Downtown’s baby boom could mean overcrowded schools unless the neighborhood gets more elementary seats soon, parent activists warned last week.
“We really need to start planning now,” said Eric Greenleaf, a P.S. 234 parent and member of the District 2 Community Education Council.
The latest population numbers show 881 babies born below Canal St. in 2008, up 56 percent from 565 in 2003, Greenleaf said. Downtown’s two new schools will help absorb some of the increase, but Greenleaf predicts that the neighborhood will need an additional 135 kindergarten seats by 2013, the year the 2008 babies start school. To put the figure in perspective, that’s the equivalent of building another P.S. 234 in the next three years.
Since the city takes about four years to site, design and build a school, Greenleaf said the city has to take action on new school seats immediately. After he presented the data last Thursday at a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s overcrowding taskforce, Elizabeth Rose, director of portfolio planning at the D.O.E., did not respond directly. However, Rose said the city would look at enrollment for this fall before making decisions about the need for space in the future.
To make projections about future kindergarten enrollment, Greenleaf, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, looks at how past birth numbers have translated into the number of kindergarten students. Greenleaf’s formula has changed over time, as each year brings new information on how many families moved away and how many moved in. Greenleaf’s current formula is based on the 2008 and 2009 kindergarten enrollment cycles, in which, on average, the number of kindergarteners was 55 percent the number of births Downtown five years earlier. Greenleaf is applying that 55 percent figure to predict kindergarten enrollments in the future.
For example, Greenleaf thinks the 881 births in 2008 will translate to 485 kindergarteners in 2013. Even with the two new schools, Downtown only has 350 kindergarten slots, which could result in a shortfall of 135 seats, Greenleaf said.
Referring to the recent fractious debate over school zoning, Greenleaf added: “The past disagreements that we’ve had, some of them very recent, really need to be put aside and everybody needs to focus on getting new schools, otherwise all the Downtown schools are going to be overcrowded.”
The Spruce Street School looks like a prime candidate for overcrowding, as the school took in three kindergarten classes last year and expects to take in three this year, although the school building only has enough room for two classes per grade.
Greenleaf raised similar overcrowding alarms and made similar predictions this time last year, when the 2007 birth data came out. One of his predictions was that Downtown would see more kindergarteners in 2009 than in 2008, because the birth rate had increased five years earlier. However, Greenleaf’s numbers were a little off, and the number of kindergarteners stayed roughly flat in 2009, possibly because the economic downturn meant that more families left the city. Based on the 2009 numbers, Greenleaf modified his formula.
Greenleaf’s estimates do not factor in new development.
— Julie Shapiro
