Local Law 167 & 168, Information and Memo to City Council
Two bills were passed last year by the City Council, with the goal of helping to alleviate school overcrowding: Local Law 167 which required the DOE to make more transparent its data sources and methodology for projecting the need for new school seats, and Local Law 168, which created a Task Force for School Siting to expedite the identification of locations where new schools could be built.
Both laws resulted from recommendations made by the City Council Working Group report Planning to Learn, as well as problems we had previously identified in our reports, including, Space Crunch and Seats Gained and Lost in NYC Schools: The Untold Story.
Local Law 167 came into force on December 1, 2019. The SCA/DOE claims to have provided the data here: http://www.nycsca.org/community/capital-plan-reports-data#Local-Law-167-Reports-352
But much of the data required is missing, and in fact the DOE is providing no more data than in years past:
- No data is posted on the number of seats lost over the last few years or projected into the future from lapsed leases, removed TCUs, or the elimination of mini-schools or annexes, that have a significant impact on the need for new seats.
- No disaggregated projections are provided for the seats needs, disaggregated by grade span or type of school, i.e. Pre-K/elementary schools/middle schools, either citywide, or by district or sub-district, as called for in the law.
- No seats need estimates are provided by sub-district at all.
- The law mandates that they provide an explanation of all the inputs that help determine their projections, CONTINUE READING: Local Law 167 & 168, Information and Memo to City Council | Class Size Matters | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes