News of an upcoming lottery this month for kindergarten placements at P.S. 234 and newly released birth statistics are heightening worries over an ever-growing demand for seats in Lower Manhattan elementary schools.

As prospective P.S. 234 parents learned to their dismay last month, there are only 55 non-special-education seats for the 130 zoned children applying to the school who do not have siblings already there.

Those parents now find themselves in a lottery, to take place between March 12 and March 22.

“Because we’re doing a lottery again for the second year it makes me afraid I’m going to have to be doing it for the next few years,” said P.S. 234 Principal Lisa Ripperger.

That demand is expected to drop as some parents decide to send their children to private schools or the children are accepted into “gifted-and-talented” programs. Still, it was just such a lottery that a recently selected temporary zoning plan was meant to avoid. But few predicted these numbers.

Members of the District 2 Community Education Council (CEC), the panel that endorsed the zoning plan in a close vote in January, repeatedly complained that they were making their decision on inadequate data provided by the Department of Education.

It seems they were right.

Elizabeth Rose, the DOE official overseeing the zoning process, now says those numbers—based on children currently enrolled in kindergarten and 1st grade—grossly underestimated the number of 4–year-olds in the selected zone (Option 2), which includes all of Tribeca west of Church Street.
She said enrollment this year rose 60 perecent over the previous year. “That would be an enormous increase in students that I don’t think anybody could have predicted,” she said.

By the end of preregistration the number of potential kindergartners for P.S. 234 had risen to 191.

Jonathan Larkin, father of a 4-year-old zoned for P.S. 234, said he knew there was the chance of a lottery, but thought the exercise in choosing a zone was “rigorous enough” that it could probably be avoided. “It seems a big failure of the zoning process," he said.

As for 1st grade, a new DOE “right of return” policy gives priority to the students who remained on the P.S. 234 wait list in the fall of 2009 when it closed and are now attending P.S. 276 or P.S. 379. That could mean an influx of 1st graders into P.S. 234. But as of late last month only five families with kindergartners in the new schools expressed interest in changing their children’s school next year. It’s a small number given the emotional outcry last spring when kindergartners were assigned through lottery to one of the new schools temporarily housed in Tweed Courthouse rather than their zoned school, P.S. 234.

“Maybe the fact that we’ve gotten so few is good,” said Ripperger, who is opening an additional 1st grade class next year to keep the class size down. “Maybe that means they’re going to stay.”

Final enrollment numbers for the other Downtown schools are due to be released March 12. More than 70 children have been registered or are expected to be registered for P.S. 397. Only two sections per grade had been planned for the school, and some parents believe that numbers like that mean that the permanent building will not accommodate its  middle school when it opens in the fall of 2011. The DOE insists that the middle school is not threatened.

Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a DOE spokesman, said the Department anticipates that there will be enough space in P.S. 397, P.S. 89 and P.S. 276 to accommodate children who do not make it into P.S. 234 through the lottery. If not, he said, the DOE will consider adding extra kindergarten classes to the schools. Barring that possibility, the DOE has selected two Greenwich Village schools—P.S. 3 and P.S. 41—as alternatives, Zarin-Rosenfeld said.

In the meantime, some parents who were zoned out of the school of their choice when Option 2 was selected over Option 3R are looking ahead. They want to make sure that accurate data inform the next zoning decision, likely to take place next year for fall 2011. The group of former 3R supporters, calling themselves the Lower Manhattan Coalition for Schools and Communities (“LoMaC”), filed a Freedom of Information Law request to the DOE and CEC. The group is seeking data they believe should have been provided during the zoning process.

“Whether you supported 2 or 3R, everybody is appalled by the utter lack of data used in this process,” said Cheryl D’Hollander, a member of the coalition. “Our focus is to pressure the DOE for more data, to make sure that permanent zoning is going to be done fairly and factually-based and not guesswork.”

News of the lottery for P.S. 234 was troubling enough for parents whose children are zoned for the school. But birth statistics for Lower Manhattan continue to show a darker picture for all Downtown parents who plan to send their children to public elementary schools in the years to come.
Without more new elementary schools, even beyond the two schools now under construction, it is increasingly difficult to imagine where today’s toddlers will attend public school.

Eric Greenleaf, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a P.S. 234 parent, has been compiling demographic data and sounding the overcrowding alarm for several years. His most recent projections, presented to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s Overcrowding Task Force last month, predict a continuing shortage of seats that will grow annually.

Greenleaf says there has been a pattern of about 60 more births each year than the one prior. At that rate, he said, 200 babies born this year will be without school seats in one of the four local schools by the time they reach kindergarten age. To bring that into perspective, Greenleaf points out, that shortfall represents 50 more seats than the capacity of P.S. 276 and P.S. 397 combined.

Greenleaf’s numbers, which come from the city’s Department of Health, show that 25 percent more children were born Downtown in 2008 (in an area coinciding with Community Board 1) than in 2005, when this fall’s crop of kindergartners was born.

“The Department of Education needs to quickly fund and site these new schools,” Greenleaf told the schools task force, noting that it can take up to five years from the time a school is approved to when children walk through the doors.

Greenleaf and many others lay the blame for overcrowding on city officials who they say encouraged residential development—especially in Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11—without providing schools to support the new families.

But having gained two new schools and an annex for P.S. 234 in recent years, Downtown parents could have a difficult time winning their case for more schools when there are needs throughout the city.

“The parents are understandably annoyed when they are told they’ve got more schools than anybody else,” said P.S. 234’s Ripperger. “This isn’t a community by community issue. It’s about a broader approach to city planning.”