A look at the challenges facing schools in Manhattan

As students pack their backpacks and get ready for the school year that will kick off next week, parents and education advocates are gearing up to fight the continuing battle for quality public school education in New York City.

While downtown, which includes Community Education Council District 2 (CEC2), enjoys many top-notch public schools, overcrowding and budget tightening are constantly threatening the balance.

The biggest concern in the district is the lack of school space for future classes.

“The inclusion of new school spaces will certainly help, but it does not eliminate the challenges that we have today,” said Council Member Dan Garodnick on the problems of overcrowding.

CEC2 recently won a long-fought battle in gaining a new elementary school at the Our Lady of Good Counsel building on East 91st Street. Over the summer, DOE Chancellor Dennis Walcott joined U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Assembly Member Dan Quart at the official announcement of the DOE’s deal with the Catholic Archdiocese to lease the space for 15 years. The building had been the temporary home to P.S. 151, the Yorkville Community School, before it moved into its permanent location on East 88th Street, and then P.S. 51, which had relocated from Chelsea while its building was under construction. The DOE’s lease on the building had been set to expire this fall, and parents in the community pushed hard to renew the lease for a longer term. Now the building will be home to P.S. 527, helping alleviate some of the area’s elementary school crowding.

“School overcrowding remains a critical problem on the Upper East Side,” Quart said at the ceremony. “As enrollment rates continue to increase, it is crucial that school construction keep pace with this growth.” Quart had a real-life prop to back up his claim—his 5-year-old son, Sam, who will be attending the school as a kindergartener this fall—standing at the podium with him.

Shino Tanikawa, the president of the District 2 Community Education Council (CEC), said in a letter addressing this year’s upcoming challenges in the district that overcrowding continues to be a major concern.

“District 2 schools continue to be overcrowded even with new schools that have started in the last four years,” Tanikawa said. “This coming year, we will be rezoning the east side of Midtown for a new school located on First Avenue at 35th Street. Plans are under way for a new school in Chelsea and another in the Financial District, and negotiations to acquire 75 Morton St. are ongoing.”

Most new school plans are for elementary schools, which is what the DOE says the district needs. Some parents and elected officials, however, say that the numbers don’t indicate the real picture of what the district needs, since it encompasses many different neighborhoods—the Upper East Side as well as most of Lower Manhattan.

Assembly Member Micah Kellner has been leading the charge to ask the DOE for a new middle school, petitioning local parents to get on board. He said that many parents with middle school-aged kids feel that they face a choice between private school and moving out to the suburbs instead of relying on public middle schools.

“In September the DOE is expected to release Educational Impact Statements from co-location [of charter schools],” said Tanikawa. “While it seems the elementary and middle schools in District 2 are spared of co-location, we still need to voice our concern for having elementary students with high school students in the same building, and for potential overcrowding that could result from co-location.”

One small victory that parents around the city are celebrating is the reinstatement of a program that was recently cut—Wellness in the Schools, which pairs professional chefs with public-school cafeterias to create healthy, scratch-made menus for the kids. Earlier this week, DOE officials said that they would have to cut the program to ensure that all schools would be able to meet more stringent federal school lunch regulations or risk losing federal money. Thanks to an immediate outcry from parents and elected officials, including Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the DOE announced that it would keep the program and work with the schools and chefs on keeping the menus within guidelines.

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

The site’s neatly organized school reviews are culled from hundreds of school visits conducted by the Insideschools staff, giving visitors insight into how test scores and reputations stack up against in-person observations of atmosphere, safety, classroom interactions and more.

Pamela Wheaton, the website’s project director, now occupies a much emptier office. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

“I use that website all the time,” said Shari Honig, a mother of two public elementary school students on the Upper East Side. “It’s really well known. It tells you a school’s test scores, ethnic diversity, what kind of programs they have, who works there, what zone it is—and there are parent comments. And you can put in different searches—your zone, district, K-to-8 versus K-to-6 programs, gifted and talented programs. It’s easy to use and navigate. I think a lot of people use the site because it’s got everything.”

But of course even a popular website isn’t immune to this economy: in June, the site announced drastic budget and staffing cuts, and launched a fundraising drive aimed at regular users. As a little red thermometer inches up the home page, news that the site won’t be able to conduct its usual rigorous review of city schools is a sign of the difficult climate facing public school families and the city as a whole. And with mayoral control likely to continue, school crowding likely to worsen and funding likely to shrink, a site like Insideschools could be more vital than ever.

