As a father of three children in local public schools and a member of District 3’s Community Education Council (CEC), Gotbaum has led a charge against the co-location of charter schools and has been an outspoken critic of the Department of Education’s policies. He’s also been involved in making the CEC a unified voice for parents from a diverse district that encompasses the Upper West Side as well as Manhattan Valley and parts of Central and West Harlem.

Now Gotbaum has formed a campaign committee and said that he’ll be spending the next six to nine months raising money and garnering support for a potential run, one he will base on his experience as an education advocate.

“I come from a labor family, but I’ve worked for 25 years in the private sector. Public service has always been in my blood,” Gotbaum said in an interview, acknowledging the influence of his father, Victor Gotbaum, a prominent labor leader, and his stepmother, former Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, as well as his family’s history of teaching in public schools.

“I see the public advocate position as a way to really stand up and speak up for those who feel disenfranchised, and that’s really expanded, unfortunately, under Bloomberg,” Gotbaum said. He wants to encourage grassroots and community involvement in local decision-making and would point to some of the collaborative successes of the Upper West Side community as models for other neighborhoods.

Education reform will be the cornerstone of any campaign, he said.

“One in every three New Yorkers is involved in the public school system in one way or another. We don’t really have effective advocates for us as parents and for our kids,” said Gotbaum. “We waste money when it’s not being watched. We are wasting literally billions on no-bid contracts, on services that aren’t being delivered, on funds that aren’t even being collected. We have $600 million in special education fees that Bloomberg has not collected that are owed [from the state and federal governments]. While we’re not getting our fair share, we’re threatening to lay off teachers; we need to hire more.”

He said that neither Mayor Bloomberg nor Chancellor Dennis Walcott have done enough to ensure that every student gets a quality education, and is critical of mayoral control of the school system.

“The office of the public advocate is about ensuring that the services of the city are being delivered properly and efficiently and that they work for our communities, for everyone. When you have essentially close to a dictatorship at the top, that doesn’t happen,” Gotbaum said.

He also said that the lack of services applies to other sectors, like the economy and jobs, and that the public advocate should be watching those areas closely.

“In terms of the middle class and working class, we’re not providing the services that we need. We’re not investing properly in education, which is huge—in training our students and our work force adequately,” Gotbaum said. “We’re also not providing the services that enable people to get into the workforce: child care, after-school programs, job training programs.”

Gotbaum said he will wait for current public advocate Bill de Blasio to declare his 2013 plans—he is likely to run for mayor—before making an ultimate decision on whether to run. City & State reported last week that other likely contenders in the race will be City Council Member Letitia James of Brooklyn and Reshma Saujani, who challenged Upper East Side Rep. Carolyn Maloney in 2010 and has been working for de Blasio’s office since. Manhattan-Brooklyn State Sen. Daniel Squadron is also reported to be considering a run.

Upper West Side parents are usually clamoring for more public school space, and now the conversation has turned toward the impending demand for middle school seats. At a joint Community Education Council (CEC) and President’s Council meeting last week for District 3, concerned parents and board members hashed out the issues facing the district’s number of middle school seats; some insisting that there is an imminent shortage approaching, while others viewed the prediction with skepticism.

Even those who agree that the district should ask for more seats were divided over how the request to the Department of Education (DOE) should be worded  and where a new school would be located.

“No one can argue that we need more middle school seats,” said Community Board 7 chair Mark Diller, confirming that the board is supportive of the push. “The very next issue is, of course, where?” Diller emphasized the need for the CEC to use data to back up their requests.

Stefan Koster, parent of a middle-school-aged daughter who recently went through the process of finding a school, presented data to the board showing what he and a group of other parent volunteers had determined regarding future middle school space in the district. They insist that the DOE is not taking into account an upcoming influx of middle-school-aged students and that there will be a severe shortage of seats by 2013.

“More and more young families like mine have decided it’s kind of cool to raise a child in the city,” as opposed to moving out to the suburbs, said Koster after the meeting. “If the DOE does not hear the community scream out in its need for more school seats, I fear that we’re going to reverse that whole aspect of people coming into and staying in the city to raise kids. How long can the Upper West Side stay a cool place if nothing happens?”

