Downtown School Advocates Take Their Pleas to the Chancellor

Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, seated next to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, attends the April 24 meeting of Silver's School Overcrowding Task Force. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

It was the same worrisome message, but this time delivered to the chancellor.

At a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s School Overcrowding Task Force last month, Downtown school advocates and elected officials had the ear of Schools Chan­cellor Carmen Fariña for the first time.

As they had repeatedly spelled out to education officials at many of these meetings, members of the group ran through dire predictions of severe school overcrowding, and continued the familiar call for new schools.

The chancellor, seated next to Silver at the head of a long conference table, mostly just listened.

“I really want to hear from you,” she told the large group assembled before her. “What your priorities are and how we can help.”

What she heard first were the principals’ ritual spring announcements of kindergarten wait lists and enrollment figures at their Downtown schools.

A record number of kindergartners, in seven classes, are slated to attend Tribeca’s P.S. 234, said Principal Lisa Ripperger. Terri Ruyter noted that 50 zoned children are without seats at her P.S. 276 in Battery Park City. The Peck Slip School is becoming “very tight” in its temporary quarters in the Tweed Courthouse, said Principal Maggie Siena, with 25 of its projected 105 kindergartners coming from the wait list for P.S. 276.

Fariña tried to sound a note of optimism. “You’re going to see the wait lists kind of disappear over time,” she said.

What the chancellor was told, however, was that crowding will only grow worse, especially in the Financial District, with its explosive growth of residential units, and a rate of child population increase that Community Board 1 maintains exceeds any other sector of New York City.

Fariña, a former Brooklyn school district superintendent, appeared to understand.

“I’ve seen DUMBO go from no families to all families,” she said. “I’ve certainly been living part of what you’re talking about, so I get it.”

Since last November—when school advocates learned that Lower Manhattan, below Canal Street, would get one 456-seat school, not the 1,000 seats they expected—they have been calling for additional seats in the city’s five-year school construction plan.

A letter in February from local elected officials to Fariña, appealing for help, was to no avail.

Now the chancellor was hearing, in person, the troubling long-term projections offered by task force member Eric Greenleaf.

By 2018, Greenleaf said, the elementary schools in Community Board 1—even with the addition of the new school, which has yet to be sited—will be short 1,350 seats.

“So please,” Greenleaf said, “we need more schools. That one school is appreciated, but it is nowhere near enough.”

Turning to face Fariña, Silver repeated the request. “We need another school in the budget so we can have it online in the 2017 and 2018 year,” he said. “That’s the message you’re going to hear over and over again.”

“I do hear you,” Farina said in brief remarks. “When you fight for some­thing you want to get some of the re­wards, and I’m hearing 2017. I circled it.”

Following the meeting, Community Board 1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes echoed the sentiments of others, who said the chancellor appeared at least to be “receptive” to their concerns.

“Now she’s hearing them directly from the parents and the elected officials,” McVay Hughes said. “That’s really important.”

Petitioning to 'Build Schools Now'

This time last year, P.S. 150 parents Lisa and Buxton Midyette and Wendy Chapman were among those fighting the Department of Education’s plan to close their Tribeca school and relocate the students to a newly opened one in
Chelsea. They won and, buoyed by that victory, they’ve taken on a far bigger—some might say quixotic—cause. But one meant to make a difference,
they say, for children now in school and those too young to begin.

They started Build Schools Now, a petition drive they say is meant to support the efforts of elected officials, Community Board 1 and other Downtown school advocates who for years have been trying to convince the city that it is failing to
keep up with the burgeoning child population below Canal Street.

“This is a an issue that has occupied many groups for years and I think merits its own organization,” Buxton Midyette told a gathering of concerned parents last month.

Along with its online petitioning at buildschoolsnow.org, they have their clipboards out most anywhere that Downtown parents gather: in front of schools, at Little League opening day and street fairs and the upcoming Taste of Tribeca. By late last month they had gathered more than 800 signatures. And they have won the endorsements of the District 2 Community Education Council and three PTAs and continue to seek others.

“It’s going to take all of us to make it happen,” said Midyette.