NYC parents worry students will be turned away from high-performing district under call to cut class sizes
Parents whose kids are in one of the city’s highest-performing but most overcrowded school districts are rebelling against a controversial state law requiring across-the-board reductions in class sizes.
The group of perturbed parents in District 26 in northern Queens are particularly concerned that a proposed cap on enrollment to comply with the law could prevent their kids from attending their neighborhood school.
“If there are enrollment caps to comply with class-size law, where are the kids going to school? Kids can’t attend their neighborhood school. That’s kind of crazy,” said parent Albert Suhu, president of CEC 26.
He acknowledged that he and some other parents are at loggerheads with their local state senator, John Liu, who championed the seemingly well-intentioned law and has resisted making any major alterations to it.
“We are looking for someone to step up and pass a law to make changes,” said Suhu, who was one of the dissenters on the chancellor’s working group over the law.
CEC 26 has passed a resolution stating, “[The New York City Public School System] has determined District 26 to be the most overcrowded district in New York City, and the state-mandated five-year window for compliance will very likely cause unacceptable harm by displacing District 26 families through artificially imposed enrollment levels of much fewer students in each District 26 school.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature — under intense lobbying from the United Federation of Teachers — approved a law in 2022 requiring schools in New York City to slash classes to a maximum of 20 students in grades K to 3, 23 students in grades 4 to 8 and 25 students in grades 9 to 12 by the 2027–28 school year.
Each year of the plan requires the city Department of Education to phase in an additional 20% of the classrooms in the city school district to abide by the law.
But the parent group’s resolution said the lack of new funding to implement class-size reduction could force the city to eliminate or slash popular programs and services, such as Summer Rising, 3-K, social workers and bilingual services, for their kids.
The parents advisory group proposed a number of changes:
- Implement class-size reduction in phases starting with elementary schools first, followed by middle schools and finally high schools.
- Focus class-size-reduction efforts first on overcrowded schools with the highest levels of poverty and lowest levels of academic achievement, while planning for construction of buildings in all other overcrowded neighborhoods.
- Bar any policy that prevents families from enrolling their children at their normally zoned neighborhood schools.
- Provide parents with a greater voice in determining exemptions for specialized programs and classes, such as gifted and talented, honors, advanced placement and electives and at specialized high schools such Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.
Liu said parents in his district have legitimate concerns, but shifted the blame to Mayor Eric Adams’s DOE for shoddy planning to comply with the law.
“CEC26 has some of the city’s most overcrowded schools and classrooms and is rightfully concerned since the DOE fails to articulate a coherent plan to build classroom space in northeast Queens to ease the overcrowding,” Liu told The Post on Sunday.
“In these last two years the mayor and chancellor could have crafted a thoughtful plan to ease the problem but instead resorted to implying false choices and fear-mongering. If the administration needs anything, they can speak up, but they should not continue to hope that their responsibility to reduce class sizes will go away.,” said the senator, who chairs the Senate Committee on New York City Education.
