Downtown Community Board Urges DOE To Build Schools

As condo after condo rises up in Lower Manhattan, the number of schools being constructed is dangerously low, downtown residents will warn at a community board meeting today.

They are planning to say that the number is so low that, absent assistance from the Department of Education, the community is resorting to looking into construction and other school building opportunities on its own.

"There's a desperate need for schools in the downtown area that the DOE has not been meeting," the executive director of the citywide group Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, said. "We're going to try to figure out what can be done and take matters into our own hands."

Elected officials ranging from the chair of the City Council's education committee, Robert Jackson, to the president of Manhattan, Scott Stringer, are expected to attend the meeting.

In the past the Department of Education has announced it is expanding facilities and even building new schools in some downtown neighborhoods, particularly those in District 2. More than 600 seats are being created at the Beekman School in the financial district, and more than 100 are being added to P.S. 234, a spokeswoman, Marge Feinberg, said last October.