By Julie Shapiro
Downtown schools have been waiting three years for grants promised by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation — and they will likely wait until 2009 before seeing any money.
In 2005, then Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg announced that the L.M.D.C. would distribute $45 million in community enhancement grants to Downtown groups. But when the L.M.D.C. announced the grant recipients two years later, none of the four schools that applied were on the list. Instead, the L.M.D.C. decided to allocate a lump sum of $4.5 million for education, with schools reapplying to get the money. The idea was to better publicize the grants and help more of the 63 eligible schools to apply.
However, the schools, which close for the summer this week, still have not received new applications, and L.M.D.C. officials said this week that the applications would not be ready until the end of the summer or early fall.
City Councilmember Alan Gerson praised the L.M.D.C. for committing to fund schools, but he said the delay in getting the money out undermines the L.M.D.C.’s good intentions.
“The money could have been allocated by the new school year,” Gerson said. “They negate [their goals] by waiting for the fall…. This is another example of ineffective government timing.”
The longer the L.M.D.C. waits before releasing the applications, the more costs for construction and programs will rise, meaning the money won’t stretch as far, Gerson said. He added that educators have a narrow window to reach kids, making the timing of the money essential.
“You can’t delay kids growing up,” he said.
A student who was a high school freshman back when the grants were announced will be graduating this week without seeing a penny.
“It’s a good thing we are not hungry children waiting for food,” said Amy Chan, business manager for P.S. 126/Manhattan Academy of Technology. Chan applied for a $300,000 grant for a technology lab back in 2006.
The other schools that applied for L.M.D.C. money are Millennium High School and P.S. 124, which both applied for grants for their gyms, and the Shuang Wen School, which hoped to fund its after-school program.
“It’s overdue,” Ann DeFalco, a parent at M.A.T., said of the funding. “We need an answer from L.M.D.C. and we need the money.”
Julie Menin, chairperson of Community Board 1 and a member of the L.M.D.C. panel that reviewed the community enhancement grant applications, thought it was a good idea to give more schools a chance to apply, but she does not want schools to have to wait much longer.
“We need to make sure [the application] is out as soon as possible so the schools get the money they desperately need,” said Menin, who is also a member of the L.M.D.C. board. She promised to put pressure on the L.M.D.C. to expedite the review process.
“It’s not as simple to give away money as you might think,” Avi Schick, chairperson of the L.M.D.C., told Downtown Express. Transferring federal money to city-run schools involves a tangle of bureaucracy. Schick, who took over the L.M.D.C. last year, is also taking extra time to craft an application that considers what the schools need and does not impose too many requirements, he said.
“That takes work on the front end,” he said, adding that he expects the process to speed up once the request for proposals is issued by September. Schick is confident the L.M.D.C. will announce the awards by the end of the year and get the money to the schools in early 2009. The L.M.D.C. plans to identify the Department of Education as the recipient of the grant and have the D.O.E. give the money directly to the schools under the L.M.D.C.’s direction.
For Chan, from P.S. 126, the grant process has been anything but straightforward. She applied for money for the school’s technology lab in 2006 and then heard nothing for months. Late last year, when the L.M.D.C. deferred the education money, they told her the new grants would have an arts focus and the technology lab would not be eligible.
“We are very frustrated,” Chan said this week. “We put in a lot of work for it, and then all of a sudden they told us we’re not even qualified.”
Schick said the grants will not be restricted to any subject or theme, but Chan had not heard that.
Chan tentatively said she would consider reapplying, but she said this time she would tailor her application to whatever the L.M.D.C. is looking for. It almost doesn’t matter what the school applies for, Chan said, because the budget cuts mean every program is hurting.
“We could use the money for anything,” Chan said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
The budget cuts also make the grant especially important to Robert Rhodes, principal of Millennium High School. The city cut Millennium’s budget by 5 percent this spring, on top of a 1.75 percent cut back in January.
“That’s a sizable chunk of purchasing power we lost very quickly,” Rhodes said. “We have needs all over the school.”
Rhodes hopes to get L.M.D.C. money to increase the number of advanced placement courses the school offers, to add arts and sports classes and to support the after-school program.
“In a perfect world, we would have [the money] now for next year,” Rhodes said. “It’s less useful in the middle of the year.”
Rhodes may also look to the L.M.D.C. for money to build Millennium a gym. On the original grant application, he asked for $2.1 million for the gym, but the L.M.D.C. told him it was unlikely that one school would receive so much money.
The L.M.D.C. said last fall that each school would be limited to $250,000, but now they’re saying the cap will depend on how many schools apply. The 63 public schools located below Houston St. are all eligible, and the L.M.D.C. promised to reach out to them and encourage them to apply. Schick said the L.M.D.C. has spoken with some of the schools that did not submit applications during the first round. If every school applied and received the same amount of money, they would get just over $70,000 apiece.
Another school that filled out the original application was P.S. 124, which also applied for money for their gym. P.S. 124’s gym floor is just a slab of concrete covered in tile, not the safest surface for sports, principal Alice Hom said. She asked the L.M.D.C. for $60,000 to redo the gym, which would also have benefited the community groups that use the gym on nights and weekends, she said.
In the two-and-a-half years since Hom applied for the grant, she estimates that the cost of redoing the gym has gone up to $100,000. Now, she plans to reapply for the gym funding and also to apply for $200,000 to buy SmartBoards for each classroom. The electronic blackboards save space in classrooms and make it easier for students in the upper grades to share their work, Hom said. Most middle schools are using SmartBoards, so if P.S. 124 students learn to use them, they will have an advantage once they get to middle school, she said.
While Hom said would have preferred to have the grants earlier, she is happy the L.M.D.C. still plans to give out the money.
“A lot of schools are in need of repairs or renovations or improvements,” she said. “With the limited funds we have…these kinds of grants could only help schools.”
Ling Ling Chou, principal at Shuang Wen, said she had not heard anything from the L.M.D.C. since she applied for a grant for Shuang Wen’s after-school program in 2006. Every year she struggles to fund the after-school program, which teaches Chinese language and culture with the goal of creating fully bilingual students who are literate in both languages.
Chou said she would consider reapplying for the grant, because the school needs the money, but she said the staff is busy and it depends how much paperwork the grant requires.
“If there’s more hope [of receiving the grant], then we’ll probably apply,” she said.
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
