By Nicole Breskin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
TRIBECA — After months of wrangling over new school zones in Lower Manhattan that were supposed to reduce overcrowding, TriBeCa parents wanting to get their children into the much coveted P.S. 234 still face a lottery.
P.S. 234, which sits in the heart of TriBeCa, received 186 applications for 125 kindergarten seats, DNAinfo has learned.
Due to the excess of applications — which far exceeded the city’s predictions — lotteries will be put in place to determine which students can enroll in P.S. 234 and which will have to be sent out of the neighborhood.
Those students will be sent to the Spruce Street School, near City Hall, or P.S. 89 or P.S. 276, both in Battery Park City, according to Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a spokesperson for the Department of Education.
Siblings of current P.S. 234 students will have preference for entry to the incoming kindergarten class. The remainder will be selected through a lottery, Zaren-Rosenfeld said.
"The reason this happened is because we underestimated population increase in our figures," he said.
According to the Department of Education, none of the other lower Manhattan schools have reached applications in excess of seats. But, if all the other schools are filled to capacity prior to the lottery, TriBeCa parents may be forced to send children out of lower Manhattan entirely and into the closest available school.
“We would have done anything we could have to avoid a lottery,” Community Education Council’s District 2 president Elzora Cleveland told DNAinfo. “We did what we could with the data presented to us.”
The Department of Education drafted zoning proposals, but the CEC’s District 2 chose an option that would see families west of Church Street zoned for school in their neighborhood at P.S. 234.
The decision came after months of hearings and even a deadlocked vote that saw heart-wrenching pleas from parents who were all vying for a spot at the school.
Cleveland said it would be “of great concern” if the remaining schools in lower Manhattan are also filled to capacity, with nowhere nearby to place the excess students who had been zoned for P.S. 234.
Lotteries will commence in mid-March.
