Voices That Must Be Heard: Schools brace for overcrowding in wake of lawsuit

The buildings of two Bronx High Schools will get more crowded coming September.

A lawsuit against the Department of Education this spring successfully stopped the city from closing 19 schools it had deemed failing. The verdict was considered a victory to many education advocates, but it is complicating things for several schools. While those that were supposed to close will remain open, the city says it will still proceed with plans to open 16 new schools—some of them in the same buildings as those that were supposed to close.

Two new schools are slated for the South Bronx this fall. Bronx Bridges High School will open in the Adlai E. Stevenson Educational Campus, where the School for Community Research and Learning was originally to be phased out. At 800 Home Street, the new Dr. Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School will open the building where the New Day Academy previously planned to close.

Carol Boyd, a parent leader with the NYC Coalition for Justice and a Bronx mother of three, said the change in plans is bound to cause problems in the fall.

"There were parents who were confused about where their children will be going to school," Boyd said. "The entire process was rather murky."

Parents who expected their child's school to be phased out may have made alternate plans, Boyd said, only to learn later that the schools would stay open. The schools originally slated for closure also received very few new enrollments—meaning schools nearby will have large, overcrowded freshman classes while these schools will have very few 9th grade students.

"Within the first week of school, there's going to be a lot of shuffling and displays of parent outcry," Boyd said.

Not to mention space issues. The Adai E. Stevenson campus at 1980 Lafayette Ave. will now house nine schools instead of eight (the building had previously been home to one large school, Adlai E. Stevenson High School, which was closed in 2009 and broken down into smaller ones).

Dr. Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School, where the New Day Academy will stay open, will also share its building with Bronx Career and College Preparatory High School and Bronx Latin High School.

While these schools will have to squeeze into the buildings where the old ones will still operate, the plans were actually a compromise between the Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), one of the groups that brought the original lawsuit against the city.

Five of the 16 new schools that the city planned to launch, the ones that had the most potential for overcrowding, were found different locations throughout the city. The DOE also agreed to provide additional support to the original 19 schools it had planned to close, in the hopes of bringing up test scores and graduation rates. In exchange for this, the UFT waived its rights to sue over the collocations.

The nine remaining schools—including those in the Bronx—will still be collocated in buildings where old schools will stay open.

The crowding problem may only last as long as the 2010-2011 school year, however. The city has indicated that it will still go ahead with the closing of its 19 "failing" schools if they don't show improvement. The lawsuit that blocked them from doing so—in which the courts determined the DOE had not followed proper procedure to legally close the schools—will only apply to this school year, and not the next.