Analyzing data from the DOE, Koster’s group concluded that an increasing number of students are remaining in District 3 for middle school based on the fact that in 2011 there were 765 “first choice” applicants for 480 middle school seats in the district, which they say points to a demand that will only continue to grow.

While many agreed with their premise, the question of how to successfully convince the DOE that the seats are eminently needed was still unanswered. Some advocated just requesting any available district space for middle school seats before deciding specifics about a new school.

“If we don’t take the space, Eva’s going to get it,” said Stefanie Goldblatt, the treasurer of the President’s Council, referring to the CEO of the Success Academy Network charter schools, Eva Moskowitz. “Let’s just grab space and figure out what goes there later.”

Goldblatt touched on a nerve that reverberated throughout the meeting: the fear that if the CEC doesn’t determine what they need quickly enough, that the DOE will allocate more public space to charter schools.

Others raised the issue of ensuring an equitable location that would serve the entire district, including the neighborhoods in the northern section that are composed largely of minority communities.

“The northern part gets charter schools; the southern part gets new schools,” said Camille Goodridge, a CEC member and co-chair of the middle school committee. “We need just as many quality schools as everybody else. Minority students need the same as everybody else.”

Some members were cautious about jumping to conclusions and asking the DOE for a new school without further consideration of the data and the potential possibilities.

“I don’t question whether or not we need middle school seats,” said council member Noah Gotbaum in an interview later. “But I want to make sure as a CEC member that it’s done by consensus, that it’s very much representative of the entire district.”

As the CEC continues to determine the best course of action, parents are rallying behind Koster and his group’s petition, hosted at MiddleSchoolBabyBoom.com, a name that speaks for itself. So far, 644 parents have signed on in support of explicitly asking the DOE to create a brand-new, separate middle school.

But some think that there are still more factors to explore before that should happen.

“We could potentially take high school seats and use them for middle school seats,” Gotbaum said. “We have to have everyone in the conversation. We can’t allow the DOE to set us against each other. There’s no planning going on at the top. That’s part of what we have to watch out for.”

Helen Rosenthal is a member of Community Board 7 and a candidate for New York City Council.

The department is planning to start three kindergarten classes at the school, but the parent council wants that number increased to five. The move, the parent council argues, would help ease pressure at nearby crowded schools, especially P.S. 87 and P.S. 199, both of which are far above capacity. The department, however, shot down the proposal, saying at an impassioned Feb. 24 meeting that I.S. 44’s facilities could not support any more children.

Per department guidelines for any significant changes to school buildings, the Panel for Education Policy will have a final hearing to approve the new school April 13.

When P.S. 452 opens this fall, the I.S. 44 building (above) will house a total of five schools. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

The new school would at least temporarily share space with four other schools: the Anderson School, which will shrink from three classes a year to two; the Computer School; J.H.S. 44, which is being phased out; and West Prep Middle School, which is expected to relocate in September 2011. Elizabeth Rose, a representative from the department’s office of portfolio planning, stressed at the meeting that the new arrangement would be a tight squeeze.

“Even though we relocated West Prep to another facility, the school’s capacities don’t change,” Rose said. “We can’t open five kindergartens. Three is the maximum capacity we can fit in this building.”

P.S. 452 is not accepting direct applications for the 2010-2011 school year. Families are being instructed to apply to their zoned school and once the March 12 deadline for kindergarten applications passes and schools process new students, the department will work with the parent council to decide how P.S. 452’s seats should be distributed.

Deborah Lopez, a parent with a child at Anderson, agreed that though demand far outstripped supply, the department should limit the number of P.S. 452 classes to three.

“The new school is welcome in this building,” she said. “But please understand that five schools is a lot of schools in this one building and children in all the schools are going to be affected.”

Lopez worried that the arrangement would adversely impact children’s access to the gym, libraries and the playground.

But many other parents were dissatisfied with the plans, and accused the city of not doing enough to address population growth and subsequent school overcrowding.

“The new school is a stop-gap measure, but it is not really stopping any gaps,” said Noah Gotbaum, chair of the parent council.

He noted that that while 75 families would have access to the new school, there would still be at least 200 other families who won’t be able to send their kids to zoned schools this coming school year.

“Parents deserve to get elementary seats in the zone where they live, or where their kids go to school,” he said.

One idea that has been floated is to relocate the Anderson School, a gifted program that has citywide admissions and could, in theory, be sited anywhere.

But the department rejected the idea of moving Anderson, which was previously housed on West 84th Street with P.S. 9.

“Our recent actions in District 3, including the relocation of the Anderson School, have resulted in a significant gain in elementary school seats for the district. We believe the Anderson School is currently in a facility extremely well suited to the needs of its students and the community, and it would not be productive to move the school twice in such a short period of time,” said Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a department spokesperson, in an email.

Eric Shuffler, who is looking for a kindergarten spot for his child, said the overcrowding issue is an “insult to parents.” Marcy Drogin, a prospective parent at P.S. 87, added it was “unacceptable” that the school was crowded and demanded there be enough seats at P.S. 87 to serve all local families.

“I would say that parents have grown weary of the DOE’s opaque processes, poor planning and short term solutions,” said Beth Servetar, co-president of the Parent’s Association at P.S. 87, which functions at 120 percent capacity.

Gary Anthony Ramsay, a former NY1 reporter and prospective P.S. 199 parent, was annoyed at the department’s suggestion that parents be patient, should their child be waitlisted at a school.

“In this economy, no one is going to move away or put their kid in a private school,” he said. “This is our version of the Titanic,” he continued. “The iceberg has already hit the ship—when are we going to make things happen?”

The problem has been acute in the southern part of District 3, where massive building projects have led to overcrowding at P.S. 199 and P.S. 87, in particular.

“There are more zoned students than there are seats because students largely choose to go to their zoned school,” said Elizabeth Rose, a representative from the department’s office of portfolio planning, at a Jan. 20 Community Education Council meeting. She credited the work of parents who “spent an enormous amount of time gathering data” in changing the department’s strategy.

“At the end, I think we called ‘uncle,’” Rose joked at the meeting. “I don’t think anyone thought we would be here announcing a new school in this area at this time.”

As recently as Dec. 16, the department was backing a two-year capital budget for the district that included no new seats or construction for new capacity. Although education officials agreed that schools were strained by crowding, they believed the problem could be alleviated through adjustments like rezoning.

Now, the city is planning to open a new elementary school in fall 2010 with three kindergarten classes, totaling 75 students. It will be housed in the I.S. 44 building, on West 77th Street, along with the Anderson School and the Computer School. As the new school grows over the next six years, it will end up with 450 elementary school seats.

To create space, though, Rose said the community now faces a “painful set of decisions.” The department will be relocating a new middle school, West Prep, within a few years, and the Anderson School, a citywide gifted school, will reduce its enrollment from three classes (or “sections”) a year back down to two.

In the new enrollment process, there will be no district-wide kindergarten lottery for the most overcrowded schools, which are filled largely from their own catchment zones. Enrollment priorities at zoned schools will first go to students in the catchment area who have a sibling at the school; then zoned students who don’t have older siblings at the school; and finally to out-of-zone students from District 3 who have a sibling at the school. The new process, which would give catchment students priority over non-catchment siblings, will be “reaffirming the chancellor’s regulations on enrollment priorities,” Rose said.

The new school’s zone could be determined in one of three ways: The city could draw a new permanent catchment zone between P.S. 87 and P.S. 199; it could allow families zoned for P.S. 87 the chance to choose this new school first; or it could allow the new school to be filled with the overflow from families who do not get into P.S. 87 or P.S. 199.

At P.S. 199 and P.S. 87, six kindergarten classes will be maintained, the most either overcrowded school can handle.

Rose stressed that no changes, other than the decision to create a new school, have been set in stone. After the first year under this new plan, Rose said, “We will need to monitor kindergarten enrollment carefully,” to see how it works, particularly after the next round of kindergarten intake in February.

At the meeting, members of the public and the parent council expressed gratitude to the department for taking this step.

“One of the things we have achieved in the war room, working with the borough president, working with the DOE is that [the department is] no longer determining unilaterally how many kids can fit,” said Noah Gotbaum, chair of the parent council.

Still, many worried that the plan didn’t go far enough. Several parent council members said they felt the new school was a stop-gap measure, and that the same crowding problems would crop up in a few years.

