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May 7, 2007
How education -- and schools -- always come last
NYC Public School Parents
Ever since the Dolan family, owners of Madison Square Garden, wrapped up the television- and radio-marketing campaign to kill the West Side Stadium project, the debate about public spending on stadiums and arenas versus schools has virtually disappeared from the headlines. However, the issue hasn't gone away.
And what's the consequence of the double-whammy, Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards publicly funded arena and historically dense housing plan?
Nothing reveals the flawed priorities of this administration more than the fact that almost twice as many new seats in sports stadiums will be created over the next five years as new seats in schools. See this chart – with 117,000 new seats projected for the new Yankees, Mets and Nets stadiums, with only 63,000 new seats in our schools.
Take the $360 million the city will give the Yankees in tax subsidies and exemptions for their new stadium – that amount alone could fund 8-10 new elementary schools or 8 new high schools with 5,000 new seats.
The plaintiffs in the [Campaign for Fiscal Equity] case determined that we needed at least 120,000 new seats to eliminate overcrowding and reduce class size in all grades – not even taking into account any population growth. This new capacity, along with libraries, science labs, and other needed improvements was the basis of the $9.2 billion that the state provided the city in capital funding.
Yet the administration plans to create only 63,000 seats. In fact, since they received all this new funding from the state, they cut back the capital plan by 3,000 seats.
Meanwhile, new development is springing up all over the city, and will likely cause even more overcrowding in our schools.
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And this is why we must ask our elected officials to require that schools be incorporated in all large scale residential and commercial developments – and not just small schools with 500 seats, when the need is more than 1,000 new seats, as generated by the Atlantic yards project. And why we need a better capital plan -- one that provides at least twice as many seats as the one currently proposed by DOE.
Posted by lumi at May 7, 2007 8:39 AM