72 tiny high schools share campuses, Chalkbeat finds. In March, the chancellor told the Council consolidation was coming up

Chalkbeat found 72 New York City high schools with fewer than 250 students that share a building with other schools, in a series republished by The City Reporter on Thursday. Nearly half of the city's high school buildings are underused, the report said.

Its main example is the Murry Bergtraum campus in Lower Manhattan. The building once held about 3,000 students in one school and now houses four. The original school has about 90 students. Last year it had one math teacher and offered only Algebra I and II, and its per-student budget is nearly twice the city average, Chalkbeat reported. Some students attend night school to graduate.

Why it matters to residents: small schools can offer close attention, but very small ones may struggle to offer advanced classes, electives and enough teachers. Combining or closing schools is slow and often unpopular, experts told Chalkbeat.

Chalkbeat reported that Chancellor Kamar Samuels is not drafting a citywide plan. Five working groups will draw up blueprints for under-enrolled schools in their districts, but none covers high schools. Samuels has told parent leaders the Education Department is considering "campus working groups" for high schools, with no timeline. He also created a supervising role over all 11 high school superintendents. The department did not answer Chalkbeat's questions on whether it is helping schools in the same building share resources.

What our records add

The chancellor raised consolidation with the Council in March. At the Council's March 23 Education budget hearing, Council Member Julie Won said she had been tracking schools that now enroll fewer than 150 students, down from several hundred a few years ago. She asked whether consolidating nearby under-enrolled schools was being considered. Samuels said the system had "lost over 20,000 kids" and that the loss falls hardest on schools serving the most vulnerable students. "I do think we're going to be discussing" opportunities like consolidation, he said, as part of planning for the class size law (3:13:45).

Earlier in the same hearing, Council Member Kamillah Hanks noted there were 22,000 fewer students in the system this year. She asked what it would cost to keep holding schools harmless from enrollment-based budget cuts. Officials said they had no projection yet (1:53:53).

The Council has no vote on mergers or closures. Those decisions go to the Panel for Educational Policy, the city's schools board. Res. 548, from Education Committee chair Eric Dinowitz, asks Albany to give the Council the power to appoint one panel member. It has waited 106 days without a hearing. We wrote about this gap when the city proposed closing a Harlem high school with 112 students.

Where Murry Bergtraum sits. The campus is in District 1, represented by Christopher Marte. The Committee on Education has 55 items pending, 38 of them for more than 180 days.

What's next

Chalkbeat's series has one more installment. Any proposal to merge or close a school would go to the Panel for Educational Policy after public hearings. The Council's Education Committee has no hearing on school size on a published agenda.