“We definitely gain from a three-classroom school,” said Helen Rosenthal, co-chair of Community Board 7’s education committee, which has been looking at District 3 data. “However, data shows we really need a six-classroom school.”

Others clamored for the department to purchase real estate, worried that a space shuffle would not be enough to solve the problem.

“We need to push the DOE to find or build new space to at least double the new school’s size,” Gotbaum said. “Otherwise, just about every elementary school in the southern portion of the district will be over-enrolled within 12 to 24 months.”

Looking a few more years down the road, he added, “And middle school overcrowding is following closely on the heels of this as our elementary kids move up.”

Parents, elected officials and parent council members pled for the department to view the crowding situation as dire and budget new seats in the district. Representatives from the School Construction Authority attended the meeting, including Richard Bocchicchio, director of facilities/space planning, as well as a representative from the deputy chancellor’s office.

Department officials agreed that capacity is strained, but said that, in their view, rezoning and new rules regarding out-of-district enrollment would be sufficient to deal with the problem. Other suggestions raised at the meeting were creating a new, more stringent kindergarten lottery, enacting more restrictions on out-of-catchment enrollment and sibling enrollment, and undertaking a dramatic reconfiguring of school zones to relieve the burden on schools like P.S. 87, which is well over 100-percent capacity already.

“We commend CEC 3, which has come up with a very detailed analysis, and we are concerned with capacity. But when you look at District 3 as a whole, we do see some buildings that we determine are underutilized,” said Jeffrey Shear, chief of staff for deputy chancellor Kathleen Grimm, who oversees finance and administration at the department.

However, many disputed the assertion that several buildings in the district were underutilized. They said that space was being shared or had been taken over by charter schools, or included specialized programs such as bilingual education, special education or gifted and talented programs that were incompatible with swelling seats at the kindergarten level.

“There are more children, and there will be more children,” said Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal at the meeting. “We can’t wait until they arrive at the school’s doorsteps, and say, ‘Oh, I guess we calculated wrong.’ We can’t afford to just move the lines, and we can’t move kids from one school to another or have a school relocated to another building.”

Representatives speaking on behalf of State Sen. Tom Duane and Borough President Scott Stringer, who has convened a “war room” to address overcrowding in Manhattan schools, echoed Rosenthal’s concerns that zoning and lottery solutions wouldn’t be enough to combat the district’s baby boom.

Rosenthal said she’d asked the department to count numbers more accurately, and parent council members said they’d asked education officials to walk with them through crowded classrooms and schools, and to produce numbers that projected growth in the district’s future population.

Education officials had agreed to inspect the schools with parents, and were working on pinning down a date as of last week’s meeting.

At the close of the meeting, parents from several neighborhood schools spoke about the conditions and crowding in their facilities.

At press time, another war room meeting was slated for Dec. 22. The timeline is tight, as parents and the department have to come to a consensus by February, when enrollment begins.

“We appreciate working very closely with Office of Portfolio Planning [another DOE office] and with the Deputy Chancellor. We don’t want to presuppose anything, but we do want us and them to recognize the urgency of this situation,” said Noah Gotbaum, chair of the parent council, after the meeting. “And we’re going to have to solve the problem in the long term. We can’t ask parents and kids to sacrifice like this for something that won’t even work for 12 months.”

Across town in District 2, which covers the East Side and much of downtown Manhattan, students have first-priority access to at least five desirable high schools, according to the official school directory. The few District 3 schools (Frederick Douglas I and II and Wadleigh, for instance) that do give priority to residents are designed to promote college-level achievement in students from under-served backgrounds.

That means no “selective” or “screened” schools, which take GPAs and other criteria into account, cater to West Side students. Unlike the “specialized” schools, which require a single admissions test, “selective” schools are an appealing public school option for students who may not have made the cut for Stuyvesant, but who are academically accelerated and in need of a strong college-prep high school.

Up until a few years ago, the Beacon School, at 227 W. 61st St., gave preference to District 3 students. But in 2005, that changed, and admissions made no geographic distinctions among citywide candidates. The District 3 Community Education Council passed a resolution in July asking that the District 3 priority be reinstated for Beacon, but the Department of Education and Beacon have announced no plans to change the policy back.

