Schools in the northwest Bronx are overcrowded and unlikely to get any help in the near future thanks to a flawed construction effort by the education department, according a recently released report from the office of Comptroller William Thompson.

Confirming what local parents, faculty and activists have been saying for years, the comptroller’s report said schools in Community School District (CSD) 10, which includes all the schools in the Norwood News’ coverage area: Norwood, North Fordham, Bedford Park and University Heights, is the third most crowded district in New York City and is operating at 99 percent capacity.

And the district’s elementary schools have it even worse, operating at 109 percent capacity on average, the most cramped in the district, according to the report.

“In October 2006, seven schools were operating in excess of 125 percent of capacity – some as high as 152 percent,” says the report. “All 10 elementary mini-schools were operating above capacity, a few with utilization rates exceeding 160 percent.”

The report blames a flawed school construction effort by the city’s education department for perpetuating the problem. Despite assurances by the School Construction Authority (SCA), which handles all the building projects for the Department of Education, the current five-year capital plan (2004-2009) has so far done little to alleviate overcrowding problems.

Since the capital plan began in 2004, only 300 seats have been added to district 10 schools and no more seats are slated to be completed until at least 2010.

The report also questions the city’s math when it comes to calculating “new seats” in the district schools. For example, the 300 “new seats” already completed for CSD 10 merely replace the seats that were lost when PS 143 was closed for poor performance several years ago. The New School for Leadership and Journalism opened in its place in 2005.  

The city also claims it will add 515 seats to the district with the construction of a new early childhood center on the PS 94 campus. But this project will displace 450 PS 94 students, meaning the net gain for seats will be no more than 65.  

Meanwhile, since 2004, SCA amendments to the capital plan have slashed nearly half of the original seats slated to be built in district 10, from 4,030 to 2,250, based on dubious population projections done by The Grier Partnership, a DOE/SCA consultant, the report says.

The Grier Partnership projects district 10 enrollment will drop 11.4 percent by 2010 and 16 percent from 2005 to 2015.

But local advocates say that’s impossible. “The idea that [CSD 10] will lose 11 percent by 2010 is not borne out of evidence,” one officer with the district’s community education council told the comptroller’s office. “This is an area that is popular and growing, with continuous flow of both middle and working class families…Bedford Park, University Heights, and Fordham also are growing communities…We have a large number of undocumented immigrants who possibly Grier doesn’t pick up on.”   

The comptroller report noted that Grier and the SCA do not take new housing construction permits into account.

Other than Grier, it’s hard to say how the SCA comes up with its numbers because it keeps its methodology confidential. They say the Grier projections are just one of the factors they take into account.

This notion of secrecy, says the report, “is contrary to a spirit of openness and transparency that should inform fundamental public decisions about the physical and economic future of New York.”

Later in the report, the same education council officer said, “Our schools are not just overcrowded – they are severely overcrowded. So even if we stay the same or even decline a little [in enrollment], we will remain overcrowded if we don’t get more schools.”

All over the district, schools are compensating for the lack of space by reconfiguring the space they have. According to a recent survey compiled by local Council Member Oliver Koppell, PS 8 in Bedford Park eliminated its science lab and divided two classrooms into four. PS 56 in Norwood converted its art, music and science rooms into classrooms. And PS/MS 280, also in Norwood, lacks an art room and doesn’t have enough space for special services such as speech therapy and physical therapy.

The first few lines of the report sums up the bleak overcrowding situation: “The capital planning process for public schools in New York City is broken. There are far too many neighborhoods with overcrowded schools and no hope of relief for at least several more years.”