I am not sure if it is open for business or not, I have not seen any kids around it
Peeking through a ground floor office window and from the signs saying "temporary entrance" it is obvious at least some people are working here
P.S. 281 Will Not Have Middle School Seats, City Says
@mjohns422
In a presentation, the School Construction Authority showed a rendering of what P.S. 281, currently being built on East ...
KIPS BAY — A new school being built on First
Avenue near East 34th Street will open in fall of 2013 as an elementary
school for grades kindergarten through fifth, the Department of
Education announced on Wednesday.
Citing the
tremendous need for kindergarten seats in the area surrounding the new
school, the DOE said it has decided not to include middle school class
sections at P.S. 281, said Josef Lukan, from the DOE’s Office of Portfolio Management, at a District 2 Community Education Council meeting.
Limiting
P.S. 281 to just K through fifth will leave room for four kindergarten
classes, instead of the three that would be available if the school were
made to accommodate grades K through eighth, Lukan explained.
“District
2 and the Midtown East area have an excess of middle school seats,”
said Lukan, who defined Midtown East roughly as the area that stretches
from East 20th Street to East 57th streets.
“[But]
there is strong demand, and growing demand, in Midtown East for
additional kindergarten seats,” he added, “which is demand that
[existing schools are] not going to be able to meet going forward with
our current kindergarten capacity.”
Kindergarten
overcrowding has indeed been a big problem in the eastern parts of
District 2, which extends from TriBeCa north to the Upper East Side.
Both P.S. 59 in Midtown East and P.S. 116 in Kips Bay were faced with lengthy kindergarten waitlists this year, and P.S. 59, which is moving into a new, bigger building this fall, has already decided to scrap its pre-K program to make room in the popular neighborhood school.
Lukan
said that in the past several years, the number of kindergarten
applications for P.S. 59, P.S. 116 and P.S. 40 in Gramercy has climbed
11 percent, while middle school enrollment has remained about the same.
Lukan
also said that Simon Baruch Middle School, on East 21st Street, is only
about 85 percent full, and that many students decide to travel outside
their immediate neighborhoods to attend the middle school of their
choice.
“We’ve been running analytics, and we do not see the need for additional middle school seats,” Lukan explained.
But Shino Tanikawa, president of the District 2 CEC, cautioned against trusting the DOE’s statistics, calling them “notoriously inaccurate.”
“The
formulas are not good, and there’s so many things the formulas can’t
account for,” Tanikawa added. “I know for a fact that a lot of middle
schools have 30 kids in a classroom, 35, 38 in some schools.”
Eric Greenleaf, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the parent of twins heading to the Salk School of Science
in the fall, also worried that the DOE is not considering that the
elementary school students currently in need of space will eventually go
on to middle school.
“The population of
soon-to-be kindergartners is just growing so rapidly that they’re just
doing all they can to satisfy that need,” said Greenleaf, who did not
attend the meeting on Wednesday. “It’s great that they’re building these
elementary schools, but they can’t do that at the expense of these
middle school seats.”
“More and more families
are saying, ‘We’re in the city, we’re in the city to stay,’” added
Greenleaf. “And so we have to make plans for these middle school kids.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, no parents spoke out in opposition of the plan to limit P.S. 281 to grades K through fifth.
Instead,
several parents suggested that the school offer a pre-K program and
possibly a gifted and talented or dual language program.
The
area around P.S. 281 will also have to be rezoned to accommodate the
new school — a process the DOE said will impact P.S. 40, P.S. 116, P.S.
59 and P.S. 267 on East 63rd Street — so several parents wondered when
they will know where their child will be heading in the fall of 2013.
Ella
Belotserkovskaya, 35, whose 4-year-old daughter will likely attend
kindergarten at P.S. 281 in 2013, said the evening left her with more
questions than answers.
But grade levels were
less of a concern than the proximity of the East 34th Street heliport to
the new school, which will feature a rooftop playground as well as a
ground-level play space.
“I know there are some
studies that say that excessive noise can impact how the kids are
learning,” said Belotserkovskaya, who lives next door to the proposed
school and is intimately familiar with the noise and gasoline fumes
emanating from the heliport.
“It really is a true issue,” she added. “It’s like living in an airport.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered