By Julie Shapiro
As the school year winds down, parents are ratcheting up the intensity of their fight against school overcrowding.
More than 200 parents packed P.S./I.S. 89’s auditorium last Thursday morning to demand solutions for overcrowded elementary schools. Their anger and energy built until even Borough President Scott Stringer, who led the cry against overcrowding and spoke at the meeting, appeared taken aback.
Tricia Joyce, whose twins will enter P.S. 234 this fall, suggested that concerned parents take measures more extreme than statistical studies, meetings and postcard campaigns. She wants to start a movement of parents who withhold their taxes or camp out on construction sites until the city commits to build schools wherever they approve high-rise condos.
“We need to be a little louder, more edgy,” Joyce said.
As the crowd of parents applauded, Stringer smiled nervously.
“Let’s try to get out of here without any federal laws broken,” he said.
But Stringer and the parents were in agreement on almost everything else: the influx of new students, the lack of available seats and the crunch of existing school space that will be tight for 2008 but impossible for 2009.
“The Department of Education’s current plans for construction will barely relieve the overcrowding,” Stringer said, referring to the new K-8 schools being built in Battery Park City and on Beekman St. “I demand that the D.O.E. plan ahead.”
Stringer wants the D.O.E. to plan at the neighborhood level, rather than by school district, as the city does now.
“People live in neighborhoods — they don’t live in school districts,” Stringer said as parents interrupted him with applause.
Ronnie Najjar, principal of P.S. 89, and Lisa Ripperger, principal of P.S. 234, praised the parents’ grassroots efforts and encouraged parents to work together across school lines.
“We need all hands on deck to make a difference here,” Ripperger told the crowd.
Stringer criticized Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for not showing up to the meeting and said the D.O.E. is the city department least willing to meet with him. A D.O.E. spokesperson said the D.O.E. was not invited to the meeting.
Jeff Mihok, a Community Board 1 member, suggested holding nighttime meetings in apartment buildings to mobilize all residents, not just those with children.
Parents have not been happy with the D.O.E.’s suggestions to ease overcrowding and are looking elsewhere for solutions. The D.O.E. wanted to bus fifth graders to other District 2 schools, an idea so unpopular that it is effectively off the table, parents said.
“We are not going to take kids out of Lower Manhattan and send them miles away,” Stringer promised them.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is working on bringing school seats to the children rather than the children to the school seats.
Paul Goldstein, from Silver’s office, told Community Board 1 this week that two or three classrooms for P.S. 234 could open as soon as this fall in Manhattan Youth’s Downtown Community Center. If the D.O.E. approves and works out an agreement with Bob Townley, executive director of Manhattan Youth, the space could replace the science and art rooms P.S. 234 had to sacrifice and turn into regular classrooms.
Goldstein is also working on getting space in the Cove Club condo building on South End Ave. to convert into classrooms for P.S. 89. The space has several strikes against it: It is a long walk from P.S. 89, it won’t be available until early next year and it would need lots of work before it could be made into classrooms. The upside is that the space is large enough for four or five classrooms, and once the Battery Park City school opens in 2010, it could be turned into an early childhood center, Goldstein said.
Another alternative P.S. 89 parents have suggested is moving overflow classes into nearby Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s top specialized schools.
But Stuyvesant parents attended last week’s meeting at P.S. 89 to say that Stuyvesant can’t possibly handle any more students since it barely has enough room for its own.
Paola de Kock, whose son is a junior at Stuyvesant, said the school has grown by hundreds of students in the last several years. In the 1995-96 school year, Stuyvesant housed 2,881 students. The enrollment has hovered just over 3,000 since then, with an all-time high of 3,125 students this year, according to D.O.E. figures.
Next fall, the D.O.E. expects Stuyvesant to have 3,240 students, which eclipses the school’s capacity of 3,200 seats. The city intends to keep the school around 3,200 students and will not grow it further, said Andy Jacob, spokesperson for the D.O.E.
“We increased the number seats to offer the opportunity [to attend Stuyvesant] to as many exceptional students as we can,” Jacob said.
But de Kock said students with free periods wander the hallways and clog the staircases, having no place to go. Students formed a committee on the crowding to suggest better ways of using the limited space. Stuyvesant’s average class size is 32 students, higher than the District 2 average. In this climate, de Kock does not want to see increased enrollment, let alone extra students from P.S. 89.
“It’s an awful idea,” de Kock said. “No way, no way.”
The last parent to speak last Thursday was Abbey Gardner, who stumbled into the meeting on her way to register her 7-year-old son for second grade at P.S. 89. Gardner and her husband, son and 4-year-old daughter are moving to Battery Park City from Miami this summer.
Holding her daughter Evie on her hip, Gardner told Stringer that she picked the neighborhood because of P.S. 89 and was dismayed to hear about the overcrowding. Evie will enter kindergarten in fall 2009, the year parents have pinpointed as the peak of the crunch.
“You did not make a mistake,” Stringer told Gardner. “You’re moving to the center of the universe. We will make sure Evie has a school space.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
