New York City is scrambling to find enough money — and space — to comply with a new state law limiting class sizes over the next few years, local education officials said Thursday.
“We’ll face some difficult choices that will be required to maintain compliance as the law’s requirements scale up,” said Emma Vadehra, the Department of Education’s chief operating officer, at a City Council hearing on the topic.
Vadehra and other education officials presented a dizzying amount of potential strategies for reducing class sizes, as the law requires. But some councilmembers questioned whether Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has sufficient plans in place to meet the state’s mandates.
Councilmember Rita Joseph, who chairs the Council’s education committee and represents parts of Brooklyn, criticized what she cast as inaccuracies in city officials’ reports on their progress to date. She also said she was “a little bothered” that New York City Public Schools had not yet implemented some of the recommendations from a working group tasked with providing guidance on the new law.
Many parents and educators initially heralded the law’s passage two years ago. It requires smaller classrooms to be incrementally achieved by 2028, with ultimate caps of 20 students for kindergarten through 3rd grade, 23 students for grades 4 through 8, and 25 students for high school.
About 40% of the city’s classrooms already comply with those targets, according to education officials. But the city needs thousands more teachers and nearly $2 billion in additional funding to remain in compliance through 2028, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates.
Districts 16 and 23 in Brooklyn and District 7 in the Bronx currently have the greatest number of classes at or below the newly mandated caps, Vadehra said. Districts 26 and 28 in Queens and District 31 in Staten Island have the fewest number of classes in compliance.
NYC Public Schools employs nearly 77,000 teachers, and…
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