IBO: New Seats Planned For District 20 Will Not Meet Enrollment Needs

The seven new schools coming to District 20 won’t do nearly enough to ease overcrowding, according to testimony from the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) at City Council Tuesday.

In a statement to the council’s education committee, IBO’s Sarita Subramanian said that while District 20 is among the two expected to receive the most news seats in the city’s five-year plan – 4,541 in total – it also has the greatest expected enrollment growth.

“Most of the seats would come online by 2021-2022,” said Subramanian. “However, the additional seats represent just 58 percent of the seats needed to eliminate the existing overcrowding identified by IBO in the district.”

According IBO’s review of school system’s Enrollment, Capacity & Utilization Report, 7,764 seats are needed to make the utilization rate across all District 20 schools less than 102.5 percent. The current five-year plan leaves 3,329 needed seats unfunded – a number that is only expected to increase in the next five years with the projected enrollment growth.

In addition, the city plans to distribute these seats among seven new district schools, but as we’ve reported, funding does not guarantee the city will be able to find the facilities to house these additional schools.

“We’ve had them in the capital plan for years. The issue is trying to find the sites. There just are no big enough properties to build a school,” Laurie Windsor, president of the District 20 Community Education Council (CEC), told Bensonhurst Bean last month.

Another challenge the city faces is finding a way to add seats in areas of the district that are actually overcrowded.

“One of the largest impediments to alleviating overcrowding is managing the mismatch between where seats in overcrowded buildings are located and where unused seats are located,” said Subramanian.