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The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Greenwich Village Middle School Moving to Financial District

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

FINANCIAL DISTRICT — The Greenwich Village Middle School will lose its name but gain 75,000 square feet when it moves to the Financial District this fall.

Principal Kelly McGuire considers this a fair trade.

“We’re going to be able to provide the middle school program our kids really deserve,” McGuire said as he gave DNAinfo a tour of the new space at 26 Broadway this week. “They deserve a computer lab. They deserve a library. They deserve a great art room. It’s been tough to do all that in our current space.”

The Greenwich Village school is now crammed into PS 3, where the 215 middle school students share nine classrooms totaling less than 10,000 square feet. The hallways are narrow and students don’t have their own lockers.

In contrast, the Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, as it will likely be called, will have 75,000 square feet at 26 Broadway. Each of the 17 classrooms will have a SmartBoard, three desktop computers and a set of laptops, along with built-in shelving and a teacher’s closet.

The school, opening this fall on the sixth and seventh floors of 26 Broadway, will also have a dance studio, a music room, a library with a computer lab, two science wings, a cafeteria and a multipurpose room.

Many of the rooms have views of Bowling Green and the Statue of Liberty. Even the elevators will be a welcome change, as the middle schoolers are accustomed to hiking up four flights of stairs every day at PS 3.

Although McGuire is intimately familiar with all these details, he still sounded amazed by his school’s good luck as he described the plans this week.

“We’ve been scrimping and saving and clawing to get money every year,” McGuire said. “And all of a sudden it’s like: Poof, here it is.”

The new space will allow the Lower Manhattan Community School to grow to 350 students in the next several years. McGuire has already started receiving more applications from lower Manhattan kids who want to stay closer to home for middle school.

McGuire plans to maintain the school’s focus on community service while expanding the arts and after-school programs using the extra space.

Some Village parents and activists opposed the move last fall, concerned about their neighborhood losing school seats.

McGuire said the school's parents are on board now.

The only thing the new school is missing is a gym, but that’s on its way too, McGuire said.

The city plans to build a full-court gym on a lower floor of 26 Broadway, an office building, McGuire said. It will open as soon as fall 2011 and serve his school along with the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, a high school that moved to 26 Broadway last fall, and another high school the city hopes to open in the building.

In all, the city is paying about $370 million to lease a total of 285,000 square feet in the building for the next 30 years.

“It’s going to be pretty incredible,” McGuire said. “It feels like a suburban school.”