By ALBINA CEKA
The Christa McAuliffe School (I.S. 187) is one of the top performing schools in Brooklyn School District 20 but that comes with a heavy price; there is barely any space left inside the building. To solve the bottleneck enrollment District 20 Superintendent Dr. David Pretto and New York City Department of Education officials proposed a split-siting plan during a joint meeting of the youth and education subcommittees Brooklyn Community Boards 10 and 11 on November 10 at Community Board 10’s local office.
“Christa McAuliffe receives the most applications in District 20 and right now they are unable to meet class size law in their current building. So they are considered overcrowded at the moment.” said Jyoti Folch Director of District Planning for NYC Schools.
The Christa McAuliffe School Building was built to have a target or maximum capacity of 862 students but in the year 2025-2026 report there were 939 students enrolled according to
NYC school construction authority and the enrollment rate is only expected to rise. The DOE seeks to resolve this by using a DOE building already in the process of construction, likely to be completed in the school year 2027-2028, located at 6303 14th Ave which is roughly 0.4 miles away from the main campus, located at 1171 65th Street.
“Given the proximity of the building, we thought it would be best to figure out a way to use this new building since we didn’t think that there would be another new building coming online anytime soon that would be so close to Christa McAuliffe and give us an opportunity to do that. ” said Folch
Community Board 10 Chairperson of Youth Services, Education, & Libraries Pierre Lehu posed the question of “What is the advantage for the students? You could have had a new school, could have been a totally separate school, what is the advantage in keeping it under the same name, the same banner?”
DOE officials explained that opening an independent school would not ease enrollment pressure at Christa McAuliffe because demand for the school is so high and only seems to be getting higher. Instead, after consulting with Principal Wilhelmina Sadiki and Community Education Council 20, a non-profit volunteer-run advisory body that represents public Pre-K-8th families and schools in District 20, officials concluded that expanding I.S. 187 was the best solution.
“It cannot be understated that this is our most popular middle school and one that parents continue to have a lot of desire to be able to get into.” said Dr. Pretto “Looking forward into the future and knowing that class size law is something that was unavoidable, I wanted to start looking at how we would be able to potentially address this demand in a win-win situation.“ he said.
If the proposal is approved the new building or four story annex will launch a fifth academic track, the Academy of Urban Design, alongside an autism-focused NEST program. The new site will phase in one grade per year beginning in the 2027–2028 school year, while the existing academies and the school’s ACES special education program will remain at the 65th Street campus, where incoming sixth grade seats will be reduced to comply with the state’s 23 student middle school class size cap.
The annex will have a maximum capacity of 461 people, but Lucia O’Brien, Associate Director of District Planning, clarified that the actual student enrollment will sit slightly lower to account for teachers and staff. “Our projected enrollment for when the new academy is fully phased in in the 2029–2030 school year is that it would serve between 375 and 405 students,” said O’Brien.
Before the proposal can move any further, the Department of Education will host a virtual Joint Public Hearing on Monday, Nov. 16, at 6 p.m. The proposal will then go before the Panel for Educational Policy for an anticipated vote on Wednesday, Jan. 20, at 6 p.m. at Clara Barton High School.