BY WENDY LYONS

NEW YORK - Public education is under attack here. A series of articles in the local press recently highlighted the deteriorating condition of the schools. Students are attending classes in closets, bathrooms, projection booths, locker rooms, gyms, and cafeterias. In one school, pictured on the front page of the New York Times, pupils share half their desktops with stacks of books cleared out of storage rooms to make space for classes.

Teachers scrambled to get enough chairs at Public School 114 in Canarsie, Brooklyn. The teachers' union contract calls for a maximum class size of 32. Forty-six students showed up to Jennifer Ambramowitz's first grade class. She managed to cram 46 desks into the classroom but could only round up 43 chairs. The school system is 10 percent over capacity, or around 91,000 students. A teachers' union survey said that 30,000 classes in the city are overcrowded.

School funding has been continuously slashed over the last half decade and there is no plan by the city's capitalist politicians to allocate funds for new schools. Republican mayor Rudolph Guliani defended cutting the school system's capital budget request in half, saying he was only following the lead of the Democratic Party administration of David Dinkins who earlier cut capital spending 25 percent citywide under pressure from the bond holders.

Instead of building more schools the city administration and school board are hoping to start year-round classes where students would attend school for 45 days and be off for 15 days, causing havoc with child care. Split sessions, which already exist in some schools in New York, would be expanded. Under that system, students are forced to rush through classes for five hours straight so the next shift can come in and do the same thing.

Sara Mosle, who taught the fourth grade on such a schedule, wrote a column in the New York Times describing the difficulties for working parents, "who couldn't always pick up their children in the middle of the day. And because the school was continually packed with students, it couldn't offer after- school programs. Even very young children were often left to play in the streets or wander home alone. Teachers were instructed to escort their students off the school grounds - lest there be an accident that might leave the school open to a lawsuit."

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York stepped into the picture and offered to take 1,000 of the most "difficult" students into the Catholic schools to ease the overcrowding for "modest fees." Guliani jumped at the offer, which has been floated since 1991, hoping to set the stage for a voucher system in the schools here.

There was a brief flurry of concern expressed by School Chancellor Rudy Crew about the violation of the constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state. The mayor then announced that he would get around public money being spent by having owners of industry donate the money, and is pushing ahead with the plan.

Numerous articles in the press are blaming immigrants for the overcrowding of the schools. This has resulted in stepped- up demands by capitalist politicians to deny public schooling for children of immigrants.

Meanwhile, New York is one of the first states to begin implementation of the anti- working-class measures contained in Clinton's welfare reform bill. Even immigrants who are long- time legal residents are being denied food stamps if they can't prove they've worked a job for at least 10 years.  
 
 
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