School Is Said to Urgently Need Funds

 by Ronald Drenger

Like other high schools across the city, Millennium High School sent out a batch of acceptance letters last month for its next ninth grade.

Ninth graders work together in a math class at Millennium High School. Photo by Carl Glassman

But unlike other schools, Millennium did not know with certainty where those students will be attending classes.

With just five months left until the start of the new academic year, officials from the school, District 2, the Department of Education, and Community Board 1 were still scrambling to find funds to prepare Millennium’s intended new home at 75 Broad Street.

Now in its inaugural year, with a single grade, the school shares a floor of the High School of Art and Design on East 57th Street. But with a new class being added, it probably has to move.

School officials and Downtown community leaders said that funding must be in place soon, probably by the end

of this month, in order to sign a lease at 75 Broad Street and convert space in the building to school use by September.

They are hoping that the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. will provide much of the roughly $10 million needed to turn four floors into a school, and last month they pressed the LMDC to make a commitment.

CB1 passed a resolution urging the agency “to show its support for Downtown children and residents” by committing $5 million to Millennium, which was always envisioned as a Downtown school.

The LMDC has so far held off from deciding on almost all of the many funding applications it has received for Downtown projects. The agency would say only that the application was under review.

“They need to get on board now so we can create a home for the kids in Lower Manhattan,” said Paul Hovitz, chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee. “We have a small window of opportunity to accomplish this. The LMDC is supposed to be supporting Downtown, so it seems like a given that this is something they should do.”

Advocates for the school said they feared that the Broad Street space could be lost if the school cannot sign a lease soon.

“The building’s owners want a commitment and we want to give it to them,” said Madelyn Wils, CB1 chair and a LMDC board member. The owners, she said, were “bending over backwards to work with us.”

“The LMDC’s philosophy seems to be to take things slow,” said David Feiner, an aide to Councilman Alan Gerson on youth issues. “But this is a special case. For other types of projects there might be competing applications but there’s no competition here. This is the one high school trying to get built and it needs to be Downtown.”

With time running out, officials said that $3 million to $5 million would at least allow the conversion of one floor and part of the lobby to accommodate the roughly 225 ninth- and tenth-graders who will attend Millennium in the fall. Additional space could be constructed later.

Sheldon Silver, speaker of the State Assembly, and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick have allocated a total of $2 million for Millennium, and Councilman Alan Gerson has committed $1 million, but it is unclear whether those funds are available immediately.

Ultimately, the plan is to convert the 11th, 12th and 13th floors of the building for the school, as well as the 34th floor, under the roof, for a gym.

“If we can’t get the bulk of the financing in place now, we can at least get started and do it in phases so we can have the Downtown location,” Hovitz said.

But phasing may be complicated, said the school’s principal, Robert Rhodes. “How do we build in way that is readily usable next year but doesn’t interfere with the master plan of the three floors?”

Close to 1,000 eighth-graders placed Millennium on their list of high school choices this year, with several hundred picking it as their first or second choice, according to Rhodes.

“It’s heartening to see all the applications,” he said. “I feel it validates the hard work our students and faculty have been doing.”

Millennium has attracted significant interest from families at I.S. 89 in Battery Park City, which has students from all over District 2.

According to Emily Marcus, the school’s guidance counselor, 16 students were accepted to Millennium and 15 plan to attend, the highest number for any high school.

But some parents at I.S. 89—and at Millennium—said that they had been assured by Rhodes, other Millennium staff, or Marcus, that the school was definitely coming to Broad Street in September.

A notice on the I.S. 89 website, posted in November and still up last month, said that the school “has officially announced the location of their new school,” at 75 Broad Street, and that “they are expecting to start the 2003-2004 school year in this building.”

Parents are hoping that it’s true. Susan Katz, whose son, Zachary, plans to go to Millenium, said she was “really concerned” that her son would have to go to school at another temporary site. Zachary was among the evacuated I.S. 89 students who spent five months last year in tight quarters at the O. Henry Learning Center in Chelsea.

“After 9/11 my child was crammed into a few classrooms and I don’t want to have that happen again,” she said.

Rhodes said that the temporary site did not affect students’ learning, but he underscored the importance, psychologically, of having their own building.

“The students want to move,” he said. “The prospect of not having a permanent building for more than a year would be very disappointing for them.”

Jada Borg, a Millennium ninth grader, agreed. “It would mean more to me personally and to other kids,” she said, “to have a place to call our own.”