New York City’s public school system could save $2.4 billion and alleviate overcrowding if education officials think outside the box instead of drawing up costly construction plans, according to a new study.

The report by the Citizens Budget Commission said the Dept. of Education spends too much money on building new school facilities instead of better utilizing the space it already has to address overcrowding at some schools and under-utilization at others.

“More flexible and cost effective approaches, including rezoning, re-purposing available seats, and altering admissions policies, are underused by the DOE,” the report said.

Rezoning school districts would provide the flexibility to swap students from crammed schools to under-utilized facilities with empty seats.

The DOE spent $9.1 billion from 2005 to Sept. 2018 on new schools, creating an extra 98,302 seats for students.

But DOE data still show that 618 out of 1,413 schools are pegged as overcrowded.

“Historically, the strategy has been to try and build yourself out of the problem,” CBC’s president Andrew Rein told The Post.

New York City can save billions of dollars on planned new school construction by reshuffling students among existing buildings, a new report argues.

The report titled Cut Costs, Not Ribbons, released on Wednesday by the Citizens Budget Commission, contends that the city can cut $2 billion in proposed construction costs to alleviate overcrowding by adjusting school enrollment policies.

“The City has not been able to build itself out of the school crowding problem,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Commission.

Almost half of city schools are overcrowded, according to the report, enrolling 95,000 more students than they have room for while other schools are under capacity.

he Wyandanch and Brentwood school districts are among 29 underfunded systems across the state that will face a struggle next fall in providing a "sound, basic education" required by the state constitution, a nonpartisan research group has concluded.

The report, from the Manhattan-based Citizens Budget Commission, comes during a time when Wyandanch confronts financial troubles deemed a "crisis" by the area's state lawmakers. On June 28, administrators in the 2,800-student district announced layoffs and pay cuts affecting more than 100 school employees, including teachers, teacher assistants, administrators, bus drivers and security guards.

New York's courts for decades have heard arguments over the issue of whether the state's poorer schools can afford to pay for minimally acceptable levels of education. The question might seem surprising in a state where average per-student spending tops $24,500 a year — the highest average for any state in the nation.

The recent blog from the budget commission, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, contends that flaws in the state's system of distributing school aid provide some districts with more money than they need, while others are shortchanged. New York will pass out more than $27 billion in funding during the 2019-20 school year, including more than $3 billion on Long Island.

Among systems identified as shortchanged are Wyandanch, which the report ranks seventh in terms of financial need statewide, and Brentwood, which is ranked 14th. Ratings cover 674 districts statewide.

"State-aid increases have been significant but poorly targeted," reported David Friedfel, the commission's director of state studies, who works out of Albany. "Districts that are shortchanged have struggled to catch up, while 'overfunded' districts continue to get more funding."

If Mayor de Blasio can’t balance his budget in good times, how would he do it if the economy sours and revenue dries up?

That’s the troubling question the Citizens Budget Commission raised last week in a report noting that Team de Blasio spent more than it took in over the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Both the City Charter and state law require Gotham to balance its annual budget. But de Blasio was able to make ends meet last year only by prepaying some of its expenses with leftover funds from the prior year.

True, City Hall wound up with a surplus last year, too: $4.2 billion, not counting another $100 million that went to a retiree health-benefits fund. It rolled that extra money into this year’s budget.

But it wasn’t as much as what it had rolled in at the end of the 2018 fiscal year: $4.6 billion. And the $255 million difference, CBC notes, represents a shortfall between revenues and spending last year.

“Any time more money is rolled in than out means the City spent more than it collected in that year,” notes the report. To see the problem, it suggests thinking about “how ending the year with $1,000 in your bank account feels good, until you remember that you started the year with $2,000.”

A handshake deal may not be enough to restore state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli's oversight powers that were rolled back beginning in 2011.

The decision to scale back his office's review of the bidding processes for the state university system and the Office of General Services triggered intense scrutiny with the Buffalo Billion bid-rigging scandal in 2016, but legislative efforts to reverse the narrowed scope of the comptroller's powers stalled at the Capitol this year.

A renewed attempt by state lawmakers to restore the powers in law was scuttled during the budget process by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who opted to pursue a less formal restoration.

The Citizen Budget Commission's David Friedfel believes DiNapoli's authority could be restored without a legislative fix, but stressed that his office would then need the cooperation of the state's Office of General Services, the State University of New York system and the City University of New York system to oversee their bidding processes.

Imagine a New York where cars no longer rule the road, and pedestrians and cyclists reclaim dominance of the city’s public space. While a New York where cars don’t dominate the streets may seem like a fantasy, to City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, it is the future.

In recent months, Johnson -- a Manhattan Democrat in his second year leading the 51-member City Council -- has gone full bore touting the idea of “breaking car culture,” or prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and mass transit in public policy rather than private automobiles. But what, exactly, would that look like?

Johnson, who says he’s never owned a car and rides the subway all the time, has become a darling of transit advocates and experts, from his focus on the health of the subway system (and call for municipal control of it) to his pushes for congestion pricing and the “Fair Fares” Metrocard program to help low-income New Yorkers.

In an interview earlier this year on the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast from Gotham Gazette and Citizens Budget Commission, Trottenberg said that the MTA, a state-run authority that controls the subways and buses with city representatives on its board, should be in the subway-building game, expanding the network like other cities are doing around the globe.

