Is NYC Trying to Hide a Decline in Enrollment Numbers?

If you live in NYC and your kids attend public schools, you know people are leaving the city and/or the public school system. What that means and who is trying to avoid highlighting the fact.

If you live in NYC and your kids attend public schools, you know people are leaving the city and/ or the public school system. This week, my kids’ bus was really late so the families all stayed there chatting. Everybody was planning or thinking about leaving NYC when their kids hit middle school. I was an exception because we are planning to go for private schools.

The DOE is pushing the narrative that enrollment drops are a thing of the past. It happened because of COVID-19, and now we have stable enrollment numbers.

I decided to dig in the numbers because at least for D2 I know this is not true. Here is what I found:

• The official numbers show that there was a 2.2% drop in enrollment in FY 23 (versus 5.7% in FY22 and 4.3% in FY21)

• But these numbers are misleading because it doesn’t account for the 14K students who are asylum seekers. If you take out the number of asylum seekers who arrived this year, the drop in enrollment would be 3.9% (assuming all the 14K arrived in 2023 since Mayor Adams announced Project Open Arms in August 2022). This matches the DOE projections, which are made usually in April/May: before the influx of asylum seekers.

Several CEC presidents received an email saying that as of March 18, 2023 there were “13,248 asylum seeker students across 608 schools.” Despite the NYC DOE press secretary attempting to say that there is no tracking by immigration status, this email that was shared with me has an Excel spreadsheet with the exact numbers of kids by school. It’s also titled “Project Open Arms.”

For context, in August of last year the Mayor Adams announced Project Open Arms, explaining it as: “a comprehensive plan to support families seeking asylum and ensure children are provided a full range of services to start their New York City.” In the nine-page document, there is comprehensive detail around how children are accessed for grade level, provided after school programs, language services and social emotional support using DESSA program. Notably, a three-year, $18 million contract was awarded to Aperture for the DESSA tool. But many parents and teachers were unhappy with the SEL tool.

When journalists started to ask questions last year about which schools received funding to support the new students, the DOE took the data out of their website. The Gothamist reported that in November of 2022 there were ~6K asylum seekers, so our schools received 7K students just in the past 6 months.

The DOE’s spokesperson suggested via Twitter that the figure I noted was simply children in temporary housing. But, according to the New York Times, in October of 2022 there were 104,000 public school children homeless and in temporary housing.

So considering the needs of so many unhoused children already in New York City, and to properly assess how many families are leaving the public school system, transparency matters.

And in review of the distribution of students, it was clear that asylum seekers are being placed disproportionally in low-income neighborhoods. There are schools that received only 6 students, and some received more than 300. Families deserve to understand why a particular school has been chosen. And to dispel any concerns that the disproportionate allocation isn’t to simply adjust for schools having lost a significant percentage of students.

As a CEC member, I want to understand which schools are losing students and why. We should hold principals and our superintendent accountable: we should help expand the schools that people would like to go to. And we should change things at the schools that are losing so many families.

As an example, there is one school in our district that has lost almost half of its student population in the past two years. But you can’t see this if you don’t look at the disaggregated numbers.

The NYC DOE should be absolute transparent about its enrollment numbers so we can really understand the decline and then start the more important work of understanding the reasons why so many families are looking for other schools.