NYC Public School Parents: How Education -- and Schools -- Always Come Last...

Nothing reveals the flawed priorities of this administration more than the fact that almost twice as many new seats in sports stadiums will be created over the next five years as new seats in schools. See this chart – with 117,000 new seats projected for the new Yankees, Mets and Nets stadiums, with only 63,000 new seats in our schools.

Take the $360 million the city will give the Yankees in tax subsidies and exemptions for their new stadium – that amount alone could fund 8-10 new elementary schools or 8 new high schools with 5,000 new seats.

The plaintiffs in the CFE case determined that we needed at least 120,000 new seats to eliminate overcrowding and reduce class size in all grades – not even taking into account any population growth. This new capacity, along with libraries, science labs, and other needed improvements was the basis of the $9.2 billion that the state provided the city in capital funding.

Yet the administration plans to create only 63,000 seats. In fact, since they received all this new funding from the state, they cut back the capital plan by 3,000 seats.

Meanwhile, new development is springing up all over the city, and will likely cause even more overcrowding in our schools.

Recently, the Mayor assembled a sustainability task force to come up with proposals on how to serve a population that is expected to grow by a million residents by 2030, to deal with the increased pressure on housing, energy, sewage, transportation, parks, playgrounds, and other infrastructure.Yet this task force was explicitly instructed to leave schools out of their considerations. See the report of PLANYC 2030 here.

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