Officials keep charter schools crammed out of spite — give kids space!

For decades, New York City public schools have shared facilities. Roughly two-thirds of all the city’s district and charter schools share a building with one or more schools — that’s about 1,300 schools.

Over the years, the policy of co-location has allowed new charter and district schools to open and flourish, and it works because so many of the city’s school buildings are severely underutilized.

For the past three years, even as the class size reduction law has been phased in, the number of unused student seats has been consistently over 215,000  — one fifth of all seats.

That’s according to the city’s analysis, the “Blue Book,” formally called the Enrollment, Capacity, and Utilization Report, an annual assessment of the city’s school buildings.

Even before the pandemic and the sharp decline in district enrollment, the city had 100 school buildings with 500 to 1,000 or more empty seats — enough seats for a new school to open at no additional cost to the city.

But even with this excess space, charter schools are expected to get by with less space than district schools.

One example that recently made the news is Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts –Manhattan, one of the 57 schools I lead as CEO of Success Academy. There, choir students are forced to practice on a stairwell because of lack of space.

We educate 22,000 students in grades K-12, most of whom are students of color from low-income neighborhoods, and most of whom become the first in their families to attend college.

At our Manhattan high school, we have 27 scholars for every classroom allotted to us, compared to 16 for two of the co-located high schools operating in the same building.

Sadly, the space inequity of this school is not the exception — it’s the rule across many other charter co-locations across the city.

It’s as if the DOE thinks charter school students are skinnier than their district peers!

While the majority (88%) of co-located schools are district schools, the 12% that are charter schools consistently get less space than district schools.

In the Bronx, Success Academy has seven schools that share space with district schools, and in each building, our schools are at or over-capacity, while the district schools have more space than their enrollment justifies, based on the city’s own analysis.

For example, Success Academy Bronx 2 in District 9 is at 131% utilization while its co-located district school uses just 67% of its allotted space.

SA Bronx 3, also in District 9, is at 152% capacity while New Millennium Bronx Academy of the Arts in the same building uses just 31% of its allotted space.

In District 4, SA Bronx 4 is at 185% and yet I.S. 131 uses only 68% of its space.

These are just a few examples from one borough. Similar inequities exist for charter schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens — and not only for Success Academy.

KIPP Amp Charter school in Brooklyn’s District 17 is at 125% capacity, while MS 354 uses only 41% of its capacity — with an enrollment of 220 in space that is large enough to educate 530 students, according to the DOE’s analysis.

In District 8, Bronx Charter School for the Arts is at 108% capacity, yet it shares space with a district high school that uses less than half of its space.

While the teachers’ union has fought to curtail or end co-location for charter schools through lawsuits and pressuring city administrators, academic studies have shown that NYC district schools, when co-located with a charter school, benefit from co-location — achieving improved academic performance, greater student engagement and school safety, and higher expectations for students.

District schools also receive matching funds for whatever a charter school spends to upgrade their facilities in excess of $5,000.

Yet despite these facts, politics intervenes.

The result is that many charter school students, 82% of whom are economically disadvantaged, get shortchanged and made to squeeze into less space.

It’s time for the city to do more than just to assess and report on its school buildings’ capacity and utilization — let’s do something about this inequity and ensure all school students, district and charter, have equitable space to learn. 

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.