BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC | Books adorn library shelves, whiteboards stand itching for markers and carpets, like one filled with colorful circles, have been fixed into position — the new Peck Slip School in the Seaport is ready for its first day.
“We’re just spending time being in awe,” Maggie Siena, the principal, said in a phone interview. “I had one teacher who, when I came into the building, she was just sitting in a room in the dark staring at it — it’s just so beautiful.”
Speaking to Downtown Express at the end of last month, Siena said teachers are busy setting up classrooms and they were in good shape to start the school year.
“I think everybody will just be delighted to see how spacious and bright it is,” she said.
“I’m very excited,” Tom Berton, a parent to a first grader and kindergartener, said in a phone interview. “Sounds wonderful. Sounds amazing. There’s going to be a music room, a library — sounds fantastic.”
It took three years of “incubating” at Tweed Courthouse, the Dept. of Education’s headquarters, over two years of a $58 million renovation and several years of the community and Downtown school advocates pushing to make the school at 1 Peck Slip, also known as P.S. 343, a reality.
“The opening of the Peck Slip School is a long-awaited and much welcome milestone for families in the Seaport and Financial Districts,” Catherine McVay Hughes, Community Board 1’s chairperson, wrote in an email. “What was once a sad post office will now be a bustling elementary school.”
Hughes pointed to the work of Assemblymember Sheldon Silver’s School Overcrowding Task Force that “has campaigned constantly to bring in the school seats we need in the wake of our rapid post-9/11 transformation.”
Lower Manhattan has experienced its shortage of school seats and waitlists.
Councilmember Margaret Chin said in an email statement, “With more and more families deciding to raise their families in the Seaport and Financial District, this school is a much needed addition to Lower Manhattan’s educational landscape.”
Tricia Joyce, a member of the task force and chairperson of C.B. 1’s Youth and Education Committee, said in a phone interview, “I’m thrilled about it. We have been really lucky once again in the timing because as it opens, we filled all of the sections. Another year at Tweed would not have been possible.”
Siena, the school’s principal, said there are a few minor items that need to be completed.
“That’s to be expected in a new school building. In fact, [the] School Construction [Authority] expects that they’ll be working on a building up to a year after it opens,” she said. “But we’re absolutely good to go in terms of using all the spaces in the school that we’re going to need.”
Siena said she was surprised by how beautiful the combination gym and auditorium — dubbed “gymnatorium ” — is.
“I was impressed at how they were able to make the room have the quality and dignity of an auditorium, but also clearly ready to serve it’s function as a gym as well,” she said. “It feels like a full gym for sure plus there’s a full size stage.”
While the school has yet to be assigned a crossing guard, Siena said she has been working closely with the N.Y.P.D.
“I’m working on seeing what we can have in place for the first day of school, even if it’s not a regularly assigned crossing guard,” she said Aug. 31.
The Dept. of Transportation did agree to close Peck Slip, the street, between Pearl and Water Sts. during student drop off and pickup.
Both Joyce and Berton, who is also a community board member, were happy that D.O.T. had put the closure in place before school began.
Siena said, “It does mean that we can feel more confident that the street and sidewalk are going to be safe spaces when we arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon.”
Around 285 students are expected to attend Peck Slip School. There is also a separate pre-K center which could include up to 10 classes this year, said Siena, who has been principal since the school started its first year at Tweed in fall 2012.
“I think that we’re going to be able to keep the tone and the warm community of our incubating school, our small Peck Slip School even though we’re in a big new building with a much bigger staff,” she said. “That’s very encouraging.”