Insideschools began as a compilation of abbreviated entries from founder and former project director Clara Hemphill’s staple series of books, New York City’s Best Public Schools. But in 2002, the site got a grant from the Sloane Foundation, which focuses on government accountability. Contributors expanded their focus beyond “the best” to cover every single school in the city, and give parents a conduit to the Department of Education.

“In such a complicated system, parents really need help,” said Pamela Wheaton, the website’s project director. “With increased choice, parents need to be informed about what their choices are.”

The task grew continuously; thanks to the “small schools” movement, the website’s school visit target has consistently moved upward. There are 66 new schools opening this fall alone, points out Mandy Hass, who works at Insideschools’ parent organization, Advocates for Children of New York (the nonprofit focuses on homeless and foster care students, as well as students in the juvenile justice system).

“When the site launched in 2002, there were 1,100 public schools in New York City. Now it’s 1,500,” Hass said. “And each new school needs a visit. We’ve visited virtually all schools in the city except for a tiny handful of principals who wouldn’t let have access.”

Until the economic crisis hit, the “tiny and underpaid” staff, as Hass characterizes it, consisted of four to five full-time workers and several freelance reporters. Still, the team was able to complete up to 200 school visits a year. Their efforts paid off: in 2008, Insideschools had 1,169,287 visitors, according to Hass—more than the 1.1 million students in the system, the nation’s largest. Visitors are mostly parents but also include older students and teachers and administrators within the system.

The sites’ founders believe that public school parents should have the same kind of choices as private school parents. Staffers therefore pay close attention to the way a school feels—what’s its mission, vibe in the hallways, educational approach and where does it fit in with other schools of its size or type? One entry frankly described the whiff of marijuana from a stairwell at a now-closed Bronx high school. The site tries to be sensitive and anticipate a diverse group of potential concerns, from school safety to special education to facilities.

The Insideschools staff during better days, the winter of 2008. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Expanded user-oriented features include advice columns, a blog with policy news, polls, forums, classified ads, a “write the chancellor” section and a “speak out” section, where parents have successfully protested policies like the confusing high school admissions process. The site has become a clearinghouse for public education chatter and action.

Both Wheaton and Hass feel that Insideschools has led the department to become more transparent and responsive to parents, and the department seems to concur.

“It has provided very clear and helpful information to parents for years,” said David Cantor, a department spokesman. “It would be tremendously missed if it were unable to continue. It’s pushed us to make our own site better simply in terms of how easy it is to navigate. They’ve set a very high standard that we would like to match.”

The trouble, unsurprisingly, started during last year’s financial crisis. As some of the initial seed funding from Sloan was due to expire at the end of the 2008 fiscal year, Advocates for Children presented a plan for the site’s sustainability, according Wheaton. The parent organization had linked up with a for-profit media company, Time Out New York Kids, that had agreed to pay for half of the site’s operating costs. But when the markets plunged in the fall of 2008, Time Out New York Kids was unable to meet its commitments. A few other negotiations for future funding that had been in full swing when the panic hit also collapsed.

“Most foundations want you to come out on the other with end a plan on how to become self-sustaining,” Wheaton said. “And we had a plan. We had lots of plans; given unforeseen circumstances, some of those plans just didn’t pan out. It was a convergence of factors that happened last fall.”

Under these circumstances, Advocates for Children could only sustain its website budget until June 30, 2009. According to Wheaton, the vast majority of overhead was the “modest” salaries and benefits for full-time employees and freelancers, and travel and office expenses (staff work out of Advocates for Children’s offices on West 30th Street). The group had redesigned the website in the summer of 2008 in order to even further reduce the cost and time of maintenance.

The site let go four staffers and all freelancers: “published journalists, former teachers, professionals with years of experience with the public schools,” Wheaton laments.

She detailed some of the cuts on June 30th blog post: “The good news is that Insideschools will not go dark. The sad news is that we have had to let go some of our gifted and committed staff members. And given our severely constrained financial circumstances, we will be curtailing some of our features.”

The remaining staffers—just a couple of full- and part-timers—have secured some limited funding and are running a fundraising drive for individual donations, hoping to raise $10,000 from parents.

Editorial boards, education advocates and other concerned citizens are also speaking out about the site’s value.

