PS 150 Parents Shocked Over DOE Plan to Move Their School to Chelsea

Parents on Thursday morning gather on the steps leading to PS 150 to talk about how they will fight the DOE's plan to move their school to Chelsea. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

PS 150 parents are reeling from the news, announced Wednesday by their childrens’ principal, that the Department of Education proposes to move the school from Tribeca to Chelsea after one more year in its current Greenwich Street location.

Principal Jenny Bonnet sent a letter to school parents informing them that a School Leadership Team meeting was called earlier in the day by District 2 Superintendent Mariano Guzman to discuss “the future” of PS 150.

“The Department of Education realizes that this will be an unexpected inconvenience and shock for many of you,” Bonnet wrote.  “They will do everything they can to make this transition as smooth as possible (yellow school buses, for example).”

But parents at the school are picturing anything but a smooth transition from the intimate educational environment of PS 150, with only 170 students and one class per grade. Their new school, expected to be a beautifully designed, state-of-the-art facility, is being built within the former Foundling Hospital at 17th Street and 6th Avenue. It was zoned late last year for children in parts of Greenwich Village and Chelsea. As PS 150, it would keep that same zone but also allow in the current PS 150 students and their siblings.

Following student drop-off on Thursday morning, parents gathered on the steps leading up to the school’s plaza, voicing their shock and anger.

“We all feel kicked in the gut,” said Wendy Chapman, the PTA president and mother of two children in the school as well as one who has graduated.

Chapman, who works closely with Bonnet and expresses admiration for her, pleaded with parents not to make their anger personal.

“This is not about Jenny, this is not about our staff,” she told the parents. “This is more about larger District 2 decision making.”

Parents vowed to fight the decision.

“We’re not going to let this happen,” said Buxton Midyette, the father of two children in the school. “The solution is not to bus kids out of the neighborhood.”

In her letter to parents, Bonnet cited several reasons for the decision, among them the overcrowding in Downtown schools. The vacated classrooms could provide relief for what has become an annual crush for kindergarten seats and the waitlists that ensue. Shino Tanikawa, president of the District 2 Community Education Council (CEC), said several options may “and should” be considered, including an incubator for a new school, a pre-k and kindergarten center, or an early childhood school up to 2nd grade. (Until 2001, PS 150 was just such a school, called the Early Childhood Center.)

Erin Hughes, a DOE spokeswoman, said no decision has been made on the use of the building, which is located within the Independence Plaza apartment complex.

“This proposal is about PS 150 and developing a long-term plan for the school to ensure that it continues to thrive,” she told the Trib in an email. “While we don’t yet have a proposal for the use of the PS 150’s current space in 2014, we are committed to ensuring that this proposal does not reduce kindergarten capacity downtown.”

According to Hughes, more than one-third of the students in PS 150, an unzoned school, come from areas outside the zones of Downtown schools where PS 150 is mandated to give preference. Those school zones include PS 234, PS 89, PS 276, and the Peck Slip and Spruce Street schools.

Bonnet told parents in her letter that the move may also be needed because of the “questionable viability of a small school, concerns about professional development and lack of collaboration for our teachers…”

The CEC’s Tanikawa said that she was told by the DOE that running that school has become increasingly difficult because of  budget issues, which may be made worse by the resources needed to implement the Common Core Standards. 

“I am in support of measures that will allow the principal to spend more time on instructional matters and less time on operational issues (like worrying about the budget and meeting enrollment projections),” she wrote in her email to the Trib.

But parents see the move as destructive to what they and the school staff they admire have built.

“This is a community where parents have given everything of themselves, time, money, resources,” said Jacqueline Miró, standing on the steps to the school. “And the reasons we are being given for the school to move do not make sense.”

Bonnet, in her letter, tried to encourage parents to see a positive side to the move. “I am hoping that as a community we can band together, support one another and take P.S. 150 to a new, exciting level and make next year a banner one.”

The city’s Panel on Educational Policy is expected to vote on the proposal on June 19, with a public hearing on the plan to be held earlier that month. The panel rarely votes down a DOE proposal.