NYC Mayor Adams fights state bill to prohibit building schools near highways

Mayor Adams is making a last-ditch effort to stop legislation banning school construction near highways that city officials insist hamstrings efforts to build schools where families need them and keep class sizes below state-mandated levels, the Daily News has learned.

Reps for the city pleaded with Gov. Hochul on Thursday not to sign a bill on her desk that prohibits building new schools within 500 feet of freeways. The legislation is aimed at addressing longstanding injustices that leave students of color and kids from low-income families disproportionately exposed to pollutants.

“In a dense urban environment like New York City where space is at a premium, protecting our children’s right to education means ensuring that they can learn right in their communities,” mayoral spokesman Charles Lutvak said in a statement.

The bill, which passed the state legislature in June, wouldn’t apply to school construction or planning that’s already underway, and highly concentrated school districts can request waivers if they exhaust all other options.

“We carved out necessary exemptions in the bill with New York City in mind,” said Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, the Environmental Justice Project director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, who drafted the legislation.

“If it takes an additional step to protect our children, when we have research that shows this practice is harmful, particularly for our Black and brown kids, the answer cannot be that we have to do business as usual,” she added.

The Environmental Protection Agency advises districts not to build schools within 500 feet of highways, where air pollution is higher. Kids in schools closer to highways had slightly lower test scores than otherwise similar students in less polluted areas, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Long-term respiratory health complications can result, too.

A NYCLU analysis shows 225 city schools are near highways — and 53% of Black and Hispanic students live within 500 feet of a major roadway.

The city already has “strong rules in place” to protect students, Lutvak insisted. Standards at the School Construction Authority for air quality and pollution control currently meet or exceed local law requirements, while air-filtration models and school designs are all selected for new buildings with air quality at top of mind, according to city officials.

“There’s no doubt that it’s becoming more and more difficult to site and build schools in New York City,” said Sharon Greenberger, a former city School Construction Authority chief. “It’s a dense city — people like to live in urban areas — but it means we have to be as creative and imaginative as possible identifying sites that will work.”

Last month, space for more than 3,000 students to be created under the city’s current capital plan had to be pushed back until after 2024 due to a lack of available real estate, officials said. Nearly 29% of those seats were in School District 24 in Queens, where sites are particularly hard to find.

The city may soon be on the hook for building more classrooms, if enrollment holds steady in the wake of new class size legislation that caps classrooms at 25 students or fewer.

The Adams administration says it is tackling what it called the “urgent challenge” of poor air quality in other ways, like a plan to electrify 100 existing schools and make all new schools electric.

Roughly 60,000 local school kids in kindergarten through eighth, or 9% of students, have active asthma, according to city data. The rate is even higher in the Bronx, where 12% of children are impacted by the condition.

Greenberger said that any waiver will slow down the construction process and cost the taxpayer money: “You end up in battle for multiple years while students are suffering.”

But for Owens-Chaplin, the trade-offs are worth it. Twenty-three states have already passed legislation banning construction of new schools close to freeways, and New York has more students who attend school near major roadways than any other state in the nation.

“You can’t put kids in a school where they’re breathing toxic air all day, and expect it to succeed,” she said. “These are some of the necessary steps we have to take to undo those harms.”

A spokesperson for the governor said she is reviewing the legislation.