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Read the press release here.

MAP: 46,000 New School Seats Coming to NYC

By Emily Frost | February 5, 2015 7:29am
 The DOE's School Construction Authority is either completing or beginning projects that will add 46,000 seats in the next four years. 
City to Add 46,000 New School Seats
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NEW YORK CITY — The Department of Education will build dozens of new schools over the next four years, adding nearly 46,000 seats across the city and spending $4.8 billion on fresh facilities and extensions to existing ones, data shows.

Queens is getting most of the new resources, with 20,777 seats coming to the borough between 2015 and 2019, DOE data said. 

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Staten Island will get the fewest, with 1,701 seats, and Manhattan will get the second-fewest, with 4,901 new seats planned. 

Note: While the DOE has determined the district of all of the new schools in its plan, it did not share the exact addresses in every case. Those cases are marked in red and do not represent the addresses of the future schools. 

The most recent U.S. Census data shows that Manhattan's population of children under 5 grew at a rate of 10.2 percent between 2010 and 2013. During the same period, the population of children under 5 in Queens grew at 7.9 percent, the data showed. 

However, the population's overall growth rate between 2010 and 2013 for Queens and Manhattan came in at a little less than 3 percent, census data said.

Past growth rates are not necessarily a projection of future growth rates, but Manhattan parents and leaders say there is already an overcrowding crisis in their borough. The school building plans left Manhattan education advocates frustrated that more resources weren't being distributed to the borough.

Leaders in District 3, which runs from West 59th Street to West 122nd Street, have argued the neighborhood is in the midst of an overcrowding crisis, citing the second longest kindergarten waitlist in the city last spring.

"I'm dismayed by the lack of investment in new seats in District 3. The Upper West Side is ground zero for some of the worst overcrowding in the city, yet very little is being done to address this crisis," said Joe Fiordaliso, president of Community Education Council 3.

In parts of Queens, however, the new seats reflect the DOE's attempts to relieve what's been dubbed "the epicenter of overcrowding" in the area surrounding the boundary between Districts 24 and 30, which includes Jackson Heights, Woodside, Elmhurst and Sunnyside.

new seats

Of the 35 new schools and school additions, 10 are slated for District 24 and four for District 30, DOE data shows.

Brooklyn's District 20, which includes Borough Park, Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, will be home to the most new schools in the borough, with seven expected to open by about 2020. 

Bay Ridge in particular has become increasingly popular and rents have risen accordingly in recent years as people get priced out of Fort Greene and Cobble Hill, experts said.

As Riverdale in The Bronx grows more popular with parents, so has the borough's District 10, which will get four new schools and an addition by the end of this decade, records show.

The Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.