Chancellor: Downtown Schools May Need to 'Grow In a Different Way'

Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña answers questions from reporters at Tweed Courthouse on June 10. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

In an effort to ease the crowding crunch in Downtown elementary schools, Chancellor Carmen Fariña said on June 10 that "everything is on the table." The chancellor declined to rule out eliminating the planned 6th-to-8th grades at the Spruce Street School, now a schoolyear away from opening its 6th grade classes.

"We're looking at all possibilities," Fariña said at a gathering of community and ethnic media reporters at the Department of Education headquarters in Tweed Courthouse. "Are there schools where it makes more sense to allow the school to grow in a different way?"

In seeking her thoughts on the future of the Spruce Street School as a k-8, the Trib asked Fariña to clarify a statement she made at a District 2 Community Education Council meeting last month.  In response to a Downtown parent's question about the need for more seats, she had said the DOE is "looking at the present structure of some of the schools. What makes sense, what might not make sense."

At the June 10 meeting, Fariña emphasized that "nothing will be done without community input."

"Anything that affects the schools and principals, we want to have the principals at the table before we make decisions," she said.

With the school opening additional kindergarten classrooms over the years to accommodate the demand, advocates for the school have feared there would be no room for the planned middle school. But at meetings of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's School Overcrowding Task Force, DOE officials have repeatedly said that the Spruce Street School would not forfeit its planned 6th-through-8th-grade expansion.

"I want to reiterate that we were promised a k-to-8 school," Silver said at his school task force meeting on June 13, adding, "We look forward to seeing the DOE live up to that promise."

Nancy Harris, the Spruce Street School's principal, told the Trib, "I don't think any of us saw the [chancellor's] statement coming," but noted that there have long been "very real space concerns" about the middle school.

"There's always been a question mark around it,"  she said.

“I do find it odd that [Fariña] is not taking a solid position as her predecessor had, that Spruce will definitely open its middle school,” said Paul Hovitz, co-chair of Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee. “For her to take the position that nothing's off the table might indicate that the middle school is in fact in jeopardy.”

A plan that would eliminate Spruce’s middle school grades—and use all available seats at the school for elementary students and possibly pre-k—could lead to a clash of interests. Parents expecting to send their children to a Spruce middle school could find themselves pitted against parents with incoming kindergartners who potentially may be placed on a wait list. (The school does not have a kindergarten wait list for the coming school year.)

At a meeting of Silver's task force in April, Fariña listened to Downtown school advocates plea for a school or schools that would at least double the 456 seats that the city has budgeted for a school below Canal Street. They project a shortage of 1,350 elementary seats by 2018.

As of yet, no site has been found for the 456-seat school.