New Battery Park City School Planned, Source Says

Governor Spitzer, Mayor Bloomberg, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, today will announce plans to build a new school in Battery Park City, a booming neighborhood where parents have long asked for more classroom space for their children, a source said.

The school will be built on the site of Governor Pataki's planned museum of women's history, which never came to fruition. It is at a prime stretch of Battery Place, near the southern tip of the park. The school-age population in District 2, which includes Battery Park City and the Upper East Side, is expected to increase by 9.2% by 2010, and the city is working to create seven new school buildings in the district by then, a Department of Education spokeswoman, Marge Feinberg, has said.

The construction of a new school in the area would add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, the president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, Elizabeth Berger, said yesterday. "We've had a real overcrowding problem with the local schools because of the population explosion, and I think this is the kind of long-term thinking and long-term planning that we need for downtown," Ms. Berger said.

An estimated 45,000 people live below Chambers Street, marking a 30% increase in the residential population since 2001, according to the alliance.

"Schools make a community," Ms. Berger said. "This is a tremendous nod of optimism and hope about this area."

The executive director of a nonprofit organization that works to reduce class size, Class Size Matters, said even with the new school, class sizes would not be reduced enough to satisfy a push from Albany to lower class sizes throughout the city.

"It will not by any means meet the need of new school space for kids in lower Manhattan and Manhattan as a whole," the director, Leonie Haimson, said.

The site currently serves as a construction staging area and the location of a sales office for the Visionaire, a new environmentally sound residential building. It has been vacant since Mr. Pataki's museum plans fell through after he left office last year.