The city’s public schools have released a proposal to comply with a state law to lower class sizes with few specifics that advocates and the teachers union quickly chided as not a “real plan.”
The 10-page document includes neither enrollment and admission policy changes, nor updates to the school system’s capital spending plan that lay out when or how space will be added to shrink the number of students per classroom to 25 or fewer.
“Meeting the new class size standards is going to require a real plan — and so far, the DOE hasn’t managed to create one,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, in a statement. “This document is missing a strategy for implementation and a targeted proposal for where and when new seats should be built.”
Education officials projected that they will be in “full compliance” next school year with the state law. Roughly 39% of classes already fall below required limits, thanks in part to enrollment declines during the pandemic that lowered average class sizes from 26 to 24 students.
But the report continued to raise the specter of increasing spending to bring down classroom counts. But supporters of the law say the extra spending is backed by increased funding for city schools in this year’s state budget.
“DOE anticipates significant costs associated with complying with the law, in terms of hiring new staff and ensuring adequate space, even as we work to consider a range of solutions to reaching compliance with the law,” read the plan.
The financial analysis found that staffing costs could total $1.3 billion each year to pay the salaries, fringe benefit and pension costs of 9,000 new teachers to comply with the law.
Capital costs were pegged at $30 billion or higher for new construction and space configuration, according to the School Construction Authority. Officials suggested the spending might fund creative ways of using space — such as converting space used for administrators or other non-instructional purposes to classrooms, re-siting schools or placing several within the same building, and constructing annexes to current schools.
But while the report laid out previously announced strategies to meet with a working group and send additional funding to needier schools, specific plans for subsequent school years were sparse.
“It’s a big nothing burger,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters. “There is no plan. They’re hoping just to coast on enrollment decline until it’s too late to do anything real.”
To implement the law after November 2023, education officials said they would consider the recommendations of the working group, identify policies that need to change to adhere to the caps, and align capital spending with plans to lower class sizes.
But the report did not outline what policies may be changed, how many more classroom seats or teachers would be needed in specific districts or schools, or a timeline of when resources would be added.
Classrooms in Staten Island are more likely to have classrooms with more students than the state limits, the report showed. That may also be the case in some neighborhoods in Queens — including Bayside, Glen Oaks, Flushing, College Point and Whitestone.
Roughly half of classes in the Bronx and Manhattan are already in compliance with the law, while fewer than four in 10 classrooms in Brooklyn follow the law.
More students from low-income families and who are Black or Hispanic are in classes below the limits. Nearly six in 10 of schools with the highest economic need comply with the law, the report said.
About half of schools with a majority of Black or Hispanic students no comply with the law, compared to about a quarter of schools with the highest shares of Asian and white children.
The new class size law caps kindergarten through third-grade classes at 20 students; fourth- through eighth-grade at 23 students; and high school at 25 students. A fifth of all classrooms will need to comply with the legislation this fall, with the remaining classrooms to be phased in over the following four years.