There’s a way forward in the polarizing debate about admission standards for New York City’s specialized high schools.

A win-win solution is to adopt year-round schooling at the eight specialized high schools. Year-round schooling is an alternative school calendar to the current practice that requires all students to attend the same 180 days of school concentrated in a 10-month period from September to June.

The Citizens Budget Commission proposed year-round schooling more than 20 years ago. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani did not follow the recommendation, yielding to objections from teachers who wanted to retain their summers off, parents who wanted children to participate in summer camps, and educators who wanted to use the schools for summertime programs. In fact, the many schools using a year-round calendar demonstrate these objections can be satisfactorily addressed.

This budget's in the books. The City Council adopted New York City's $92.8 billion budget for the 2020 fiscal year on Wednesday, less than a week after reaching a deal with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The spending plan boosts the city's reserves by $250 million amid a risky economic outlook. It also includes millions of dollars in extra funding for parks and libraries; 285 more social workers for public schools; and commitments to pay parity for pre-kindergarten teachers and public defenders.

But de Blasio and Johnson should have put more money in the city's reserves while its economy is still strong "in order to protect New Yorkers when the rainy day arrives," said Andrew Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group.

"The budget agreement includes $329 million in new savings plus recognition of additional revenues," Rein said in a statement last week. "The most prudent course of action would have been to place the vast majority of these new resources in reserve; however, most of the funds were dedicated to service expansion and new spending initiatives."

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council agreed on a massive new budget for the Big Apple on Monday.

Mayor de Blasio touted about $250 million added to the city’s historic reserves for a rainy day.

“What we’ve done consistently is found more and more savings and we’ve added to reserves,” de Blasio said.

But the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission said it’s not enough.

“They really missed a golden opportunity to do much more by putting more money in reserves, which can protect New Yorkers when the eventual economic downturn does come to be,” commission president Andrew Rein said.

On Thursday, the City Council approved a $92.8 billion budget — after pushing Mayor Bill de Blasio to agree to add fresh fiscal risks to the spending plan.

This is the sixth straight year that the city-funded portion of the budget will grow faster than inflation. Since Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s last budget ($72.8 billion), total outlays have grown an average of 4.6% a year.

And the final deal adds new, unfunded spending on council priorities: boosting pay for public defenders and nonprofit-based pre-K workers, as well as upping reimbursement rates for social service providers.

All defensible goals — if you don’t fund them “off the books.”

The mayor and Speaker Corey Johnson argue that the city’s $1.2 billion reserve fund is more than enough to cover the added costs.

So what? That’s not the reserve’s purpose: It’s supposed to be a cushion for when the economy inevitably turns down, so that the city doesn’t have to suddenly cut services or hike taxes to balance the budget.

Plus, these are not one-time costs: The city will need to find the money to cover the added expenses in every future year, too. That’s why, as the Citizens Budget Commission’s Ana Champeny explains, the city should be relying on offsetting savings to fund the new spending.

Committing to long-term spending of money the city doesn’t have in hand harkens back to the practices that led to the 1970s fiscal crisis.

As he eyes his own mayoral run, Johnson is claiming to be fiscally responsible because he’s pushed de Blasio to boost the reserve fund. But this gimmick more than erases those Brownie points.

Try harder, Corey.

A dedicated rainy day fund for New York City’s budget — one of 17 ballot proposals from the Charter Revision Commission — would resonate favorably in the capital markets, according to a bond analyst.

“I think that would be well-received in the bond community,” said Howard Cure, director of municipal bond research for Evercore Wealth Management, after Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council reached a handshake agreement on a $92.8 billion operating budget for fiscal 2020.

The markets, he said, would favor such a fund over the current mechanism of accounts that range from general reserve to the Retiree Retiree Health Benefits Trust, to which the budget proposal adds $150 million and $100 million, respectively.

De Blasio and the 51-member council must ratify the spending plan by June 30. The budget agreement includes $329 million in new savings on top of the $2.5 billion in the citywide savings program in fiscal 2019 and 2020.

Splicing together a variety of reserve accounts — what Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein calls “workarounds” — traces to financial controls New York State imposed after the city's 1970s fiscal implosion. That includes an oversight board that must approve the city’s budget.

The City Council is expected Wednesday to approve a $92.8 billion budget financial watchdogs say is unusual for excluding how to pay for some big-ticket items — a move likened to writing blank checks.

The Council vote will take place just days after Mayor Bill de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson hugged at City Hall on Friday to confirm an agreement they said creates a balanced budget — even as they acknowledged three looming unpaid bills.

The unfunded items include moving non-profit pre-K employees toward pay parity with Department of Education staffers, pushing public defenders toward equal footing with city government attorneys, and boosting the reimbursement rate for the overhead costs of social service providers.

City officials committed to settling those bills in the fiscal year that starts on July 1, but haven’t accounted for the expenses in the city’s ledger, which, by law, must be balanced.

“These are sort of like blank check TBDs that are out there,” said Ana Champeny, of the fiscal monitoring group the Citizens Budget Commission. “Some of these items can be potentially expensive, and the question becomes what if the revenues aren’t there to support that increased spending.”