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Rezoning plan for Lower Manhattan

District 2′s Community Education Council is facing a catch-22: Approve the three rezoning plans presented by the Department of Education last night, with all of their wrinkles, or risk missing a chance to solve crowding problems this year.

After parents criticized a first draft of the plans last month, department officials brought new rezoning maps – one for the Upper East Side, one for the West Village/Chelsea, and one for  Lower Manhattan – to the council’s meeting last night. The plans, which council members had not seen before the meeting, address some problems but introduce others, according to Shino Tanikawa, the council’s president.

The Upper East Side plan was minimally altered, while the West Village/Chelsea plan had significant changes. P.S. 3 and P.S. 41, which currently share a single choice zone, will be split into two separate zones. Moreover, the P.S. 41 zone would include inside of it the future zone lines for the Foundling School, which is set to open in 2014.

The main point of contention involves the Lower Manhattan plan which would send some addresses currently zoned for Tribeca’s P.S. 234 and others currently zoned for P.S. 397, the new Spruce Street School, to P.S. 1 in Chinatown, a far less affluent school with many immigrant students. Last summer, families on P.S. 234′s waiting list resisted when they were offered places at another Chinatown school, P.S. 130.

Some parents said the change would damage the neighborhoods’ sense of identity. But Tricia Joyce, a P.S. 234 parent and a co-chair of the school’s overcrowding committee, said the bigger problem is that P.S. 1 could become overcrowded.

“The proposals are all just overcrowding the schools around us for an insignificant gain,” Joyce said. “Rezoning does not create seats and seats are what we need.” (more…)

A map of proposed new school zones for Lower Manhattan

Tribeca’s P.S. 234 is no stranger to overcrowding, but last night the packed auditorium was full of stressed downtown parents instead of their children.

The parents were there to speak out on the Department of Education’s rezoning proposal for downtown Manhattan during the first of multiple public hearings held by the Community Education Council for District 2.

It is the third time District 2 has been rezoned in as many years as new schools have come online to serve the district’s growing number of families. In 2009, the department offered up multiple rezoning options, pitting parents against each other based on how their children would be affected. This year, the department released a single proposal for the council to revise and approve.

“We went through some wars together,” Elizabeth Rose, from the DOE’s department of portfolio management, told the parents at last night’s meeting. “Tonight, I’m mostly here to listen.”

Rose, CEC members, and other officials heard parents complain that they had moved to Tribeca in order to send their children to the popular P.S. 234, only to find out that they could be rezoned and see the value of their homes fall. They heard concerns about changes to a longstanding policy of treating the West Village as a single zone shared by multiple schools. And they heard worries about the “sketchy” neighborhood that students might have to walk through to get from Tribeca to P.S. 3 in the West Village.

Together, the parents argued that the rezoning proposal did not meet downtown’s real needs: for the DOE to bring school zones in line with neighborhood boundaries, ensure students’ safety during their commutes, and build more schools in Lower Manhattan. (more…)