Volume 21, Number 20 | The Newspaper of Lower Manhattan | Sept. 26 – Oct. 2, 2008
Doubt cast on overcrowding plans
The city took one school overcrowding solution off the table this week and raised serious doubts about another: The incubator space at 26 Broadway is out, and space at the Cove Club looks unlikely.
Until this week, the Department of Education was pushing for 26 Broadway, a converted office building, to house the early elementary seats Lower Manhattan needs next fall. But the Department of Buildings thinks the site is not safe for kindergarten students, a D.O.E. representative told Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s overcrowding taskforce Monday.
Parents have been critical of the 26 Broadway space since the D.O.E. floated it this summer as an incubator for the two new schools under construction Downtown. P.S./I.S. 276 in Battery Park City will open in 2010 and the Beekman St. school will open in 2010 or 2011, but Downtown’s schools face a space crunch for next fall. The D.O.E. is now planning to use the 250 available seats in 26 Broadway for middle school seats, spokesperson Margie Feinberg said.
Parents were not happy about the prospect of 26 Broadway hosting young children in the middle of the hectic Financial District, so they didn’t mind that the D.O.E. has backed off of it.
But parents are more concerned that the Department of Education has also come close to rejecting the Cove Club space in southern Battery Park City, which is the community’s first choice.
The city will not be able to get the Cove Club space open by next fall, a D.O.E. representative told Speaker Silver’s taskforce. The Battery Park City Parks Conservancy is vacating the space in March, and the D.O.E. would need until January of 2010 to complete the environmental review and design and construct the space. That will be too late to help with overcrowding next fall — and since Downtown schools badly need the classrooms the Cove Club would provide, the community is not taking no for an answer.
“If there’s a will to do it, they can consolidate the process and get it done,” Silver told Downtown Express. “They could make it happen…. There isn’t a lot of space Downtown that is available. If this is available, we don’t want to let it go.”
Silver planned to talk to the School Construction Authority in the next few days to “give them a sense of urgency.”
The urgency is real — if the Cove Club falls through, Silver said there are no other readily available alternatives.
–Julie Shapiro