“We take very seriously the recommendations made by the Community Education Council, but there is no plan for Beacon to change its admission criteria, at least for this year,” Andrew Jacob, a spokesperson for the department, told  West Side Spirit in June.

West Side parents are frustrated because they feel the disparity puts undue pressure on their kids, some of whom don’t get into any of their top schools during the first round of admissions and have to go through the process again later. They wonder if the rest of New York is being treated differently than residents of some of the tony neighborhoods covered by District 2, like the Upper East Side and Tribeca. So how did this arrangement come about? And will the city change this policy?

Part of the reason there are no district-priority schools on the West Side is historical. Many of the desirable District 2 High School schools opened between 1987 and 1988, when Anthony Alvarado was district superintendent. A formerly scandal-ridden chancellor known as a fierce advocate for his district, Alvarado boosted scores and reputations in the district. During that era, the Department of Education had centralized control of high schools, while K-8 schools were the province of each district. But District 2 became an exception to this rule. New high schools for that area were allowed during Alvarado’s tenure because they grew out of existing middle schools. They were created in entirely new spaces and therefore did not take away seats from citywide high schools.

Largely as a result of that boom, five schools—the N.Y.C. Lab School, the School of the Future, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Baruch College High School and the Museum School—all give some degree of preference to District 2 students alone. A sixth school, Millennium High School, gives preference to students who live south of Houston Street. Of those schools, Lab, Eleanor Roosevelt, Baruch and Millennium are all selective, while the Museum School and School of the Future have great reputations. There are several other district-preference high schools in the city, many of them in Queens.

According to education officials, the number of out-of-district students who attend these screened District 2 high schools is as much as 30 percent, meaning that although the bulk of the student body is local, a significant portion of non-district students are allowed in.

Meanwhile, parents, students and teachers in District 3—which has its share of well-regarded middle schools, like the Delta Program, Computer School and Center School—didn’t get a chance to play catch-up to the Alvarado era. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein took control of schools in 2002, essentially all new high schools have had citywide admissions. This policy change was implemented to level the playing field, requiring all students to go through the same multi-round admissions system.

But that disparity, combined with the fact that Beacon High School—which was started by District 3 teachers and families—went citywide, has many Upper West Side parents feeling left out in the cold, bewildered or downright angry.

“You go to these District 2 schools, you tour them and they’re great schools,” said Sara Mears, a Computer School parent who started a blog about the high school admissions process, www.nychsasg.blogspot.com. “And you think, ‘This is where I want my kid to go.’ Then you hear that very few get in, but maybe some do. We as parents have no way of understanding exactly what the preferences mean or how they are applied. It seems to be different for each school.”

Mears points out that 2009 admissions data from the Delta program reveal 30 acceptances to Eleanor Roosevelt, zero for Baruch and six for Lab, demonstrating that there’s a huge variation in District 3 acceptance rates among schools that give District 2 preference.

The department did not return requests for comment for this article. However, in a letter to a frustrated West Side parent, Leonard Trerotola, the department’s executive director for high school enrollment, wrote: “While District 2 students are given priority at [certain schools] that does not necessarily mean other students will not be ranked and matched to one of those schools… The approximate number of seats allocated at screened programs that give priority to District 2 is only 5 percent of the total number of seats in Manhattan alone.”

Parents Bijou Miller and Sara Mears are unhappy with the disparity between screened high schools in Districts 2 and 3 that give priority to local students. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Many of District 3’s middle school students are also applying to the city’s specialized high schools via the standardized admissions test, or auditioning for LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. But parents say the lack of solid fallbacks, i.e. your basic neighborhood high school, is putting too much pressure on kids to perform well on one-shot applications.

“It’s nice to have specialized high schools, but I have a problem with that second tier,” said West Side parent Martin Librett, whose twin daughters are applying to high schools. “There aren’t enough screened schools, or schools with tracked programs.”

Librett says that if the process doesn’t work out for his daughters, he’ll have to consider moving out of the city.

Whether the answer is better access to District 2 high schools or local schools of their own, it’s clear that West Side parents aren’t happy with the status quo. And they are uncomfortable with pitting kids from two districts against each other.

