BY ALINE REYNOLDS | Spruce Street School (P.S. 397) Principal Nancy Harris is brimming with excitement over the permanent home for her elementary school at 8 Spruce St., which kindergarteners through second graders will move into come this fall.
Workers are putting the finishing touches on the first four stories of the Frank Gehry building, which will house both P.S. 397 and P.S. 94 starting in September. The latter school will open an early childhood special education program there, its fifth in Manhattan, opening with a kindergarten class and expanding by one grade per year. P.S. 397, meanwhile, will occupy the remainder of the classrooms in the building.
All classrooms will be equipped with wireless Internet, a Smart Board, a laser printer and two iMac computers. Harris ordered tables with adjustable legs and chairs of various sizes to accommodate the students’ disparate heights. The furniture will be delivered on June 27 and will be arranged much as it was in the Tweed Courthouse, P.S. 397’s incubation site.
The physical setup will be flexible, Harris noted, so staff can make necessary aesthetic changes to the classrooms along the way. “I’m looking at it as, let’s move in the space for a little while, and see how the kids use it and how we can continue to grow into it,” said Harris. “This is our home for a long time, so we want to wait a little while before seeing what we need.”
Harris also hopes to further expand the school’s curriculum in the months and years to come. For example, the school will introduce integrated co-teaching to the curriculum, in which general and special education teachers instruct core curriculum classes together. “We aim to grow all of our programs,” said Harris. “We have the amazing space now — it’s just a matter of growing the school to have that staff and resources.”
She and P.S. 94 Principal Ronnie Shuster said they hope to emulate the setup at 55 Battery Place, where P.S./I.S. 276 will be incorporating select special needs children from the P.S. 94 program into its classrooms in the fall. “The goal is to integrate our children into the general education classrooms,” Shuster said. “We need a year to get our feet wet, get to know each other and the children. It’s possible it’ll happen sooner than later.”
As it does in its other location, P.S. 94 will be using iPads in its classrooms for speech and language instruction.
“It’s working amazingly well with children with autism. Somehow, when you put it in front of them, you don’t have to tell them anything, they all know what to do!” said Shuster.
The two schools will share cluster rooms, an exercise room, a library and other learning-friendly areas in the Gehry building. The combined space also features a full-sized gymnasium, a 300-seat auditorium complete with dressing rooms and bathrooms and a spacious play roof with skyline views of Lower Manhattan. The enclosed yard, located on the fifth floor, will have a movable soft surface, an irrigation system and portable basketball hoops, balls and other play equipment.
It will also have a $25,000 music suite comprised of special acoustical panels and individual practice rooms, as well as science labs with decontamination units and an arts studio.
The second floor, assigned to the P.S. 94 students, will house occupational and physical therapy suites for its autistic children and P.S. 397 kids in need of “sensory breaks,” according to Shuster. The principal hopes to equip the space with vestibular swings that develop a sense of balance and other recreational equipment.
The schools’ library, which will have a digital check-out system, will comprise more than 8,000 titles in the form of bound books, E-books, audio books, and reference materials. “We went for breadth, and not multiple copies, so we could have as much variety as possible,” Harris explained.
Sharing the spaces, Shuster noted, “is much easier for the children to work together. Also, teachers will have their periods at the same time, so they have a chance to collaborate.”
“They’ve done a terrific job,” said New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who toured the building on June 3 along with the principals and New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. “This school will tell the world that Downtown Manhattan is bigger and better than ever,” Silver continued. “It’s a place where they’re going to get that leg up on that competition.”
“This is great. I’m pumped up,” Walcott chimed in as he got a glimpse of the school auditorium. “I can hear something evolving… the Silver string quartet!” he joked. On a more serious note, Walcott promised Harris and Shuster that the city Department of Education would not schedule a Panel for Education Policy meeting there during his chancellorship.
Walcott gave assurances that P.S. 397 will indeed have a middle school, contrary to parents’ concerns that, by welcoming four incoming kindergarten classes next year, the school won’t have room to open a sixth grade in 2015.
“I guarantee this will be a pre-K through eight school,” said Walcott. “We’ll be meeting every year and talking about the growth of the school itself. It’s not an issue, as far as I’m concerned.”
