Mayor de Blasio’s game of denying space to new charter schools just got a lot harder, thanks to the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission.
It’s now a yearly dance: Charters ask for room in underused public-school buildings, and Team de Blasio insists it can’t spare much space, nixing perhaps half the requests.
This puts taxpayers on the line to cover the rent for whatever facilities those charters end up finding. And it delays the schools’ opening a year or more, as they must find a site and convert it to classroom use.
But the CBC just did a deep analysis of school overcrowding — and Families for Excellent Schools used that data to show there’s plenty of room in the districts where charters want it for the 2017-18 school year.
The CBC noted that overcrowding’s worse in districts with better schools and higher incomes. Lower-income areas with bad public schools have lots of unused space. And that’s where charters want to open: Their mission is to provide hope to just such kids.
The FES analysis pulled the CBC’s numbers for the 10 districts where 25 charter schools seek space next year — and found more than 56,000 open seats.
Makes sense: Families tend to flee areas with bad schools for ’hoods with better ones.
And 106,000 students citywide have already fled to public charter schools — mostly from failed regular schools. But another 45,000 kids are stranded on waitlists, since charters lack the room. Hence the drive to expand, and the requests for space.
Bottom line: The FES shows that if the city grants all the space requests of those 25 schools, utilization rates in the districts will rise only from 79 percent to 82 percent.
The mayor’s usual fallback excuse is that adding a second school in an underused building might harm the existing school. But his own Department of Education doesn’t buy that: For the 2014-15 year, it used such “co-locations” to open 31 new regular public schools.
And de Blasio now says he thinks charters are peachy, so he can’t claim a charter co-location is worse than any other.
Charters want to teach; tens of thousands of children across New York are desperate for a place where they have a real shot to learn. The city has ample space to let the two sides come together.
If the mayor stands in their way, he doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on.