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Q&A
Metrics used for planning school expansions and new construction
5:36:06
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Council Member Rita Joseph inquires about the metrics used to plan school expansions and new construction. SCA President Nina Kubota and Deputy Chancellor Emma Vadehra explain the planning process and data used for decision-making.
- Projections are done at district and subdistrict levels, incorporating housing data
- Class size compliance law has shifted planning to a per-school basis
- Current enrollment and class size compliance data are used to determine space needs at each school
- A survey of principals was conducted to gather feedback on space needs and potential conversions
Rita Joseph
5:36:06
Correct.
5:36:08
And what metrics do you use to figure out, hey, I'm gonna build this amount of schools in the next ten years?
5:36:13
Is this the census?
5:36:14
You build out an annex in that other school, and here you are, they're already at capacity.
5:36:18
I went to visit that school with council member Ressler too and it's a high in demand school, AP classes are full, the kids are amazing and more people want their kids to go there.
5:36:28
So how do we what's the metric to expand schools that are in demand in terms of space?
Nina Kubota
5:36:35
Well, we do our projections, do it at a sort of district and subdistrict area, and to that we add housing.
5:36:44
So we were really prior to this plan planning at that level.
5:36:50
Since class size compliance law came into effect, we've been really analyzing it at a per school basis, and actually I'll turn to my partners here at New York City Public Schools to help us with that answer.
Emma Vadehra
5:37:05
Yeah, so as Nina said, and this is one of the reasons, and she highlighted this, that SEAs had to think differently about how they allocate their new capacity funding going forward because we used to look at overcrowded communities based on the projections of who was going to live in the community and that's not what we need at PSA.
5:37:25
The challenge at PSA isn't whether more people are moving into the community.
5:37:30
Opening up a school down the street from PS8 doesn't actually solve the PS8 problem unless we want to limit enrollment which we don't.
5:37:38
And so it creates a new way of planning for SEA that's actually far more constraining because you actually need to find a way to expand the capacity of PS8 itself.
5:37:49
As we work with SCA on that what we are looking at is our class size compliance data.
5:37:54
So we're looking, as you know we have data for every class in the system at this point in time.
5:37:59
We are looking at the space already available in that building to see, as we discussed earlier, if any of that space can be converted into instructional space without any tradeoffs.
5:38:12
And we also did a survey of all our principals to get their feedback on this particular challenge.
5:38:18
What space do you have?
5:38:20
What space do you need?
5:38:22
What space could you convert?
5:38:24
Coming out of that survey is how we've gotten to some of these smaller room conversion projects that Tom and team are doing to actually say we can move further towards compliance without building more buildings just by churning over some of that space.
5:38:37
But the basic data we're looking at is our current enrollment and class size compliance data to figure out what's needed at each school.
5:38:44
And when we say 500 schools need more space, that's what we're looking at current state.