Millennium High Competing with Uptown School for Coveted Space
Millennium High School may be a victim of its own success.
Opened in 2002, it is the only public high school that gives preference to Lower Manhattan students, and demand for the school at 75 Broad Street grows by the year. Only one in six applicants who ranked it as their first choice this year was accepted, and only top-scoring students now need apply.
“Watching more and more students being closed out of the process has been very painful for me,” said the principal, Robert Rhodes. “I didn’t get into this job to ration resources to kids who want to work hard and do really well. That’s the situation I find myself in now.”
Some relief to that situation could reside just two blocks away, on two floors of 26 Broadway that are leased by the city’s Department of Education. Rhodes is applying to the DOE to open a Millennium annex on those floors next school year for an additional 400 students. But the DOE plans to move the much lower-performing Richard R. Green High School of Teaching there from the building that it has to vacate on East 86th Street.
A second Millennium instead would open in Brooklyn, where 35 percent of Millennium’s students live. “It will have a significant impact in opening up more seats for Lower Manhattan students at Millennium,” said Lenny Spieller, the DOE’s director of public affairs.
Last month, Rhodes said, DOE officials offered Millennium an “unofficial proposal” to expand into 26 Broadway if he were willing to drop its admissions criteria for that space and make it a separate, “unscreened” school. According to the DOE, the city needs more unscreened high schools, a position that Downtown school advocates strongly oppose for Lower Manhattan, where several unscreened high schools are already located. But Rhodes said he would consider it.
“It would be easy to fill the seats screened or unscreened,” he said, “and put together a very strong program.”
“The idea is to get our foot in the door,” said Paul Hovitz, co-chair of Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee, which strongly supports the Millennium expansion.
[UPDATE: Following the posting of this story, DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld issued a statement to the Trib denying that such an "unofficial proposal" was made. "Our position has been, and continues to be, that Richard R. Greene HS should move to 26 Broadway in order to keep unscreened high school seats in Manhattan and to relieve elementary school overcrowding uptown (where Greene currently resides)."]
Screened or unscreened, Rhodes said, the second school would allow for cross-registration of some courses, providing enough students for advanced placement courses, visual and performing arts classes and sports teams that the school can’t now offer. And with one full and one half-size gym opening at 26 Broadway in the fall, Millennium could finally have the gym it has sought for years.
With a 68 percent graduation rate at Richard R. Green (Millennium’s is nearly 100 percent), advocates for Lower Manhattan schools see it as a poor fit for Downtown, and a missed opportunity to build on Millennium’s proven success. [READ A RICHARD R. GREEN STUDENT'S RESPONSE.]
“I don’t understand. With the educated families in Lower Manhattan, why would they put another [unscreened] school like that down here?” asked Erica Weldon, whose daughter is a 10th grader at Millennium. “I feel like there aren’t enough seats for our Downtown children who are the higher-performing kids.”
Opposition to Richard R. Green, however, goes beyond academics. In the 2007-2008 school year (the last year for which records are available), 54 students or 9 percent of students from Richard R. Green were suspended. It was a number that had fallen dramatically from the two previous years.
“That’s huge,” said Maria Ouranitsas, the mother of a Millennium freshman and the parent coordinator at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School (LMC), which occupies two floors of 26 Broadway. “I’m just imagining what it might be like with another 600 students from a school like Richard R. Green that has higher incident rates than Millennium does.”
In the DOE’s most recent survey, nearly half of Richard R. Green student respondents disagreed that fellow students treat their teachers with respect. (This compares with 11 out of 78 Millennium respondents who felt the same way about their classmates.)
A call to David Raubvogel, principal of Richard R. Green, was not returned.
DOE hearings on the Richard R. Green School’s proposed move to 26 Broadway are scheduled for Jan. 5 at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School (26 Broadway, entrance on Beaver Street) and Jan. 6 at Richard R. Green High School, 421 East 88 St. Both hearings start at 6 p.m.
In a letter to Community Board 1, Lower Manhattan Community Middle School Principal Kelly McGuire said the support for Millennium’s move is unanimous among parents at his school. He noted that there are “real concerns” about sharing the same building with Richard R. Green.
“A few of my students who travel from a farther distance away, mostly Harlem and the Bronx, have experienced harassment by high-school-age kids,” he wrote, adding that his students have not had similar problems from Millennium students or from the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, a high school that is also in 26 Broadway.
Ouranitsas said middle-schoolers from LMC have also been harassed by students attending Manhattan Academy for Arts and Language, a high school geared to English language learners, temporarily housed nearby at 53 Broadway.
“Our kids are so much younger than them,” she said in an interview last month. “Last Friday, Kelly [McGuire] had to go and police the train station and make sure the kids were okay.”
“Are the subways going to be supervised by police? I don’t know any of that,” said Jane Eisen, co-president of LMC’s parent association. Eisen said her concerns were not “personal” toward the Upper East Side school.
But Millennium already shares some programs with her daughter’s middle school and is a familiar presence in the neighborhood, she said.
And she worries about more than 600 additional high-schoolers in the area, 200 more than are being proposed by Millennium.
“Six hundred, that’s a lot of high school students,” she said. “And I have a little middle-school girl in that building.”
By Carl Glassman
UPDATED Jan. 08