NYC caves on state class size law, will hire 3,700 new teachers: Mayor Adams

Mayor Eric Adams did an about-face on the state’s controversial class size law Wednesday — announcing New York City will hire thousands of new teachers after saying for years that the mandate was unaffordable.

The city will give the already-bloated city Department of Education extra cash to hire 3,700 teachers across 750 public schools to help shrink classroom headcounts, the mayor said.

“These 3,700 new teachers will give our schools the ability to create smaller classes, more nurturing classrooms, where all our students can excel and be provided more individualized care,” Adams said.

The Adams administration had long pushed back against the law, handed down from Albany in 2022, that requires kindergarten through third grade classes to be capped at 20 students; fourth through eighth grade classes capped at 23 students; and high school classes capped at 25 students.

City Hall officials slammed it an unfunded mandate and said the Big Apple didn’t have the money to hire enough teachers to meet the requirements, nor enough space.

Still, Adams seemingly agreed to cut a blank check to the DOE for the teacher hires and to bring on 100 other new school employees to meet the mandate, which requires that 60% of public school classes be in compliance by September. The city must be in total compliance by 2028.

“We will comply with the law,” Adams said Wednesday from P.S. 88 – The Seneca School in Ridgewood, Queens, where he was joined by Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos and Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers union.

“We’re committed to this, and we’re going to ensure that it’s done,” the mayor added.

Officials couldn’t immediately say how much the hiring spree would cost, but Aviles-Ramos recently told the City Council during a budget hearing last month that it could set taxpayers back “hundreds of millions more.”

The new funding will be tacked on to Adams’ budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year, officials said. The DOE’s projected spending plan for next year already stands at a whopping $41.2 billion — a third of the entire city’s budget.

About 46% of the city’s more than 1,800 public schools are currently at or below the class size requirements, the chancellor said Wednesday.

Exact funding details will come in a few weeks, a mayor’s office source told The Post. Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent, announced the hiring in advance of releasing his finalized budget plan in June so principals have time to prepare for next school year, the source said.

Adams’ previous schools boss, David Banks, warned in 2022 that hiring enough elementary school teachers alone could cost $500 million per year, and warned an unfunded mandate could lead to unwelcome trade-offs and severe budget cuts throughout the system.

To fully comply with the law, the city’s Independent Budget Office found in 2023 that 17,700 additional teachers would need to be hired at a cost of $1.6 to $1.9 billion annually.

“The rest of the state has these class sizes and our students deserve it just like any other student in the state,” Mulgrew, the teachers’ union leader, said Wednesday.

Aviles-Ramos said the DOE was now focused on the “really important” recruitment piece, noting it won’t be easy to find 3,700 new hires.

The DOE will conduct “targeted recruitment” to find teachers before the start of the next school year, she said.

“We will continue to make progress, enabling our teachers to work with smaller groups of students providing more individualized attention and fostering a deeper level of engagement in the classroom,” Aviles-Ramos said.

State Sen. John Liu, the chair of the Senate Committee on New York City Education who sponsored the class size bill, called Wednesday’s announcement an “encouraging sign” that the Adams administration was moving to meet the mandate.

“There is still more work to do to meet the full requirements of the class size law in the coming years, but today’s announcement is an encouraging sign that the city is finally taking real steps toward complying with state law and using the tools and funding provided by the state to make a lasting difference in the future of NYC Public Schools,” he said.