(Crain’s) — New York City education officials are set to approve a school construction budget on Wednesday that would significantly cut the number of schools to be built in the next three years, as the city faces what it says is a new cap on state construction aid. The School Construction Authority’s $9.3 billion budget, which covers work through 2014, will go before the Panel for Educational Policy, where it is expected to pass, and will then move to the City Council. Instead of the 56 new schools that the Council approved last year, the budget would support the construction of 26 schools across the city, reducing the number of places for new students to 14,000 from roughly 28,000. The cuts come as class sizes have swollen in much of the city, a situation serious enough that the city has received a state waiver from court-mandated class size reduction targets for all but 75 of its nearly 1,700 schools.
