Overcrowding Is Said to Be Worse This Year at Large Public High Schools in the City
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, NY TIMES, September 24, 2004

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Overcrowding at some of the city's largest public high schools has gotten worse this year, according to parents, principals and education labor leaders.

City education officials had tried to get ahead of the problem by opening 18 regional enrollment centers in mid-August but were quickly overwhelmed by parents dissatisfied with the schools their children were assigned to attend, even after the Bloomberg administration opened up 53 new small schools.

Some of the worst crowding is at large, high-performing schools. At Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens, there are 4,424 students, up from 3,920 last year; at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, there are 4,616 students, up from about 4,100. Cardozo's capacity is about 3,050 and Madison's is about 2,380.

But some struggling schools are also suffering. At Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, designated one of the city's most dangerous schools last year, there are about 3,800 students, up from 3,600.

"We're drowning," said Michael Herman, a social studies teacher who is the school union leader. Some classes for non-English-speaking students have up to 65 children, he said. "The problem is this: the Department of Ed. keeps sending kids to the school," he said. "It's creating chaos."

City education officials said they expected enrollment figures to decline by the time registers were audited at the end of next month. In many cases, students who have moved away or dropped out may still be counted on the rolls.

But the officials conceded that some schools would have more students than last year.

"In most cases, we will have final registers that are lower than today's," said Stephen Morello, a spokesman for the Education Department. "In some of these cases, we expect that they will have more students than they had last year."

At a news conference yesterday afternoon, Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that there were more than 11,000 classes citywide in which the number of students exceeded contractual limits.

Ms. Weingarten, standing outside Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, said that the vast majority of the oversized classes were in high schools, where classes are mostly limited to 34 students.

"Our teachers need lower class sizes in order to effectively connect with our kids,'' Ms. Weingarten said.

She offered four main reasons for the crowding: budget cuts that forced reductions in teaching staffs; the opening of the new small schools, which take up a disproportionate amount of space in larger buildings; problems with new computer software being used to devise student class schedules; and new enrollment policies that changed how students were admitted to schools.

Chancellor Joel I. Klein's press secretary, Jerry Russo, said the union had trumped up numbers. "This is the union's annual P.R. stunt on this issue," Mr. Russo said. "We regret that the U.F.T. would needlessly cause distress among our parents and students, as it did last year with these bogus numbers."

In his statement, Mr. Russo said that of 9,200 complaints of oversized classes last year, "only a handful were actually arbitrated."

Separately yesterday, the Education Department announced that it had released $42 million more to schools, as part of a continuing effort to reverse budget cuts that had forced many principals to shrink programs.

But parents continued to fret. Cindy Adams, whose son, Rob, is a junior at the Academy for American Studies in Queens, said officials had promised an enrollment of no more than 500. But the school now has 593.

She said there were 44 children in her son's math class and 37 in his law and government class. "The first day of school my son said at lunch he could not even sit down," she said.

11,100 OVERSIZED CLASSES ARE A CRAM SHAME: UNION
By DAVID ANDREATTA & TATIANA DELIGIANNAKAS, NY POST, September 24, 2004

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September 24, 2004 -- More than 11,100 city classrooms are overstuffed - with 10,000 of them in high schools - a new teachers union survey shows.
Queens high schools, where overcrowding has been a chronic problem, were the most packed on average. Staten Island high schools had the fewest overcrowded classrooms.

The union found 4,490 Queens high school classes had more than 34 students - the cap outlined in the union's contract with the city. By contrast, there were 3,015 in Brooklyn, 1,290 in The Bronx, 915 in Manhattan and 314 in Staten Island.

At Cardozo HS in Bayside, the union found 520 classes were beyond capacity. Francis Lewis HS and Long Island City HS both had 387 classes tipping the scales.

The survey is done annually by the United Federation of Teachers to force the city to adhere to class-size limits in their contract.

"Tens of thousands of New York City youngsters are being shortchanged because they are crammed into classes with too many students," UFT President Randi Weingarten said yesterday outside Washington Irving HS in Manhattan, which had 242 overcrowded classrooms.

Weingarten acknowledged that the city is making an effort to enforce class-size limits in the early grades, but urged more be done in high schools.

Last year, the city added roughly 10,300 high school seats and hopes to add another 21,000 over the next five years.

Jerry Russo, a spokesman for the chancellor, called the union's numbers "bogus." He said the vast majority of the 9,200 overcrowded classrooms counted the previous year were lowered to the union's satisfaction.