With a school zoning decision just weeks away, Grace Flood stood before  60 of her neighbors gathered late last month in the lobby of 275 Greenwich Street in Tribeca.

“We’ve got to make a huge stink,” Flood said, imploring her fellow condo owners to demonstrate at a Jan. 6 meeting of School District 2’s Community Education Council.

“I want to suggest,” Flood continued, “that as [the CEC panel] walk into that meeting the hallway is lined with us, and that we all have signs and catch the members.”

Such is the passion among residents in various corners of Tribeca, all claiming P.S. 234 as their rightful community school. (See Parents' Letters to the Trib Here.)

The condo owners at 275 Greenwich St. are protesting the latest school zoning option (Option 3, at right), presented last month by the Department of Education. That plan puts next fall’s kindergartners who live in their building—a block from P.S. 234—in the P.S. 89 zone.

But residents all around the neighborhood, excluded in one or more of four zoning options under discussion, have been e-mailing, petitioning and speaking out at hearings in hopes of being included in the school zone they took for granted as theirs.

“I don’t have a single friend in Battery Park City. My children don’t have a single friend in Battery Park City because it’s not my community,” said Allison Silver, a north Tribeca mother who spoke against an option (not shown above) that would zone her corner of the neighborhood for P.S. 89. “I don’t go there. P.S. 234 is a part of my community.”

So, too, do parents of 4-year-olds in Battery Park City’s Gateway Plaza consider P.S. 276 their school. The new school, under construction at the southern end of the neighborhood, is closer to them than P.S. 89 and the DOE’s Option 3 would give those parents what they want. (Options 1 and 2, however, do not.) But it sends children in buildings such as 275 Greenwich Street in the southern part of Tribeca to P.S. 89 to make up for the loss in student enrollment.

The CEC, a panel of elected parent volunteers, have final say over school zoning. Sometime this month, they are expected to vote on the catchments for P.S. 234 and P.S. 89, and the two new schools, P.S. 276 and P.S. 397. At the Jan. 6 public meeting (6:30 p.m. at 333 Seventh Ave.), the CEC will deliberate over the various zoning options. The public cannot speak. But the next evening, at 6:30 p.m. in the P.S. 234 auditorium, the committee will listen to comments at one final hearing.

Shino Tanikawa, co-chair of the CEC’s zoning committee, said her committee will deliberate all four proposals before them.
“I want to make it clear to everybody,” she said. “We haven’t decided anything.”

The zoning to be voted on this month is temporary. Elizabeth Rose, the DOE’s liaison to the zoning process, said it will stand until the CEC votes to change it.

“We’re looking at [temporary zoning] we hope will be something that approximates long-term,” she said, noting that the plan will be modified.

Tanikawa said the CEC has yet to receive the needed demographic figures to make informed long-term projections.

“We’ll be able to better project what might be happening if we had better data,” she said. “Unfortunately,” Tanikawa added, “I am committed to seeing this through, however long it takes.”

—Faith Paris contributed reporting for this story.