In April, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott told a meeting of Assemblyman Sheldon Silver's School Overcrowding Task Force that he would look into the need for new schools in Lower Manhattan. Two months later the DOE declared the need for 1,000 more school seats in the next five years. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
The city's Department of Education on Tuesday announced its plan for building new schools over the next five years, and among them are two 456-seat elementary schools in Lower Manhattan. Sites for them have yet to be identified.
In June, the DOE had identified the need for 1,000 seats, but it was not until the Nov. 5 release of its next five-year capital plan that it said it could fund them. Beyond that, many questions remain, and a DOE spokeswoman declined to answer questions on specifics of the plan.
"It remains to be seen where we go from here," said Paul Hovitz, co-chair of Community Board 1's Youth and Education Committee. He said CB1 is requesting a DOE representative "to give us an explanation what this capital plan lays out" at the committee's Nov. 12 meeting.
According to the plan, the schools will be completed in 2018 and 2019.
"Those seats are going to be needed before then," said Eric Greenleaf, a Downtown parent and professor in NYU's Stern School of Business whose demographic projections—and warnings of growing school crowding—have long been cited by school advocates.
The seats are for a Greenwich Village/Tribeca "subdistrict" of Community School District 2. The subdistrict encompasses Manhattan south of 14th Street and west of Broadway. Tricia Joyce, chair of CB1's Youth and Education Committee, said she is perplexed by the DOE’s projected needs for such a wide area rather than for individual neighborhoods.
“It seems as though they’re sticking by their very complex, highly theoretical, demographic-based projections that are based on a subdistrict level, when they’re building on a neighborhood level,” she said. “My hopes for this plan was that they were going to use an alternative way of planning.”
According to the DOE, the capital plan for building and maintaining the city's schools will be submitted for approval to the Panel on Education Policy next March and voted on by the City Council in June.
—Aline Reynolds contributed reporting.