“The mentality in District 3 is, ‘They [District 2] have choice, we don’t, and getting kids into Beacon is getting harder,’” said Bijou Miller, who has seen both sides of the issue. She was a member of the District 2 President’s Council, which represents district parent associations, when her older child attended a District 2 school. Now that her younger child is at Delta, Miller sits on District 3’s President’s Council.

“The DOE—whether they intentionally do this or not I don’t know—but when they are moving schools around, putting charter schools in or making new schools, they always end up pitting parents against parents,” she said. “That seems really wrong to me because it dissipates our ability to really help our children. I don’t want to see District 3 fighting to get District 2’s schools taken away.”

Miller believes that District 3 and other districts lacking local options should have their own priority screened high schools, just like District 2. That should include Frank McCourt High School, she argues, the newest school on the West 84th Street Brandeis campus, opening in Fall 2010.

She isn’t the only one. Many Upper West Side parents were hopeful that the new schools on the Brandeis campus, specifically the McCourt School, would become a District 3 preference school. But when plans for McCourt were announced, so was the idea that it would have citywide admissions.

For many involved with the school’s creation, geographically-neutral admissions was the only fair way to go.

“What are the ramifications for kids who used to have access to the Brandeis building who don’t anymore?” said Clara Hemphill, one of the many people involved in brainstorming ideas for the McCourt school and a writer who has published popular guides to the city’s best public schools. “This is a concern of Harlem, Washington Heights and Bronx parents whose kids were sent to Brandeis when it was terrible. Their fear is now that it’s good, they’ll be excluded.”

On Dec. 2, District 3’s parent council passed a resolution asking that the McCourt school give priority to students from District 3, 4, 5 and 6, thus serving both the West Side and other neighborhoods that have been feeding students to Brandeis. But even if that plan is implemented, the Upper West Side would still be without many neighborhood high school options.

Another solution floated by parents is opening District 2 schools to citywide admissions. But that would eliminate the value of those schools as less-competitive alternatives to the specialized schools, Hemphill points out.

“Say that Eleanor Roosevelt takes students with 90 averages and above,” she said. “If Eleanor Roosevelt went citywide, it would have to take kids with 95 averages or even higher.”

This has already happened with Beacon, which residents say used to be more of an eclectic niche school than a hyper-competitive one. Last year, 4,738 students applied for 269 seats.

Still, some parents think increased selectivity would be preferable because it would make the process fairer. David Felton is a Computer School parent who, along with another parent, has been corresponding with Chancellor Klein to protest the disparity between the two districts. He says that the District 2 preference leads to de facto segregation, or at the very least, the appearance of the department being partial to what he sees as more privileged families.

“It’s a huge, huge district of the wealthiest and whitest people in New York,” he said of District 2. “So there’s clear inequity based on where you live.”

Ending district preference at all Manhattan schools is “the only way you can make it fair in terms of less-advantaged districts,” Felton said. “This is bigger than District 2 inequity. The high school admissions process is so unwieldy that by its very nature it’s unfair to poorer families.”

Felton argues that the detailed forms and two rounds of admissions, plus a separate process for specialized schools, inherently discriminates against non-English-speaking families, parents who work double-shifts and single parents and relatives who have less time and know-how to navigate the process. He, like all parents interviewed for this article, stressed that he is not just advocating for his own kids or district, but for all students who come up against similar disadvantages.

Unfortunately, the situation is only likely to get more competitive. A recent study found that the city’s largest class size increases this year were in District 3, where swelling enrollment numbers in lower grades mean more high school students down the road.

“Clearly, the demographics need to be taken into consideration,” said Noah Gotbaum, chair of the district’s parent council, pointing to growing ranks at the elementary and middle school level. “But high school overcrowding and utilization problems are already here in a huge way.”

He added that he believes the department’s small schools initiative, which often puts several smaller high schools together in one large building, doesn’t take shared use of facilities into account when calculating capacity, leading to a major crunch in lunchrooms, gyms and other common spaces. Overwhelming interest in the new McCourt school, he added, reveals “a huge pent-up demand” for high school seats on the West Side.

As more students come up through the system, though, parents hope that any new schools—especially those on the Brandeis and Martin Luther King, Jr., campuses—will establish good records for college admissions.

“There’s a real hunger for good schools on the West Side,” Hemphill said. “I hope all of the schools in the Brandeis building serve that need. The solution is to build more schools, not to have ever more esoteric admissions rules.”

