WEST VILLAGE — Local parents organizing around a new middle school in the West Village want to reach out to families with special needs students.
The new middle school, referred to as 75 Morton for its address on Morton Street, is still under construction, but will have an entire floor of the seven-story school dedicated to serving special needs students when it opens in 2017.
Local parents who campaigned for years to get city funding for the new school — which will be the Greenwich Village-SoHo area's only public middle school — formed a coalition called the 75 Morton Community Alliance, and have remained involved in the school's development with meetings and conference calls with Department of Education officials.
Now they're attempting to build attendance from parents of special needs students at a Nov. 2 "envisioning meeting," to make sure 75 Morton will adequately serve the city's most vulnerable students.
All public schools are required to meet the needs of all students, but, as DNAinfo New York previously reported, many schools fail to do so, especially new schools with small student populations.
For example, if an entering class has two students who need a controlled learning environment and three who need individualized education plans, a school might group all five together, downgrading the recognized needs of the students with more severe issues, critics say.
At a recent planning meeting, two mothers with experience in the city's special-education specific District 75, which often sends students with special needs to separate programs within schools, said they believe 75 Morton will help kids with more intensive needs, particularly students with "more difficult sensory issues" who need more controlled environments, since the entire second floor of the school is meant for special needs students.
Jordana Mendelson and another mother of a student with special needs, Margie Dienstag, are also hopeful about having a school that can serve their children and others like them in a more central Manhattan neighborhood.
They said students who need those services are often pushed to the outer edges of the city.
"We need something for our kids," said Dienstag, a longtime West Village mother of three. "I'm not saying in walking distance, but less than an hour on the bus."
Mendelson agreed, adding, "It's typical for [District 75] kids to be on the bus for two hours."
With the understanding that it can be difficult for parents or guardians of special needs kids to get childcare, organizers hope to gather feedback in advance from those who can't make it to the meeting. (Input can be emailed to 75morton@gmail.com.)
The Nov. 2 meeting, to be held at the newly relocated Clinton School for Writers and Artists on Union Square, will include two rounds of breakout sessions for dialogue with facilitators, plus subject matter experts who will lay out the issues beforehand.
The focus of the meeting is to decide the school's learning philosophy and "theme," which could potentially be shaped by community partnerships.
"For example, if the Whitney was interested, there could be more of [an] arts focus," one parent explained at the recent planning meeting.
While there has been interest in another performing arts school, the 75MCA volunteers said, the district already has three, and is lacking in math and science programming.
They said some organizations have expressed interest in funding a school named for Jane Jacobs, which could pave the way for special urban studies and architecture programming. A potential architecture-themed school could come out of a partnership with Cooper Union, if the university is interested in working with the school.
The 75 Morton envisioning meeting is open to the public. It will start at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 2 at the Clinton School for Artists and Writers at 10 East 15th St.
Community Education Council 2 is also holding a meeting on the prospective admissions process for 75 Morton. It still has not yet been decided whether the school will be zoned or accessible through a lottery. That meeting is scheduled for Oct. 20 at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of P.S. 41 at 116 West 11th St., and CEC2 promised DOE officials will be on hand to answer questions.
