PUBLISHED BY MOSHOLU PRESERVATION CORPORATION

Group Enlists Council in Battle to Add School Seats

By ALEX KRATZ

In late July, on a hot Wednesday morning, organizers and youth from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, lamenting chronic overcrowding and its effect on education, stormed City Hall to demand more school seats in the Bronx and citywide. “What do we want?” an organizer shouted.

“More schools!” an assembled group of northwest Bronx youth shouted back for a gaggle of reporters and cameramen.

“When do we want them?”

“Now!”

The chanting gave way to a press conference where the Coalition announced its SEATS (Schools Exploding at the Seams) initiative, which is designed to pressure the Education Department, using the City Council as a lobbying arm, into adding more school seats for the current Five-Year Capital Plan, which is up for revision in November.

The City Council has an opportunity to weigh in on any capital plan revisions when it approves the city’s budget next June.

Taking a leadership role in this fight, Bronx Council Member Oliver Koppell and his staff recently completed an overcrowding survey in District 10. The results were disturbing and contradicted the city’s line that schools are either at capacity or underutilized.

Koppell’s education specialist, Eleanor Edelstein said that according to the survey, PS 8 in Bedford Park is running at 181 percent capacity, meaning the school was built for 750 seats, but is housing 1,164 students. At the Walton High School campus, which houses five schools, all of the principals said they were suffering from overcrowding. Edelstein also mentioned PS 56, PS 280 and PS 94 in Norwood as schools feeling the strain of overcrowding.

The goal of SEATS, Coalition president Teresa Anderson said, is to make overcrowding a citywide issue. Anderson added that they were already getting a very positive response from Council members, many of whom have already pledged their support for SEATS.

The goal is to have each Council member survey their district’s schools, like Koppell did.

“We need to get a real picture of what’s going on in all the boroughs, so we can tell them they’re wrong when [the DOE] says, ‘We don’t need anymore seats,’ or when they tell us, ‘we’ll just add another teacher,’” Anderson said. “We need to get the stories from the people who are on the ground dealing with this problem.”

The overcrowding issue reached a boil last fall when the DOE announced it would be eliminating 1,700 Bronx seats from the capital plan. And recently the DOE announced that no schools were planned for the Kingsbridge Armory, whereas the Coalition has demanded 2,000 seats there.

The DOE and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have repeatedly said that they are confident the new capital plan will ease overcrowding in the Bronx and citywide, but Anderson and other critics aren’t buying it.

They say the DOE’s projections for school seats are skewed and contradictory. For example, when calculating the need for high school seats, the DOE projects that only 36 percent of Bronx students will graduate. Meanwhile, Klein says he wants the graduation rate to reach 70 percent by 2010.

The DOE says the graduation rate is only one of several factors it uses to determine school seat needs. It also uses demographic changes. If that’s the case, wonders Jamin Sewell, a staffer for Coalition ally Koppell, then why is the DOE taking away seats if the mayor is predicting the city to grow by a million people in the next 20 years.

“It’s like the mayor is speaking out of both sides of his mouth,” Sewell said.

The Coalition spent the morning before the press conference pitching Council members and imploring them to survey schools in their district to find out exactly which ones and to what extent they are overcrowded.

Manhattan Council Member Robert Jackson (head of the Education committee) and Brooklyn’s David Yassky joined the Bronx’s Koppell and Joel Rivera on the steps of City Hall in speaking during the press conference. Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum also pledged her support for the SEATS initiative.

Gina Ortiz, a Bronx student, paraphrased Frederick Douglas in imploring the public and council members to keep up the pressure on the DOE. “Power concedes nothing without urging,” she said.

Rivera agreed, telling the assembled youth, “You must keep the pressure on us.” He added, “These kids are asking for something that is basic. These are the future leaders of the City of New York.”

Then the sweaty youth began chanting again in the hot mid-morning sun.

“Build more schools! Build more schools!”
 

Back to News Index Page