“Are we nuts? With advocates raising a hue and cry over giving parents a greater voice in the schools, it is simply unbelievable that no one is rallying to save a website called Insideschools.org,” cried a June 14 editorial in the Daily News, which was met by several comments from parents praising the site. Writers at wonky policy sites like Gotham Gazette and Gotham Schools, which usually host non-opinionated forums, have expressed support for Insideschools’ mission. Other parenting and school websites and list-servs, like NYC Mom and Park Slope Parents, are running ads encouraging members to raise cash.

“We’re feeling a lot of love, but now what we really need to find is money or skilled people who care about city schools who are willing to work with us,” Hass said.

Currently, there is no official timeline: the staff says it will continue to work at a reduced capacity until there is funding to expand again. At press time, Insideschools was more than halfway to the initial $10,000 fundraising goal, having raised $7,362 as of July 13 through user donations. The group also recently snagged an additional $150,000 foundation grant from a soon-to-be announced source. Still, these influxes of cash represent just a fraction of operating costs, Wheaton says, given that the site needs several full-time staffers and part-time tech support even to run at a bare-bones capacity.

Savings may be found in other ways, by relying more on readers to update information, for example, and working with service centers and education graduate schools to conduct school visits. Recently laid-off or retired would-be writers may also jump at an opportunity to help out.

Like many media outlets these days, the website needs a new model, and staff are busy brainstorming and experimenting with ideas for keeping content fresh. That includes the ever-popular citizen journalism or crowd-sourcing: asking readers, en masse, to contribute a piece of information. But the staff doesn’t want the whole site to rely on crowd-sourcing for fear that it will lead to inequality in coverage, with a greater focus on big or high-performing schools.

“I’m optimistic because there are 1.1 million kids in school, and the parents really value what we’re doing,” Wheaton said. “If they know how they can help, they will.”

Children swarmed out of P.S. 290 Manhattan New School on the sunny afternoon of Sept. 8, shaded by scaffolding only feet above parents’ heads.
“They’re building for a long time,” said Anastasia Khusanou, whose son is in the 2nd grade.
“A year,” her son’s classmate chimes in.
The project currently underway concerns windows-but many wish it would add classrooms instead. The school, housed in a turn-of-the-century building on East 82nd Street near Second Avenue, was started with 125 students in 1994 and has swelled to more than 600: partly because a nearby school, P.S. 151, closed in 2000. The allure of talented teachers and administrators has also been a big draw for families who might otherwise have gone private. But much of the blame probably falls on new developments that have sprung up nearby in the past several years, bringing in more children than the school can handle.

Scott Stringer at a Sept. 5 press conference. His new report about school crowding found that between 2000 and 2007, up to 1,600 new students were added to Community Boards 6, 7 and 8 without any additional school seating. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

The city has designated P.S. 290-as well as 12 other public schools within the borders of community boards 6, 7 and 8-as overcrowded. Parent-funded teaching assistants shoulder some of the burden in large classrooms, but they can be cut if the money runs dry.
“We’re asked to pay for a teaching assistant fund,” said parent Cat Gannon, who has a daughter at P.S. 290. “There’s a lot of pressure on us to pay. Not many can afford it.”

Scott Stringer at a Sept. 5 press conference. His new report about school crowding found that between 2000 and 2007, up to 1,600 new students were added to Community Boards 6, 7 and 8 without any additional school seating.
Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

While administration and teachers were praised for making do with less, parents are also aware of what’s lost from educational programming when space becomes scarce.
“The art room is so tiny,” said parent Rebecca Clark. “They rarely are allowed to paint.”
The lack of a real auditorium is another factor that has affected students’ arts education, Clark added.
“As a lover of the arts it’s difficult to deal with,” she said. “There’s no room to put on plays.”
The city says it can deal with overcrowding and will make improvements in the next five-year capital plan, which outlines big facility projects like new school seats. But critics wonder whether enough is being done, and a new report from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer highlights problems in districts that aren’t as a whole considered in need of new seats-like the Upper West Side-but which have clear pockets of crowding.

It’s hard to miss the condominiums that are sprouting up around the city, particularly on the Upper East and West Sides-or the glossy marketing campaigns for these buildings that are geared toward families.
Sparked by parent complaints, Stringer began looking at the numbers of new developments versus public school space earlier this year. His first report on school crowding, released in April, compared the number of apartment units created to the number of new students in each community board district. An updated version of this first report was released Sept. 5.
Between 2000 and 2007, the report estimated that up to 1,600 new students were added to Community Boards 6 and 8 on the East Side, and Board 7 on the West Side, without any additional school seating.
“You can’t continue building high rises without doing proper planning for schools,” Stringer said at the press conference, flanked by several other elected officials. “Building permits are flying out the door, and we need to plan around it.”

