The new middle school planned for 75 Morton St. will be zoned to include three Downtown elementary schools.
BY YANNIC RACK |
A highly anticipated new public middle school opening in Greenwich Village next year will be zoned to include parts of Lower Manhattan — a big win for local parents who have pushed for months to get a share of the seats.
Community Education Council District 2, the local school board, this week approved a final zoning proposal for the school coming to 75 Morton St., including PS 89 and PS 276 in Battery Park City, and PS 234 in Tribeca.
“It’s great news for the families that wanted to be included,” said CEC president Shino Tanikawa after the unanimous vote.
The city’s Department of Education had initially presented two zoning scenarios for 75 Morton, with one version including the Lower Manhattan schools and the other cutting off the zone at Canal St., but together with the CEC settled on the more inclusive option last month.
“I was glad to hear they made the decision. I think it was the right thing to do,” Tricia Joyce, a Downtown parent who heads Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee, said of the decision.
Lower Manhattan parents have been advocating for the larger zone because their current zoned school, Simon Baruch Middle School at First Ave. and E. 21st St., is too far away for most Downtowners even to consider it.
“It’s for strictly geographic reasons — Baruch is really difficult to get to,” said Tanikawa. “75 Morton is an easy ten-minute walk from Tribeca — it’s an easy commute. That’s what’s driving Downtown parents’ desire for going there.”
Joyce, who has twin daughters in sixth grade at IS 289 and Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, said its distance from the neighborhood is what took Baruch out of the running for her children.
“It always came down to location, because Baruch is actually a very popular school for those that can go to it,” she said. “I think Morton is a much more doable zoned school for the west side of Lower Manhattan. It’s on the 1 train — it’s like two stops!”
At Community Education Council meetings over the past few months, Downtown parents turned out to support the proposal, although parents and school leaders at Baruch also worried that losing the three Downtown schools to a new zone would decrease Baruch’s own attendance.
But Joyce said those fears were dispelled by looking at last year’s enrollment numbers — which showed that only three seats at the school were filled by children assigned through the regular zoning process who would have gone to 75 Morton instead.
“I think once we established that, it was a much easier decision to make,” Joyce said.
District 2, which covers most of Manhattan up to the Upper East Side, typically sees around 80% of students make a middle school choice, rather than attend their zoned school.
“A vast majority of parents and students Downtown participate in the choice process, which means most of them are putting down unzoned schools,” said Tanikawa.
The only complication at the CEC vote this week was a last-minute plea from elected officials and Community Board 2 to include a few blocks between W. 12th and W. 14th St. in the zone as well — which Tanikawa said might still happen in the future, but postponed the issue for the time being.
“We asked the DOE to produce another map that includes the blocks they asked us to consider,” she said. “But we didn’t want to delay the decision on zoning, because we wanted it to be included in the middle school calendar.”
The new school at 75 Morton will welcome its first class of 6th graders in September 2017 and is expected to eventually grow to a student body of up to 850 children.
