A Private Elementary School for Tribeca

 by Barry Owens

Bridie Gauthier doesn't need to commission a study or conduct demographic analysis to tell her what every parent in Lower Manhattan already knows-if you build classrooms down here, students will fill them.
 
After just a year in the Beach Street building owned by her Montessori School of Manhattan, Bridie Gauthier has decided to expand the school in 2005 to a kindergarten through sixth grade. Photo: Stephanie Keith

Gauthier, who heads the Montessori School of Manhattan, now a preschool and kindergarten, at 53-55 Beach Street, plans to expand the school to include first through third grades in the fall of 2005. She estimates that within five years the school will house 600 students and offer full elementary classes through the sixth grade. It will be Tribeca's first private elementary school.

"It's all based on the needs we're seeing and on the conversations we've had with parents," Gauthier said.

She said close to 50 percent of the parents of toddlers already enrolled in the school have indicated to her they intend to keep their children in private school. Enrollment figures at the school have rapidly expanded and she expects they will continue to increase as more families move into the neighborhood.

The private school, formerly located in Independence Plaza, opened in its current space in September of last

year with 22 toddlers. That number has more than doubled and Gauthier expects 70 to 80 toddlers will enroll by this fall.

There had been plans all along for the school to offer Montessori elementary classes in Manhattan, Gauthier said, but it wasn't until recently that Tribeca was chosen for the expansion.

"The public schools down here have been a victim of their own success," she said. "They're doing a wonderful job, getting great test scores, and now everybody wants their kids to go there."

She said that the Montessori school will not be for everyone, as its teachers are trained to act more as guides and observers than instructors, and children are allowed to learn at their own pace. Rather than drawing children out of public schools, she expects the school's toddler program to feed its elementary program.

Based on the Montessori model, students in first through third grades will be grouped together as will students in fourth through sixth grades. Plans are for the school to expand classroom by classroom and floor by floor as needed.

With six floors and adjacent warehouse space owned by the school, Gauthier said the building shouldn't lack for room. Each of the floors is finished space and would only require furnishing and plumbing to serve as classrooms. She estimates that each floor could house as many as five classrooms of 16 to 18 students, and that there would be two teachers in every class.

The school would also provide space for French, Spanish, art therapy and gym classes. Plans are to build a library and cafeteria in the building's basement, she said.

"There are many families coming to Tribeca that are staying and growing--only, in Lower Manhattan, elementary schools are hard to come by," she said.