, Leonie