Some P.S. 234 Wait Listed Kids May Be Bound for Distant Schools
P.S. 234’s infamous kindergarten wait list is shrinking, but not without troubling questions for parents over where the remaining children will attend school in the fall.
“There is progress,” the Department of Education’s Elizabeth Rose told a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s School Overcrowding Task Force last week. Numbering 67 a month ago, now there are 55 children in line for their zoned Tribeca school. According to the latest registration figures, Rose said, there will be seats this fall for 20 of those wait listed students in Lower Manhattan’s new schools, P.S. 276 in lower Battery Park City and P.S. 397, the Spruce Street School.
Where will the rest of the children go?
Rose restated the DOE's position that they will be assigned “as near to their homes as possible.” P.S. 3 on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village is likely to be one of those schools, especially for families in northern Tribeca. But, for the first time, Rose said that three other schools are also considered alternatives, all of them located in or around Chinatown and the Lower East Side: P.S. 1 on Henry Street; P.S. 42 on Hester Street and P.S. 126 on Catherine Street.
The DOE may decide to open a fourth kindergarten class at one of the new schools, Rose said, possibly eliminating the need to send children farther afield. But several P.S. 397 parents at the meeting said they oppose adding another class of kindergartners to the school, which is now temporarily housed in the Tweed Courthouse and scheduled to move to its permanent building, Beekman Tower, in 2011. Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee on April 20 passed a resolution supporting their opposition to the extra class. (The full community board will vote on the resolution at its upcoming meeting on Tuesday, April 27.)
Kimberly Busi, co-president of the P.S. 397 PTA, said she feared that the additional children would jeopardize the middle school in what was to be a kindergarten through eighth grade. “I think it’s a very real risk,” she said. “And if there’s a fourth kindergarten class there that means our middle school is gone.”
She and others also said there is no room to expand. "Right now it [the classroom space at Tweed Courthouse] is maxed to capacity,” said Karen Stonely, a P.S. 397 parent.
Rose said the message she's gotten from parents is that they want their young children to attend schools in their own community. “We have to weigh…the tradeoffs,” she said. “Right now is it better to open an extra kindergarten section so that the children in this community can stay in this community if the alternative were, for example, kindergarten seats at P.S. 1, P.S. 42, P.S. 126? That would be the alternative.”
Asked to comment on those alternatives, Stacey Mayesh, whose daughter is number 52 on the P.S. 234 wait list, was unequivocal. “If I had to weigh the importance of [providing space for] a middle school against young children that have to commute to the West Village, Chinatown or the Lower East Side, there is no comparison,” she said.
Rose said she and Principal Nancy Harris would take into account the number of first graders who will be registered next fall at P.S. 397. “We’re not going to make a decision to add a fourth kindergarten in a vacuum,” she said.
Rose continued to reject a call by wait listed parents who want to voice their choice for an alternate school.
“I completely understand how frustrated parents are with this and I empathize,” she said, but added that such an option would be bureaucratically unfeasible because wait lists in Manhattan are “but small pieces of the wait list issue and alternate-offer issue, and we are dealing with a citywide process.”
After the meeting, Rose said it was too soon to assume that an additional class added to P.S. 397 would jeopardize the middle school because a new elementary school, somewhere from Hudson Square south, is expected to open in the next few years. “The capacity situation could be very different,” she said, “by the time this year’s kindergarten class are in fifth grade.
But Busi said it was her “assumption” that the middle school would open in 2011, and parents are planning accordingly. They envision teachers connecting middle and lower school curriculums and older children mentoring younger ones. “It is perhaps the most unique component to our school versus a K-5, and central to our mission,” she said.
"I don't know that we ever absolutely stated that the [middle school] would start in fall 2011," Rose said.
In the meantime, parents on the P.S. 234 wait list are due to get letters during the week of May 17 telling them where their children will attend kindergarten in the fall. An information session on those “alternate offers” is tentatively scheduled for May 11. The time and place will be announced.
By Carl Glassman