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City Plans Major Rezoning of Downtown Schools

By Julie Shapiro | April 15, 2011 4:52pm | Updated on April 15, 2011 4:51pm
P.S. 234 in TriBeCa no longer has enough room to hold all of the children living in the neighborhood.
P.S. 234 in TriBeCa no longer has enough room to hold all of the children living in the neighborhood.
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DNAinfo/Julie Shapiro

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER MANHATTAN — Children living in lower Manhattan may soon travel outside their neighborhood to attend elementary school for the first time in 20 years, the Department of Education said this week.

To ease overcrowding in downtown's schools, the city plans to rejigger elementary zones across a broad swath of lower Manhattan, below 14th Street on the west side and below Grand Street on the east side, said Elizabeth Rose, a planner for the department.

That means children living in northern TriBeCa may travel up to P.S. 3 in Greenwich Village, while kids living near City Hall and in the Seaport may be sent to school in Chinatown. Currently, children living in Community Board 1 do not cross the board's northern boundary lines of Canal Street on the west and the Brooklyn Bridge on the east.

Children danced during a fundraiser for the Spruce Street School last year. Downtown has so many new families that the neighborhood's schools can't fit all the children.
Children danced during a fundraiser for the Spruce Street School last year. Downtown has so many new families that the neighborhood's schools can't fit all the children.
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DNAinfo/Julie Shapiro

"We don't look at city community board districts as boundary lines," Rose told surprised parents at Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's school overcrowding meeting on Thursday. "We are looking not just at this lower piece of Manhattan. We are looking all the way up to the top of the sub-district [at 14th Street]."

Although downtown's schools are overcrowded, P.S. 3 and schools in Chinatown have extra space, so it makes sense to spread lower Manhattan's baby boom farther afield, Rose said. The rezoning will go into effect in the fall of 2012.

But downtown parents said they strongly disagreed with the city's plan. The Department of Education should build more school seats downtown rather than sending children elsewhere, parents said.

"I'm not at all happy with busing kids out of our neighborhood," said Paul Hovitz, co-chairman of CB1's Youth and Education Committee. "After 9/11, many people feel they need their children [to go to school] close to home."

Eric Greenleaf, a P.S. 234 parent and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who projects that lower Manhattan will soon be short hundreds of elementary seats, also said the city's proposal is not viable.

"We need to find and site more schools downtown now," Greenleaf said. "The time to plan for these seats is now, not to wait for an emergency."

Lower Manhattan is getting one new 476-seat elementary school, likely at the site of the Peck Slip Post Office, which the city is in negotiations to buy. The school will open with just kindergarten classes in Tweed Courthouse in the fall of 2012 and is scheduled to move into its permanent home in 2015.

"We recognize the need for seats," said Liz Bergin, vice president of capital plan management at the DOE. "We have seats in the pipeline. We're trying to get them here as quickly as we possibly can."

But Greenleaf and other parents pointed out that even if that school opened up today, it would already be almost full, because there are so many extra kindergartners downtown.

TriBeCa's P.S. 234 held a lottery for seats this year and still has 34 children on its kindergarten waiting list, Rose said. P.S. 89 in northern Battery Park City and the Spruce Street School near City Hall each opened an extra section of kindergarten to accommodate all the applications they received. P.S. 276 in southern Battery Park City is also full.

Frank Gehry's new 76-story skyscraper near City Hall is expected to bring even more families to lower Manhattan.
Frank Gehry's new 76-story skyscraper near City Hall is expected to bring even more families to lower Manhattan.
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DNAinfo/Julie Shapiro

The Department of Education will begin working on the rezoning in the next few months with the District 2 Community Education Council, Rose said. The rezoning will only affect children who enter school starting in the fall of 2012 — all current elementary students will be able to remain in their current school.

Rose said the city would try to keep all children within half a mile of their home.

Also at Thursday's meeting, Rose addressed the concerns of parents at the Spruce Street School who worry that the school is accepting so many kindergartners that it will not have room to open a middle school in 2015. Rose said the city is committed to the middle school and is still planning to open it. She promised to provide a detailed explanation of how the city will make room for the middle school at Silver's next overcrowding meeting May 19.