While acknowledging that the city’s capital plan will direct money at overcrowded schools, Stringer’s report says more aggressive action is needed, especially with the amount of residential growth in the borough.
But the Department of Education already has some of the tools in place to address crowding, according to Jeff Shear, chief of staff to the deputy chancellor. Shear, who noted in an interview the planned addition of 5,000 seats in District 2, said that crowding can be alleviated through restructuring.

“Are there kids in a particular school who are attending from outside of the school zone or district? Are there nearby schools that are underutilized? There might be other ways to address the overcrowding,” Shear said.

In February, the department’s capital plan was amended to include 39 projects to expand capacity, with a goal of adding 25,000 seats in overcrowded school districts, thanks to $6.5 billion of state funding. With this money, the Murray Hill-Gramercy Park area will receive 1,010 seats between 2008 and 2012, and the Upper East Side will get 544, according to Stringer’s report. The Upper West Side, however, is not slated to get any more school seats-even though 1,093 new dwelling units were added since the beginning of 2008.
Part of the problem is that there’s no requirement that residential developments include new schools.
“Right now, you can build 20 new buildings, and there’s no provision for a school,” said West Side Council Member Gale Brewer. “It all has to be negotiated individually.”

P.S 290 parent Rebecca Clark, with her daughter, said she is worried that arts education is getting squeezed because of school crowding. Photo By: Dan Rivoli

Communities have to be lucky enough to have elected officials and other local leaders who are paying attention to new projects-and who can then work with developers to discuss the inclusion of education space. Sometimes it’s easier to get schools included in larger projects that go through the community board and City Council review and approval process, as a concession to ease local opposition. This is exactly what happened with the 9.8-acre East River Realty project south of the United Nations, which will include a K-8 school. Officials hope they can repeat the success with Extell’s project on Riverside South, which stretches south from West 72nd Street.
Extell is seriously considering an elementary school, according to company spokesman George Arzt, but negotiations are far from being finalized. However, he said that Extell would construct the school’s basic structure.

The other part of the problem, many critics say, is that the department is using an inaccurate metric to measure crowded schools. For example, if there is a pocket of overcrowded schools within a district that is under capacity, funds will be diverted to other districts in need of new school seats. This is the case on the West Side, which is not officially “overcrowded,” but it has several schools that are filled beyond capacity.
P.S. 9, on West 84th Street near Columbus Avenue, is 184 seats over capacity-although parents don’t seem to be too concerned about it, based on a handful of recent interviews.
“I understand that the classes have been pretty large, but there are a lot of adults in each class,” said parent John Lee.
There is, however, a concern that there will be an influx of new students in the future when nearby condominiums are complete.
East Side Council Member Jessica Lappin thinks it would make more sense to examine crowding within smaller boundaries than school districts. On the West Side, District 3 runs from West 59th to 122nd streets, while District 2 covers includes most of lower Manhattan, the Village, Midtown, Chelsea and the Upper East Side.
“The pockets of neighborhoods are different with the [School] district,” she said. “If you take it to a community board level, you have a much greater handle on schools.”
Community Board 8, for example, only covers East 59th to 96th streets.
An overarching question to all of this is about money: once the city figures out how many new seats are needed, can it afford to create them?
As the department drafts the budget for its next capital plan, Council Member Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee, said the plan must state how much money will be needed to solve overcrowding.
In the coming weeks, Council committees will hold hearings on the plan. And the final product, the Council Member said, must note the cost of providing every child with a seat to end crowding.
“If we need to bond out the money, then let’s do that,” Jackson said. “Tell us, the public, the parents, how much it’s going to cost.”

SUMMERTIME, AND THE READING’S EASY-OR AT LEAST IT USED TO BE:
I was going to rail against summer reading homework. I thought I’d complain about the school’s tentacle-like reach into our homes. The way assignments spoil the free-form pace of summer, leaving little wiggle room for boredom, the space in which new ideas flourish.
Assigning books is a far cry from my childhood summer reading days, when I’d crawl into the apple tree with a box of thin mints and Little Women until my mother made me climb down to set the table for dinner. [Read More]