Despite New Facilities, Middle School a Tough Sell to Local Parents
A middle school opened on lower Broadway in September. It is outfitted with dance and visual arts studios, a library stocked with $100,000 worth of books and a large music room with new guitars, clarinets, trumpets, drums, and other instruments. Spacious science labs and classrooms, each with its own Smart Board and new computers, open onto wide, gleaming hallways that seem more than ample for the 245 students who traverse them.
This freshly minted two-floor complex at 26 Broadway is called Lower Manhattan Community Middle School. But whether the Lower Manhattan community will embrace it remains to be seen.
For the 12 years before moving Downtown, this was Greenwich Village Middle School, squeezed into the top floor of the building that houses P.S. 3 on Hudson Street. It was a school few middle-class children from the Village attended, attracting instead many black and Hispanic students from less affluent neighborhoods, whose parents saw it as a safe alternative to schools closer to home. The entire school consisted of nine rooms, eight of them classrooms.
“We were not set up for success,” said Kelly McGuire, 37, the school’s principal for the past five years. “When the school was started it was not intended to be housed on just that floor.” At that, McGuire extended his arms. “Literally, this is as wide as the hallways were. So it was just very tough.”
The elementary school in the building needed to expand and 26 Broadway, the former Standard Oil Corp. building that also houses a high school, the Urban Assembly of Business for Young Women, became the lucky school’s new home. But what traveled with it, McGuire said, was a reputation that it did not deserve.
“‘[On tours] parents have said to me, ‘I’ve heard that your kids are really, really rough. How do you address that?’ Or, in years past, ‘Where do the white kids go?’”
“I tell them I’ve worked in four different middle schools. They’re not any rougher here than anywhere else.”
“And in many ways, it’s better here than what I’ve found at other schools,” added the principal, a Minnesota native who has taught in Louisiana and California and was vice principal of Wagner Middle School on the Upper East Side.
But perception matters. Despite the school’s shiny new digs, enrollment is short of what McGuire needs to maintain funding. “We have 23 and 24 students in our 6th grade classes and our budget depends on our having more like 24 or 25. I need my 25 kids.”
He hopes some of those students will come from the elementary schools in Lower Manhattan.
“I would like our school to represent what New York City looks like,” McGuire noted. “And that would mean having white parents come to the school and say, ‘Yeah, that could be a school for me. Asian parents, Latino parents, African-American parents, too.” (About 20 percent of his current students are white. Another 20 percent are black and 30 percent are Hispanic. A growing number, now 30 percent, come from Chinatown.)
McGuire said he believes he lost about a dozen Downtown students to I.S. 276, which also opened in its new Battery Park City building in September and is itself 20 students short of capacity.
“I feel there is growing competition between I.S. 89, I.S. 276 and myself. I’m the new kid on the block so I feel like I need to get my name out there.”
Competition is at the heart of the middle school “choice” process, in which parents and their 5th graders visit a variety of schools, usually within their school district, and rank them in the order of their top five preferences. Many Lower Manhattan students attend schools that require top test scores and other evidence of achievement potential. The Salk School of Science is most frequently picked by students from Tribeca’s P.S. 234.
For the first time, McGuire’s school is attracting children from P.S. 234. But LMC, as it is called, will remain a hard sell to Lower Manhattan parents, according to Eric Greenleaf, a P.S. 234 parent and New York University business professor who serves on the District 2 Community Education Council and is a frequent critic of the Department of Education. He faults the DOE for poor planning that leads to school overcrowding and shifting schools like LMC into spaces he believes are better used by true “neighborhood” schools.
“People like the idea of neighborhood schools, they’re much more willing to take a risk with a neighborhood school than with a school that’s not a neighborhood school,” he said. “Lower Manhattan Middle School was just brought in from another location to make room for more elementary school students at P.S. 3.”
In addition, Greenleaf said, entrance exams at some of the most competitive schools have changed the way parents look at schools.
“Since where you go to middle school has an effect on where you get to go to high school, and that’s competitive as well, people just don’t dare change that.”
McGuire is proud that his school is different. While students are “screened” through interviews and other evaluations, it is not looking for top achievers.
On average, he said, his students score in the “3” range of the 4-point standardized test taken in the 4th grade.
“At schools like Lab [New York City Lab for Collaborative Learning] and Salk, there’s this competition, competition, competition,” he noted. “Some parents think that’s not good for their kid. They think it’s important to send their children to a diverse school, to a school that’s warmer. And we’re definitely a warm school. That’s kind of our thing.”
Striding down the hall, a slim and towering presence beside his students, McGuire, the father of twin 2-year-olds, projects a sense of caring authority. Students approach him with ease and, as often, he takes a child aside to talk, his hand resting gently on one shoulder.
“Sometimes Mr. McGuire comes and asks me for my opinion if he wants to do something new,” said 7th grader Kayla Philip. “He understands everyone.”
Nothing seems to escape his eye, not a tiny bit of cellophane that he picks up from the spotless floor, or a student rushing down the hall.
“Hey, Ricky, come here,” the principal calls out to the boy, caught in the corner of his eye. “What were you just doing?”
“Running,” the boy says sheepishly.
“Please go back, touch that wall, and walk back.”
Parents and students interviewed said they appreciate the personal attention that McGuire and teachers give the children. They said they like being part of a small school. And no one called it rough.
“A lot of people thought I was crazy when I said I was sending my daughter there,” said Jane Eisen, whose 7th-grader, Chloe, chose the school after graduating from a private elementary school. “But I say, take a look at the school now. I think you’ll have a different view of it.”
CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story it was incorrectly stated that the school is 75 students short of capacity. The school plans to add a class per year, increasing capacity to 325 students in 2012. The current 6th-grade enrollment is several students short of capacity.
By Carl Glassman