By Kathianne Boniello
The suggestion to alter the formula for state aid in favor of more reimbursement to the city for building schools was just one of the ways Green proposed to attack school overcrowding at a news conference last week.
In the study – which named Queens as the most overcrowded borough in the city – Green said the city takes in nearly 40 percent of the state's students but gets less than 31 percent of state aid for building schools.
“There are solutions ready right now to fix the problem of classroom overcrowding,” Green said last Thursday.
Green's ideas for funding more classroom space came with the findings of a recent investigation by his office that found more than half of the city's elementary schools are overcrowded.
The study entitled “Still No Room to Learn” found Queens the most overcrowded of the five boroughs, with 76 percent of its elementary schools lacking the proper number of classroom seats.
The investigation was a followup by Green's office to a 1999 study “No Room to Learn,” during which the public advocate's office found that to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, the city needed about 2,600 additional classrooms.
A spokesman for Borough President Claire Shulman said school overcrowding continues to be a top priority for Shulman.
“Despite all the effort we're running in place,” said spokesman Dan Andrews, who said the borough added the same number of new students as classroom seats.
Shulman “still believes this is an emergency situation,” he said.
Andrews said the borough president holds monthly meetings with city school officials to assess how many new schools are being built in Queens and scout out new construction sites.
“We're in the process,” he said.
Green's study also contends that the city loses out on state Reduced Class Size Initiative aid meant to help district's shrink classes in the early grades.
The funding, Green said, is contingent on having space to reduce class sizes, leaving overcrowded city schools out of the picture.
Green said “it's unacceptable that half of all schools are still overcrowded, some holding twice as many children as they were built for.”
Queens is home to six of the 10 school districts citywide with the most overcrowded elementary schools, according to the report. Only School District 26 in northeast Queens has not seen its elementary schools suffocated by a lack of classroom seats, Green's report said.
The public advocate also proposed increasing the city Board of Education's portion of the budget. Green said the Board of Ed was expected to receive only 9.9 percent of the city's capital budget, which was slated to increase by nearly 40 percent over the next five years.
