In a Switch, P.S. 234's Principal Says She Needs More Students

P.S. 234 Principal Lisa Ripperger directs students at the start of a school day last month. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

P.S. 234 is facing a shortage of students.

Yes, you read it right.

The Tribeca school that seems to have become synonymous with kindergarten wait lists and crowding worries is now looking toward a future of too few kids, according to its principal, Lisa Rip­perger.

“I’m now in fear of being under-enrolled going forward,” Ripperger said last month, speaking at a meeting of As­sembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s School Over­crowding Task Force, a group formed in 2008 to grapple, in part, with what has been over-demand for kindergarten seats at her school.

Previously serving students from the east side of Lower Manhattan and the  Financial District as well as Tribeca, P.S. 234’s zone has shrunk dramatically over the years in response to the building of new Downtown schools and the kindergarten wait lists that formerly beset the school, beginning in 2009.

For next year, according to Rip­perger, P.S. 234 is 27 kindergarten seats short of the 175 that she projected—and wants—for the next school year.

Some who regularly attend the nearly-monthly meetings on school crowding seemed stunned by Ripperger’s statement.

“It’s ironic that we started out with 234 bursting at the seams and made changes in the zoning with the specific idea of relieving the pressure,” noted Paul Hovitz, co-chair of Community Board 1’s Youth and Ed­ucation Com­mit­tee. “Apparently the job was done too well.”

For P.S. 234, Ripperger said later in a telephone interview, the consequence of fewer students is less per-pupil funding to pay for the “nonessentials” that she wants to maintain, such as “support teachers” who mentor classroom teachers. Fewer students can also mean the loss of classroom teachers and increased class size, which at P.S. 234, Ripperger said, has stayed relatively small. Next year, she said, she expects to lose a teacher.

Ripperger said she also needs more kindergarten students because the school later loses children to private school.

“It’s not as though when we start with 175 we’re guaranteed to keep 175 all through first grade,” she said.

Ripperger argued that drawing accurate zoning lines for the various Down­town schools is “an almost impossible task.” While one of the schools, P.S. 276, has a wait list for next year, the others in CB1 do not. (As of last month there were 47 empty elementary seats among four of the five zoned elementary schools in the CB1 area.)

Ripperger said new schools should have the flexibility to serve elementary or middle school students, depending on the “ebb and flow” of the population. Currently a 456-seat elementary school is budgeted for somewhere below Canal Street and Downtown school advocates are calling on the DOE for twice that number of grade school seats.

“Right now there isn’t a need for more kindergarten seats,” said Ripperger, who advocates instead for another middle school. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be in time.”

When one school does have too many kindergartners for its zone, parents should be flexible about traveling to another Downtown school that has the room, Ripperger said. That’s how wait lists were handled this past school year. She calls it “reforming the expectations.”

“Wherever you’re living Downtown, your kid can go to a good school,” she said.

At Silver’s task force meeting, Eric Greenleaf repeated his prediction of a shortage of at least 130 kindergarten seats Downtown in 2015, even with the opening of the Peck Slip School. But he also noted that many families had been scared off from moving Downtown because of all the talk about crowding.

“Once the word gets out that there is room in these schools, people will respond in ways they haven’t been able to for years,” Greenleaf said. “So I think we’ll see lots of new kindergartners.”