BY SAM SPOKONY | In a close finish that one member called the hardest decision she’d ever had to make there, the District 2 Community Education Council voted on Wednesday night to split the zone currently shared by Greenwich Village’s two public elementary schools, P.S. 3 and P.S. 41.
The 6-to-4 vote — a vote that had been delayed nearly two months due to the extensive and passionate debate between teachers and parents from both schools — approves a Department of Education proposal to split the zone that P.S. 3 and P.S. 41 have shared for 42 years. The split will go into effect in 2014.
And in an unexpected turn made about an hour before that decision, the council also voted to amend their resolution of approval in order to request the inclusion of the Westbeth Artists Housing complex in the catchment zone that will now belong to P.S. 3.
Westbeth residents had argued previously — as well as on the night of the vote — that the alternative, arts-based curriculum at P.S. 3 is better suited to the needs of their children and families.
The amendment calls for D.O.E. to shift a portion of the new dividing line up three blocks. In the small notch west of Washington St., the line would move north from Perry St. to Bethune St.
A D.O.E. representative who was present at Wednesday’s meeting said that the change is acceptable to the department, and said further that D.O.E. will return to the next C.E.C. meeting with a new map to take the amendment into account. The three-block change will not become part of the approved zone split until the council officially votes on it at that later meeting.
Members of the P.S. 41 community lauded the council’s decision to approve the split, saying that a continued shared zone would have worsened the disastrous overcrowding problem that has forced the W. 11th St. school to deal with huge class sizes and sacrifice classroom space for art, science, music and drama in recent years.
But P.S. 3 parents and teachers were groaning as they left the meeting, since they’d continuously — and often emotionally — argued that, among other things, the council would be wrong to take away the benefit of choice offered by a shared zone. P.S. 3 was, in fact, founded in 1971 on the principle of choice, as a neighborhood alternative to P.S. 41.
Moments before the members voted, C.E.C. President Shino Tanikawa addressed the crowd to acknowledge that the process leading up to the decision had been an extraordinarily difficult one, for the council members as well as the communities of both schools.
“Regardless of how the vote turns out, I just want you all to know that we have done our best,” Tanikawa said. “I know it hasn’t been perfect. But we’ve thought about this very deeply, and we’re all coming to this decision from a very personal place. We have done our best.”
