The St. Paul Example
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Before New York’s City Council approves the $13.1 billion capital plan offered up by Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, they might make a pilgrimage to St. Paul School. Not Senator Kerry’s prep school, St. Paul’s School, in Concord, N.H., where tuition is $31,125 a year. Sandwiched between check-cashing joints and train tracks on East 118th Street in Harlem, this St. Paul School is a Catholic institution that educates about 270 students from prekindergarten to grade eight. Tuition at St. Paul is $2,400 a year, with donors and the Catholic Church covering the rest of the $4,500 a year it costs in all to educate a child there. That’s a pittance compared to the more than $11,000 a student that the New York public schools spend.
We visited St. Paul last week to have a look at the new gym floor and stage that a donor to the school had paid for. The gym floor cost a total of $8,816,according to the school’s principal. The city of New York and its taxpayers, by comparison, recently paid $172,639 for a gym floor at P.S. 197 in Manhattan, and $58,000 for one in P.S. 60 at Staten Island.
The stage at St. Paul costs $36,318, the principal says. Meanwhile, the city Department of Education’s five-year capital plan includes stage upgrade projects ranging from $680,567 (P.S. 145 in Manhattan) to $2,561,578 (P.S. 16 in Brooklyn).
The city Department of Education makes the points that of the two public school gym projects mentioned above, one involved asbestos removal, and the other was an emergency project following a flood that damaged the subflooring. The city government says it pays prevailing union wages to its contractors, and that its facilities handle more students than parochial schools and therefore need to be built to higher standards.
Still, the cost differences are stunning. “I think it is incredibly instructive,” says the chairwoman of the City Council’s Education Committee, Eva Moskowitz, who has been suggesting that the $13.1 billion is worth some careful scrutiny. “We have a long way to go to make the School Construction Authority an efficient and cost-effective agency.”
