Hundreds of high-poverty New York City schools already have space in their buildings to lower class sizes this fall as part of an incoming state law, according to data released Tuesday by the teachers union.
The United Federation of Teachers report found 856 schools that receive Title I funds for low-income families offer enough room to meet classroom caps required by the state. Those mandates are currently being phased in and vary by grade level between 20 and 25 students.
“All we need to do is hire additional staff for those schools to come into compliance with the class size law,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said Tuesday outside Education Department headquarters.
Mayor Adams and his administration have said the need to hire additional staff is a large part of what makes the class-size law costly and hard to implement.
The analysis came after the newly enacted state budget extended Adams’ control of the city’s public schools for another two years with slight changes to the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, which will grow to 24 members with a new chairperson picked by Adams among state lawmakers’ nominees.
As part of the deal, Adams faces new limits on how he can cut Education Department funding without consulting the UFT, and the budget must be sufficient to meet the class-size caps. The city is also required to spend an additional $2 billion on classroom construction to comply with the law.
Those changes appeared to satisfy the UFT, which is withdrawing a December lawsuit to undo Adams’ budget cuts. While the mayor said the cuts were necessary to cover the costs of sheltering migrants, the union accused the city of using record-high state education aid to supplant its own spending on local schools.
“We have stopped the lawsuit because the state has also changed the language explicitly for New York City about funding schools,” Mulgrew said. “What we were looking for as a remedy in that lawsuit, we now have in a law from Albany.”
City Hall and the City Council recently announced $514 million in new city education spending to backfill expiring federal stimulus dollars after the pandemic.
The UFT space analysis considered current and projected enrollment, building utilization rates and the number of seats needed to bring the buildings into compliance with state law.
The schools identified by the UFT have space for over 207,000 additional seats, but only need 31,318 seats to meet class size caps, the union found. To staff those programs, UFT estimated the city has to hire about 3,000 more teachers who, paid at a first-year salary, would cost $180 million.
The Education Department, which already hires thousands of teachers each year for empty positions, disputed the union’s cost estimate when accounting for both salaries and fringe costs. It also said the UFT’s space analysis fails to consider preschool programs in some of the buildings.
To comply with the mandate in full, the city’s Independent Budget Office has estimated the public schools would need to hire 17,700 additional teachers, with a price tag between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion.
“We’re talking about compliance with a law that, as the Chancellor (David Banks) said many times, does not give flexibility,” First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg told reporters last month, citing a lack of “alternatives that don’t involve painful tradeoffs.
“Those options, frankly, don’t really exist. And this is why, as the Chancellor has been talking about for a while now, it’s a challenging law to implement,” he added.
The law requires that 40% of local classrooms be in compliance next year. All class sizes must comply with the caps by September 2028.
“We have been in constant engagement with the UFT and CSA (the principal’s union) regarding the Class Size Reduction plan,” said public schools spokesman Nathaniel Styer, “and we will continue to stay in compliance with the law.”
