Parents Say Capital Plan Ignores Queens's Crowded Schools
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The city's new capital plan will create fewer new school seats citywide, and some parents in Queens say schools’ overcrowding needs to be immediately addressed. Borough reporter Ruschell Boone filed the following report. As a parent of children who attend an overcrowded school in Woodside, Queens, Sunil Kumar was not happy to hear that the Department of Education's new capital plan will not create as many schools seats as the last one did.
The 2004-2009 plan called for 55,000 seats, but the new five-year plan will create fewer than half that amount.
“If the city is not increasing but cutting the seats, this will be difficult in the future for the kids to get better study,” said Kumar.
The city said it will create 25,000 seats in 40 new schools, but critics charge that is a little sleight of hand, since the plan includes about 8,000 seats that were supposed to have been created under the previous plan but never were.
The DOE says it cannot afford to continue spending at the same levels it did in the past due to the economy and high construction costs. Yet a number of parents are not satisfied with that explanation.
“I don't mind paying more to go on the subway. I don't mind some other cuts, but definitely overcrowding, that could lead to the negative effect on the education of my children. That's my number one priority,” said parent Julian Pimiento.
The advocacy group Class Size Matters also blasts the plan, saying their own estimates show that Queens alone should be getting more than twice as many seats as the city is planning to build citywide. The borough has some of the most overcrowded schools in the city.
“We estimated that we needed more than 55,000 seats in Queens just to deal with existing overcrowding and yet this plan would provide less than 10,000 of those seats,” said Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters. “And that doesn't even count when we did our calculation of high school students in trailers.”
The DOE disputes the report, saying the group is misstating the facts and vastly overestimating the number of new seats that are needed. A DOE spokesperson said some overcrowding can be eased by using under-utilized schools more efficiently, by reconfiguring which grades are in which schools and by deciding what kind of schools are needed in particular neighborhoods.
The capital plan still has to be approved by the City Council.