City Moves To Address School Overcrowding

Amid growing concerns that the city’s most coveted public schools do not have the space to fit all the families who would like to attend them, the Bloomberg administration is making several moves to answer critics who say it is not doing enough to address the problem.The deputy mayor for education and community development, Dennis Walcott, sent a letter yesterday to the Empire State Development Corp. asking it to consider converting a state office building in the West Village into a city school rather than putting it up for sale.The move pre-empts a rally today at the site of the building, 75 Morton St., by parents and the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, who are calling on the state to turn the building into a middle school.Meanwhile, officials at the Department of Education are agreeing to build a “war room” to tackle the crowding issue in Manhattan’s Community School District 2, a particularly coveted — and strained — school district that covers the Upper East Side and parts of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, including TriBeCa.The war room will not be a single physical location; rather, it represents an agreement by education officials to meet regularly with elected officials who represent the district, the chief operating officer at the department’s Office of Portfolio Development, John White, said in an interview yesterday.The suggestion to meet regularly and to name the gatherings a “war room” was made by the president of Manhattan, Scott Stringer.Mr. Stringer said he borrowed the idea from a former president of Queens, Clare Schulman, who he said used a war room to plot school construction years ago.The Manhattan president is one of several elected officials — including the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan and Queens — who have been turning the crowding concern into a rallying cry.Mr. Stringer said the wide interest reflects passion among Manhattan parents, who are seeing the effects of crowding show up in their own lives: Their children might have more students in a class or they might have lost an art room to the cause of finding space for all the new kindergartners.Parents also are seeing more family-friendly condos rise in their neighborhoods and wonder how their schools will be able to accommodate even more bodies.The result is meetings in Manhattan that have drawn hundreds of parents at a time.“Elected officials are feeling the heat,” Mr. Stringer said. “We’re at the tipping point where we have record development and no clear road map for school construction.”The Department of Education has been working on the issue for years, both in District 2 and across the city, Mr. White said. He said the department intends to build 5,000 new seats in the district, and he said it is working closely with parent representatives on the community education council to do that.“We see it as a great opportunity,” Mr. White said of the interest in public schools. “Opportunities come with challenges, and we believe we’ll solve the challenges.”The challenges are likely to include cases in which the extra students will come faster than the new seats.Two new school buildings are slated to come to Lower Manhattan by 2010, but in the meantime, two popular TriBeCa schools, P.S. 234 and P.S. 89, could have so many kindergartners enroll that by fall 2009 there will not be enough space to fill all of them, Mr. White said.Ms. Maloney said she is optimistic that the Department of Education “may be starting to come around.”She added: “They have been slow to waking up to the problem, and it’s often been the parents and the elected officials who have come up with plans for new schools.”

City Moves To Address School Overcrowding

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