Last year, parents clashed over a plan to move the Center School out of P.S. 199’s building to alleviate crowding (that controversial move took place over the summer). This year, parents seemed far more united in urging the department to create more space in the district and, in particular, in asking education officials to treat the situation as urgent.

“There’s only so much we can do by moving pieces on a chessboard as we did last year,” said the parent council’s chair, Noah Gotbaum. “We need elected officials and the DOE to work with us to address this acute situation district-wide. It’s not pocket overcrowding, it’s a systematic problem.

Gotbaum opened the Oct. 21 meeting, held at P.S. 76 on West 121st Street, by saying that district crowding had many sources, from the construction of new residential buildings to the economic downturn, which has caused families to turn to public schools, to uptown schools being elbowed out by charter schools.

P.S. 199: verging-on-overcrowded. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

John White, the department’s interim acting deputy chancellor for strategy and innovation, pointed to internal statistics on local schools, which indicate that district-wide there is only a small uptick of students, but that individual school enrollment has fluctuated widely.

“Across the district, enrollment is growing slightly,” White said. “But when you dig under this, enrollment in some schools is growing significantly. In others it’s shrinking significantly.”

White listed several potential, unofficial solutions, many of which he said would be “hard tradeoffs.” These included merging sister elementary schools P.S. 185 (serving grades K to 2 on West 112th Street) and P.S. 208 (serving grades 3 to 5 on West 111th Street), and re-evaluating the district’s kindergarten admissions process. He recommended creating new plans for the Harlem building that houses P.S. 241 and two charter schools, and for the lower part of the district, which includes three verging-on-overcrowded schools: P.S. 9, P.S. 199 and P.S. 87. Finally, White noted that the uneven distribution of English language learners and special education students should be adjusted.

But several parent council members said they felt the department’s numbers did not reflect reality at many neighborhood schools. The department’s estimate of a school’s capacity, they suggested, did not take into account the fact that many schools had lost rooms for art and music, cut back on gym time and had to serve lunch as early as 10 a.m., which has had an adverse effect on education. Members also said that vacancies in the district caused by phased-out schools or under-enrollment in special programs did not appear to free up any more spaces for young children, who are entering the schools in larger numbers.

State Sen. Bill Perkins, Assembly Members Linda Rosenthal and Daniel O’Donnell and Council Member Gale Brewer all attended the meeting, and largely supported the parents’ sense of urgency.

“You can’t fix a problem unless you acknowledge it’s there,” said O’Donnell, who sits on the Assembly’s education committee.

The parent council intends to convene a “war room” of concerned parents and public officials to lobby for change in time for the 2010-2011 school year. They hope to find “incubator space” for a new school.

Will Havemann, a spokesman for the department, said education officials are preparing for the next parent council meeting.

“We’re going to establish a set of discrete issues that we need to plan around by the next regular CEC meeting,” he said. “We are very committed, and it is a high priority to make sure we are responding to concerns of parents in this district.”

On June 17, the district’s Community Education Council and Presidents’ Council approved a request asking the Department of Education to give local students priority at Beacon High School, considered one of city’s the most prestigious schools. There are 12 high schools in the district, and all of them have a citywide admissions policy. By contrast, District 2, which covers the East Side and parts of downtown, has several priority high schools for local students.

“Many parents from the district have come to us and complained about how their children were not accepted to Beacon,” said Elizabeth Shell, the parent council’s president. “Beacon has many students from District 2, and yet that district has five high schools who give them priority while we have none.”

District 3’s parent council wants Beacon High School to give area students special consideration for admissions. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Beacon, at 227 W. 61 St., gave priority to District 3 students when it was created in 1993. However, in 2005, the school introduced the admissions policy change, which was later approved by the department. Now, students from across the city can get in if they meet the admission criteria, which include test scores, a portfolio and an interview.

A change seems unlikely, though.

“We take very seriously the recommendations made by the Community Education Council, but there is no plan for Beacon to change its admission criteria, at least for this year,” said Andrew Jacob, a spokesperson for the department.

Admissions criteria for the 2009-2010 school year had already been approved and published by the time the resolution was passed, he explained.

