Editor's Focus: A New York minute
11,000 students.
That’s a good-sized school system—bigger than the overwhelming majority of the 13,300 or so public school districts in the United States. To accommodate 11,000 students, you’d probably have to have at least a dozen schools, maybe even two dozen.
Now imagine having to add 11,000 seats and open two dozen schools at the same time. Actually, they don’t have to imagine it in New York City—they just did it.
For the 2024-25 school year, the New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district, opened 24 new schools and added 11,010 seats. The New York City School Construction Authority says the new buildings represent the greatest number of student seats added to the system in two decades.
Opening 24 schools and increasing capacity by 11,000 students is a massive undertaking by any measure, but when your student numbers surpass 1 million, an additional 11,000 seats account for only about 1 percent of total enrollment.
The sheer size of the New York City school system is something AS&U has been highlighting each fall when we publish the AS&U 100, the list of the 100 largest school districts. For as long as AS&U has been publishing the list, and for many years before that, New York City has claimed the top spot as the nation’s largest district. And no one else is close. For this year’s AS&U 100, which uses enrollment numbers from 2022-23, New York City has over 500,000 students more than the next largest system, the Los Angeles Unified District.
How big is the New York City school system? Let me count the ways. Its budget for 2023-24 was $39.4 billion. Its capital plan for fiscal years 2025 to 2029 calls for projects totaling $19 billion. In 2023-24, New York City had 1,596 schools operated by the education department and another 274 campuses operating as charter schools. If its charter schools operated as a separate school system, its 145,997 student count would have placed it as the 17th largest in the nation.
Lists like the AS&U 100 may provide bragging rights to school systems at the top or ones growing quickly enough to climb the ranks of the list. But for students, the size of a school district shouldn’t matter if the schools in the district are small enough to create a sense of belonging, and if class sizes are small enough to give students the individual attention they need.
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(Editor's note: On page 34 of the August Educational Interiors Showcase issue, the list of projects in the Auditoriums/Music rooms category inadvertently omitted the architect for the Festus School District High School Band and Choral Addition. It is Archimages.)