School Overcrowding And Larger Class Sizes Is The Hallmark Of The De Blasio Administration.

Despite assurances and campaign promises by Bill de Blasio to reduce class size and build more classrooms to alleviate school overcrowding, it turns out that class sizes have actually risen and school overcrowding continues unabated.

First, the New York City Public School Parents blog shows that class sizes have actually rose during the first two years of the De Blasio/Farina Administration.  According to the blog, the DOE's own 2014-15 data shows that class sizes rose 0.1 to an average of 26.4 students per classroom from the previous school year and since the 2007-08 school year, the average class size has increased an astounding 8.32%.

Second, there are 540,000 students who are attending overcrowded public schools or about 50% of the New York City Public School students.  Worse are the schools in the immigrant communities where for every 1% increase in the immigrant population, there is a need for 100 more classroom seats.  Unfortunately, the City only projects to add 33,000 seats when the minimum needed is 49,000 and some groups claim it should be 100,000 new seats to account for the under counting of illegal immigrants.in these largely immigrant communities.

Finally, unreasonably tight school budgets that average 14% lower than in 2007-08 and kept frozen the last two years despite the City's 6 Billion dollar surplus along with the unfair fair student funding  continued school overcrowding and large class sizes will make student academic achievement a struggle.