“We try to give students more choices with high school admissions policies, and Beacon is an example,” Jacob said.

Priority for District 3 students relates to questions raised earlier this year of declining diversity at Beacon. According to department statistics, the number of Hispanic students has decreased from 24 percent in 2005 to 21.2 percent in 2008. African-American enrollment has also declined from 19.1 percent to 15 percent during the same period.

The discrepancies, according to the department, reflect the fact that until 2005, students from District 3, which has a much larger percentage of African Americans and Latinos, had priority. Now, the pool of applicants reflects the city as a whole.

“Beacon remains one of the most diverse and selective schools in the city,” Jacob said.

Still, some students, parents and other critics have been pressing the issue. On June 8, diversity was the focus of a forum convened by the group at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street and West End Avenue.

“This is a question of transparency,” said Andrietta Sims, a public school teacher whose daughter graduated from Beacon two years ago. “We want to know how the students are being admitted and how they are going to correct this.”

Sims is one of the people who in May sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein expressing concern about the decrease in diversity. By the time the department answered in June, a group of prominent scholars—including New York University professors Pedro Noguera and Gary Anderson—signed on to a second letter to the chancellor.

For parent council president Shell, the diversity issue could be resolved if the school again gave priority to District 3 students. But Shell said that Beacon’s administration has not been willing to talk to them.

Meanwhile, students plan to continue their protests and approach underrepresented communities to inform them about the admissions process. This will help broaden the pool of applicants and increase diversity, no matter what group has priority.

Jerry Butler
Center School Parent

Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity.

To the Editor:
Oft overlooked and central to the Community Education Council draft resolution is that most families in the P.S. 199 catchment choose to send their children to P.S. 199, an elementary school offering only a general education program. Might I offer that up as a feather in the cap of public education? Too many families, not enough room. See the problem?

The idea to use space at P.S. 9 as a new elementary school was proposed and considered. Is anyone at all curious as to the Department of Education manpower and resources needed to implement this idea? In these economic times? Seriously?
Further, even if P.S. 199 families were given every seat available in this overflow idea, it would still not accommodate every kindergartener in our catchment for next year. Sending the excess 199 kindergarteners to P.S. 191 and P.S. 87 could hamper or eliminate their choice programs.
Center School is a district-wide middle school. Their passionate argument against relocation infers their program’s collapse. Have faith, wonderful and vital Center School. “Yes You Can” survive a move!

The very best we can do is advocate equitable and age-appropriate choices for our children. And to continue to offer those same choices to the children who come after our children.

The only issue is space. The only solution lies in absolute district-wide fairness.

Becky Neustadt
P.S. 199 and M.S. 54 parent

Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity.

To the Editor:
As with most parents, I would go to the ends of the earth to do what is best for my child. If that included putting him on a bus or taking him on a subway every morning to school, I would do it. But I will not do that when there is one of the best elementary schools in the city one block away—where my neighbors can watch over my child, where I have neighbors who can pick up my child if I cannot (I am a single parent.)

Many of us made sacrifices to move to this area or to stay in this area—myself and several parents (both potential and current) I know are in studios and one-bedroom apartments with one or more children so that we can stay here and send our kids to this school and, more importantly, to stay where we have created a wonderful community.

Two things could change our community: 1) Not allowing any new children into P.S. 199 for at least the next three years, which is what would happen if we don’t gain The Center School space, and 2) if the parents and connected parties to the Center School continue their vitriolic attacks on anyone who disagrees with them.

If this is the legacy The Center School wants to leave, then so be it; but I would hope as an educational institution and as our neighbors they can move beyond that, and we can begin to repair the harm done. We have been called racist and elitist. That is not the community I know and not the one I am fighting for. The community I know includes musicians and teachers and those working hard in the private and public sector as advocates for any number of social causes. And yes, we have a large number of wealthy individuals as well. AND so does Center School. This is not a bad thing to have at a public school—it means our teachers can teach and take home their hard-earned paycheck and not have to pay for crayons and paper towels in their classrooms.

Why doesn’t Center School want a bigger space with more rooms and more resources, where their children don’t have to learn in hallways? I still haven’t heard a compelling argument.

Karen Dinitz
Prospective P.S. 199 Parent

Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity.