Parents Celebrate Waitlist Solutions

Maritza Mrozinski with son Dylan at PS 89, where he was offered a kindergarten seat for September. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

“Oh, my God, I just started jumping up and down!”

So recalled Maritza Mrozinski when describing her reaction to the news last month that her son, Dylan, who was hopelessly low on the waitlist for a kindergarten seat at PS 276, would be able to attend PS 89 in September.

As it turns out, all of the remaining children waitlisted for PS 89, PS 276, PS 234 and the Peck Slip School received “alternate offers,” as the De partment of Education calls them, at schools in their neighborhoods. Here’s how it worked out.

• Two kindergarten classes were added to the existing three at PS 89, one to accommodate its own waitlist and another for children waitlisted for PS 276.

• PS 150 will get a second kindergarten class for children waiting for a seat at PS 234.

• The three children waitlisted for the Peck Slip School can go to the Spruce Street School.

The news came at a June meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s School Overcrowding Task Force, before parents were officially notified of where their waitlisted children would be sent to kindergarten. Ariana Massouh, the mother
of a child waitlisted at PS 276, attended the meeting and immediately got the word out to the other parents.

Massouh, who had mobilized parents with a petition and letter-writing campaign addressed to the Department of Education, was now witnessing the resolution to a fight she said she had to wage.

“I was so upset when I found out about the waitlist news, the uncertainty was literally driving me nuts,” she recalled in an interview. “So I sat down with my husband and said the only thing that’s going to make me feel better is to at least put the effort in to make something happen. It was really a coping mechanism for me.”

While PS 89 Principal Ronnie Najjar said she did not oppose the opening of two additional kindergarten classes in her school, she was worried about the following year if, once again, she has nearly 30 children on her waitlist.

“We would not ask that any school to offer kindergarten sections that are actually beyond their capacity to carry those sections through their school, Jennifer Peng, from the DOE’S Office of Portfolio Management, told Silver’s task force. “I do hear that being the underlying worry.”

Peng said she expected the five sections of kindergartners to become five classes of first graders the following year, then to be collapsed into fewer classes in the years after that.

Jessica Whitney Gould, whose son Julian had been on the waitlist for PS 234, said in an interview that she was “of course, very happy” that he would be attending PS 150. But she expressed concerns about the emotional climate at the school, where staff and some parents disagree over a recent DOE proposal to move the school to Chelsea in the 2014 school year.

“There’s a lot of conflict in that school right now and I hope that kind of energy doesn’t affect the children,” she said, adding that she continues to be troubled by the yearly drama over school crowding.

“It’s not the best scenario to keep squeezing these schools to create more classes,” she noted.

Down the road, that squeeze could be eased considerably. A school needs assessment announced last month by the DOE found that Lower Manhattan—defined by two subdistricts of School District 2 below 14th Street—will be short 1,000 seats in the coming years.

That means the city can include a new school, or schools, in that area in its five-year, citywide capital plan that is expected to be announced in November.
The finding, presented to a subcommittee of Silver’s task force on June 12, reverses the DOE’s long-held position, at odds with Downtown school advocates, that additional seats are not needed in Lower Manhattan.

“The ideal thing would be to put the school in FiDi. That’s where the needs are greatest now,” said Eric Greenleaf, a member of that committee whose own demographic projections have indicated a shortage of 1,200 seats in Lower Manhattan in the next five to six years. (According to a Community Board 1 study, the number of Financial District children aged four and under increased by 242 percent between 2000 and 2010; in Tribeca, that increase was 200 percent.)

In determining where to open new schools, the DOE forecasts population growth based on new apartment construction, making development-intensive Lower Manhattan a logical choice for a school, Greenleaf said.

“There may not be enough money to fund all the needs around the city and [the DOE] has to look at where overcrowding is the worst,” he said.

“I think everyone would agree that overcrowding is pretty bad downtown.”
Carrie Marlin, the director of planning for the DOE’s Office of Portfolio Management, told Silver’s task force that there are other considerations as well, including the availability of sites that meet the size and environmental qualifications for a new elementary school.

“A lot of that often drives the decision about where a new building will go,” she said.

Paul Goldstein, who directs Silver’s district office, said it is “incumbent” upon the task force to begin an immediate search for new sites, much like their previous efforts that yielded the locations for the last three Downtown schools.

“We know it’s this group that has identified sites for the schools that have been built to date,” Goldstein said. “With all due respect to the [School Construction Authority] and the DOE, it’s been the community that has identified every single one of them.”

The DOE’s Marlin didn’t disagree. “We rely on that often,” she added.