DOE: No Relief Next September from School Crowding Pressures

From left, Community Board 1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes, CB1 Youth Committee chairs Paul Hovitz and Tricia Joyce, and fellow Downtown school advocate Eric Greenleaf at meeting of Sheldon Silver's School Overcrowding Task Force. They and others at the meeting complained to education officials, yet again, about what they say is an inadequate response to school crowding. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Not long after learning with dismay [1] that the city plans to add one—not two—456-seat schools below Canal Street in the next five years, Downtown school advocates got more bad news.
The new school, which has yet to be sited, will not open in temporary space  this coming fall, as some had hoped. An “incubating” space would have helped to relieve overcrowding in the 2014-2015 school year.
Mike Mirisola, a School Con­struc­tion Authority official, told a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s School Overcrowding Task Force last month that the city cannot officially site a new school until June, when the City Council approves the school as part of the city Department of Edu­ca­tion’s overall capital budget. That, in turn, delays when a temporary location for the school can be made available.

“So then we don’t stand a chance of incubating a new school in September?” asked Paul Hovitz, co-chair of Com­munity Board 1’s Youth and Edu­cation Committee. “Because you need to site it first before you incubate?”

“That’s right,” Mirisola answered.

“That’s disappointing,” Hovitz said in a tone of despair.

“Now we are very delayed,” added Tricia Joyce, who chairs the youth committee with Hovitz, “and in a very precarious situation once again.”

Last spring, schools within Com­munity Board 1 had nearly 150 children on kindergarten wait lists, a number that dropped to zero by the beginning of the school year. Many of those children were  ultimately offered seats because the DOE added two kindergarten sections to P.S. 89’s three sections and one to P.S. 150. It is unclear how children on yet another round of wait lists will be accommodated.

“We know we’re going to have wait lists this spring when the kindergarten process gets underway,” Drew Patterson, the DOE’s planner for southern Man­hattan, told the task force. The 712-seat Peck Slip School, which will not open until the fall of 2015, will “make a world of difference,” he added, but “clearly it doesn’t do anything for us next year.”

Until a District 2 Community Edu­cation Council meeting in No­vember, Downtown school advocates believed that the need for 1,000 seats that the city had identified for Lower Manhattan would be addressed by opening new schools below Canal Street. The city’s five-year plan for building and repairing its schools, released in November, stated that there would be two 456-seat schools in the “Greenwich Village/­Tribeca subdistrict,” but it did not specify where.

Only in answer to a question at the CEC meeting did Mirisola reveal that one of the two schools is in fact a previously an­nounced elementary school planned for Hudson Square. Trinity Real Estate is obliged to build that school in return for a rezoning of the area that will allow for large-scale development. Those planned seats are intended for children living in the Hudson Square developments, though how the school will be zoned is yet to be determined.

Silver told DOE officials at his task force meeting that he wants to see the capital plan amended to meet the need below Canal Street, which his group says amounts to more than 1,200 seats.

“We’re asking that when the DOE finalizes its plan for next year, it add at least 1,000 seats for here in Lower Man­hattan,” he said, “and site them for the Financial District and Battery Park City, where we have seen the most growth.”

In February, an amended version of the capital plan will be submitted for approval to the city’s Panel for Educational Policy.