P.S. 234 Faces an Overcrowded Future

 by Ronald Drenger

P.S. 234, the school often touted as one of Tribeca’s jewels, is falling victim to its own success and Downtown’s soaring population.

The school, at Chambers and Greenwich streets, is expected to enroll more than 700 students this fall, a jump from 645 children in 2002–03. Fifth-grade classes, which had 29 and 30 students, will have 35 in September. For the first time, there will be five kindergarten classes.

Fourth graders at work last month at P.S. 234. As fifth graders this fall, they will be in classes of 35. Photo by Carl Glassman.

And the creation of thousands of new apartments in Lower Manhattan promises to bring bigger waves of students.

“It’s a huge issue,” said Renee DeSantis, the mother of a third grader and another daughter who will enter kindergarten next year. “My concern is that my daughter’s needs won’t be met, that some children will disappear in the fray,” she said, echoing comments heard from many parents.

To help accommodate all of the children, the school last month worked out a plan, approved by the PTA at its June 24 meeting, to convert offices on the third floor into a pre-K room, and one of the existing pre-K rooms into a kindergarten classroom. A dishwashing room near the cafeteria will be converted into a music room.

“I think we can accommodate students this year, but the question is, what transpires in the longer term?” said George Olsen, a real estate lawyer and P.S. 234’s PTA president during the past two school years.

Late last month, Olsen and an architect developed a proposal to build a 6–8,000-square-foot extension to the northwest corner of the building, along Chambers Street, on part of the existing playground. The extension would have three floors and two new classrooms on each floor. Under the plan, the playground would shift south, encompassing what is now a dog run, to make up for the lost space.

Olsen proposed trying to incorporate a new dog run into the city’s plan for Site 5C, on the west side of the school, using some of the area where the city and its developer want to create a public plaza.

But both Anna Switzer, who was the school’s principal until June, and Sandy Bridges, her successor, oppose enlarging the school, saying that it would create an impersonal environment.

“You just about squeak by with 600 students,” Switzer said. “After that it’s just too big.”

Switzer called on the two other local public elementary schools, P.S. 89 and P.S. 150, to work together with P.S. 234 to help resolve the problem. “Everybody has an interest in this, in making it work,” she said.
Parents say that the P.S. 234 school building, at Chambers and Greenwich
Some students in P.S. 234’s zone, which includes Tribeca, the Financial District, the South Street Seaport area and the Civic Center, could seek seats in the other schools.

But Alyssa Polack, the principal of P.S. 150, which is not zoned for a particular area but gives preference to local children, said that her school has no extra room. “We are using our building to capacity,” she said. “I’m not underutilized. I’m overutilized.”
Outgoing P.S. 234 principal Anna Switzer in the school's unused cafeteria
Ronnie Najjar, principal of P.S. 89, across West Street in Battery Park City, said her lower grades are full, but that there was room for fourth and fifth graders. P.S. 234, she said, “should encourage parents to consider moving across the street to a high-level school.”

The P.S. 234 PTA sent a letter on June 3 to Shelley Harwayne, School District 2’s superintendent, requesting her help “to devise and implement long-term solutions before the problem reaches crisis proportions.” The PTA asked for a freeze on enrollment for kindergarten, first grade and fifth grade.

By the end of June, Harwayne had not responded to the PTA’s request for a meeting and she did not return calls from the Trib seeking comment.

But at Community Board 1’s Youth Committee meeting on
June 24, Roy Moskowitz, the district’s counsel, said that P.S. 234 “seems to be coming to that point” of having an overcrowding problem. Resolving it, he said, is “going to be a timing issue. I don’t know if the system is going to be able to respond to the population explosion quickly enough.

Thousands of new residential units are being developed in Lower Manhattan as the city aggressively promotes the area as a residential community.

Two of the biggest projects in the pipeline are right next door to P.S. 234: a planned 35-story tower with 488 units on Site 5C, the city-owned lot behind the school (see story, page 7), and an even larger residential building across Warren Street on Site 5B. (In a city hearing on Site 5C last month, Olsen suggested that the new buildings could be zoned for P.S. 89.)

According to a study released last month by Community Board 1, 13,000 new residential units have been occupied since 2000 or are scheduled for completion by 2005.

The favored solution for handling the anticipated influx of children is a new school, preferably east of Broadway, where many of the new units are being built. According to Switzer, 42 new children from that area will enter P.S. 234 in September, and the school had 120 this past year.

Madelyn Wils, chairwoman of Community Board 1, said that the board was pushing the Department of Education to build a new school and that “the Bloomberg Administration is working with us.”

“The city has collected innumerable taxes, condo and co-op taxes in Lower Manhattan, and it’s about time they put some of these taxes back into the community,” she said, noting that funding for Millennium High School, P.S. 234 and P.S./I.S. 89 did not come out of city coffers.

“I keep hearing [Deputy Mayor] Dan Doctoroff quoted in the press saying he wants to see new residential development around here,” said Nicole Vianna, the P.S. 234 PTA treasurer. “But nowhere do I see Dan Doctoroff saying, ‘I see a lot of residential, and I see a new public school.’”

But getting the city to commit to building the new school during a budget crisis, while schools in other parts of the city face even worse overcrowding, will be a challenge.

Paul Rose, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said that a new Downtown school was not in the current capital budget but that the department “is constantly looking for ways to add capacity in areas that are overcrowded.” For the future, he added, “if the need arises to provide more seats in any area of New York City, we will look at addressing those needs in our upcoming capital plan.”

Another way to get a school built is to convince a developer to include it in a new building, in exchange for community support for a project. Such an arrangement could be attempted on Site 5B or Site 5C, where CB1 is opposing the city’s plans for large buildings, but the 5C building is already supposed to include an 18,000-square-foot community center.

P.S. 234, with its largely affluent and involved parent body, is lucky. The PTA allocated $25,000 for the construction work to convert the offices into a classroom in case the Department of Education doesn’t pay for it.

For the proposed building extension, Olsen said that the PTA could probably raise money for interior work if the city builds the shell. But it will take more than parents’ money to resolve the longer-term overcrowding crisis.

“A solution has to be developed with the Department of Education, the community and the City of New York,” Switzer said. “I think it’s much too complicated a problem for any one constituency to solve.”