New York City charter schools are grappling with severe overcrowding issues, while district schools share the same buildings with ample unused space. This situation highlights a concerning disparity in resource allocation within the city's education system.
The choir at Success Academy's High School of Liberal Arts in Manhattan has to practice in a stairwell due to a lack of space. This situation highlights a broader issue in New York City's school system: overcrowding in charter schools compared to district schools sharing the same buildings. Roughly two-thirds of all the city’s district and charter schools share a building with one or more schools — that’s about 1,300 schools.
Over the years, the policy of co-location has allowed new charter and district schools to open and flourish, and it works because so many of the city’s school buildings are severely underutilized. For the past three years, even as the class size reduction law has been phased in, the number of unused student seats has been consistently over 215,000 — one fifth of all seats.Even before the pandemic and the sharp decline in district enrollment, the city had 100 school buildings with 500 to 1,000 or more empty seats — enough seats for a new school to open at no additional cost to the city.One of the 57 schools I lead as CEO of Success Academy is facing this issue firsthand. At our Manhattan high school, we have 27 scholars for every classroom allotted to us, compared to 16 for two of the co-located high schools operating in the same building. This space inequity is not the exception — it’s the rule across many other charter co-locations across the city. It’s as if the city Department of Education thinks charter school students are skinnier than their district peers! While the majority (88%) of co-located schools are district schools, the 12% that are charter schools consistently get less space than district schools. In the Bronx, Success Academy has seven schools that share space with district schools, and in each building, our schools are at or over-capacity, while the district schools have more space than their enrollment justifies, based on the city’s own analysis. For example, Success Academy Bronx 2 in District 9 is at 131% utilization while its co-located district school uses just 67% of its allotted space. SA Bronx 3, also in District 9, is at 152% capacity while New Millennium Bronx Academy of the Arts in the same building uses just 31% of its allotted space.These are just a few examples from one borough. Similar inequities exist for charter schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens — and not only for Success Academy. KIPP Amp Charter school in Brooklyn’s District 17 is at 125% capacity, while MS 354 uses only 41% of its capacity — with an enrollment of 220 in space that is large enough to educate 530 students, according to the DOE’s analysis. In District 8, Bronx Charter School for the Arts is at 108% capacity, yet it shares space with a district high school that uses less than half of its space. While the teachers’ union has fought to curtail or end co-location for charter schools through lawsuits and pressuring city administrators, academic studies have shown that NYC district schools, when co-located with a charter school, District schools also receive matching funds for whatever a charter school spends to upgrade their facilities in excess of $5,000. It’s time for the city to do more than just to assess and report on its school buildings’ capacity and utilization — let’s do something about this inequity and ensure all school students, district and charter, have equitable space to learn
Charter Schools Co-Location Overcrowding District Schools Space Inequity NYC Department Of Education Educational Resources
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