City Schools Are Overcrowded, With No End in Sight

Nearly 500,000 New York City students are in overcrowded schools. And as the city revises the way it calculates overcrowding, to give a truer picture of how full the schools are, this number could increase even more.

The city has plans to tackle the issue but they only go so far, allowing crowded schools to remain a chronic condition for years to come.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration estimated a need for about 50,000 seats over the next five years to meet current and projected enrollment. But its five-year capital plan will fund just 33,000 seats.

"The D.O.E. has failed to show any commitment to actually addressing the problem of school overcrowding throughout its history and more recently even during this administration," said Leonie Haimson, the founder and executive director of the organization Class Size Matters. 

One problem is that some schools are under-enrolled, while others are operating way above capacity.

"If you look at the total enrollment in all of our buildings in aggregate and compare that to the total capacity of all of our buildings in aggregate, there are in fact enough seats," said Elizabeth Rose, deputy chancellor of operations. "The challenge is, not all of those seats are in exactly the location that we would want them to be."

City education officials admitted they cannot keep up with growth in certain neighborhoods, like Corona, Queens or Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. School construction also has not kept pace with a surge of new residential development.

Rose emphasized that the city has other tools to alleviate overcrowding, in addition to new construction. It uses rezoning to shift enrollment. It also tries to create new programs, such as gifted and talented classes, in under-utilized buildings in order to attract more families.

Still, those methods are limited.

"In certain pockets of the city, I do think overcrowding is likely to persist," said Sarita Subramanian, senior education, budget and policy analyst at the Independent Budget Office.

In order to alleviate existing overcrowding, she said, the city needs 75,000 seats, leaving the school system in a continual game of catch-up before it could even tackle projected future growth.