Silver Sides with Peck Slip Parents in Call for More Classrooms

One of the rooms in Tweed Courthouse partitioned for use by two classes and classroom staff. The office space is expected to be eliminated and higher partitions are to be installed by the end of the month. Photo courtesy of Peck Slip School PTA

If space-deprived Department of Education officials are short on conference rooms, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver says they can have his.

To help free up classroom space for Peck Slip School students, temporarily housed in the DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, Silver offered schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña meeting rooms in his expansive office suite in nearby 250 Broadway.

Silver is siding with Peck Slip School parents against Fariña over the use of two rooms they say should be given over to first and second graders, who now share their rooms with another class. Parents say that the two large rooms, each partitioned by six-foot-high office-style dividers, are noisy and crowded.

One of the rooms that the parents believe should be made available, a former classroom, was turned into a center for professional development by Fariña. The other is a chancellor’s conference room.

“The education of our children is too important to be compromised for the convenience of DOE meetings that can easily take place elsewhere,” Silver wrote in his Oct. 14 letter to Fariña.

A DOE spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on Silver’s proposal.

The Peck Slip School is in its third and last year of temporary housing in Tweed Courthouse. Next year the students will move into their new quarters near the Seaport.

Paul Goldstein, an aide to Silver, announced the offer Tuesday evening at a meeting of Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee, attended by many of the parents of those first and second graders. One of the parents, Eden Lopez, described the conditions as “the most pathetic excuse for a learning environment.”

“Most egregious are the state-of-the art noise reducing dividers that are flimsy six-foot-high dividers which, of course, offer no buffer at all in a room with 15-foot-high ceilings.”

The dividers carve up the 2,400-square-foot rooms into three sections, two of which are classroom spaces. The third section is office space used by a special education teacher and a teacher mentor.

According to a DOE source, the office space will be eliminated in order to enlarge each classroom. Also, higher, stronger dividers, to be installed by the end of the month, are expected by the DOE to fix the noisy conditions.

The DOE has turned down the parents requests for the two additional rooms.  Tom Taratko, who heads the DOE’s Office of Space Planning, told the parents that he is looking into installing dividers that are 10 feet high—four feet taller than the current ones.

“We feel very confident we could come up with some type of improvements that could be done over a weekend,” Taratko said.

Raising the dividers up to ceilings as high as 18 feet, as some have suggested, would be impractical, he said, because of landmark and city code constraints.

Tricia Joyce, the committee’s chair, said she doubted that even 10-foot-high partitions in a room with such high ceilings would solve the problem.

“It’s not going to help to be six feet from the ceiling, we all know that,” Joyce said. “If they can take it all the way up and make this an acceptable situation I think we need to let them do it.”

“If not,” she added, “I think we need to talk about the conference room.”

Maggie Siena, the principal, said that while she fought for having the former classroom for her school, she did not share the opinion of many parents that the conference room should be a classroom. “It has brick walls, it’s a landmark room, it would be a harder room to use as a classroom than the space where the kids are right now.”

Siena said she feels caught between her loyalty to the parents and to the chancellor “who has exceeded our expectations for what she is doing for New York City students.”

“I’m in a tough spot,” she said.