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The gym at P.S. 18 in the northeastern most corner of Inwood is barely a gym. There are no windows and two large columns are centered in the room.
“That’s the play space for over 800 kids. It’s the only play space, there’s not really an adjacent park and the play yard is an asphalt yard, and small to boot,” said Sarah Morgridge, chief of staff for City Council Member Robert Jackson.
The building, which houses two schools on 9th Avenue, is a former candy factory leased by the city’s Department of Education.
Morgridge said the school is a band-aid for a district that was once severely overcrowded. She believes the district is still crowded and will stay crowded even after the new elementary school on Sherman Avenue and W. 204th Street opens this fall.
The new building, however, is the last one the district will see for at least five years – the DOE has no plans to add more capacity to School District 6 in Northern Manhattan. Instead, it will turn its efforts downtown where eight more schools are planned for a district just beginning to experience what has been a decades-long condition uptown.
The funding for new schools, like the new one on Sherman Avenue, comes from the School Construction Authority’s five-year Capital Plan. The Sherman Avenue school was one of three schools allocated in the 2004-2009 plan. Those schools came only after lobbying and an amendment to the plan, and two of them were later dropped as the district’s enrollment declined.
The next five-year plan calls for no new seats for Northern Manhattan, despite the continued use of leased sites, temporary structures and trailers. That is how Washington Heights Academy has functioned for the last three years on Nagle Avenue. It will move into Sherman Avenue in the fall.
“It isn’t as critically overcrowded as it was,” said Morgridge. Her boss Robert Jackson, before running for office, was a lead plaintiff in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, a landmark case focused on Northern Manhattan that set bare minimums for class size and education in New York State.
Morgridge, a parent and former school board member, believes the district is still reeling from the massive overcrowding of the 1990s.
“Some of the things we accepted as temporary or emergency solutions, such as transportable classrooms, they should be gone with this decline” in student population, Morgridge said. “With this decline every school should have its full complement or at the very least its minimum number of art rooms, dance rooms, science labs, all the specialized spaces that enhance and support a sound basic education’s curriculum.”
According to the most recent Enrollment-Capacity-Utilization Report, known as the “blue book,” elementary schools in District 6 have only 59 of the types of cluster rooms Morgridge described. The state standards as outlined in the Contract for Excellence call for a minimum of 73.
“If you were to reduce class sizes to the level that the Contract for Excellence calls for, we should have 76 cluster rooms,” Morgridge said. “So that gap is significant, that’s a minimum standard, and we’re not meeting the minimum standard for classrooms.”
A look at the buildings themselves point to overcrowding.
P.S. 18 shares its leased site with P.S. 278 in Inwood’s industrial area. There’s a car wash next door, and last summer the building was regularly shaken by blasts from a tunnel ConEdison was digging underneath the Harlem River.
“Lunch starts at 10 a.m. in that school, that’s indicative of overcrowding,” Morgridge said.
However, in the new Capital Plan, District 2, a relatively more wealthy area in Lower Manhattan, is the only district slated to receive new schools – eight of them.
The decision to pour money into the district is justified by the DOE, Morgridge said, because the department is seeing indications of overcrowding already, and predict it to get worse.
That ignores communities that have suffered overcrowding for a long time, she argues.
Morgridge describes a black hole that engulfs art rooms and gyms – and funding.
“It’s not that [the SCA is] changing their focus away from District 6, it’s the flaw in how they calculate their data that leads them away from District 6,” Morgridge said.
“What we’ve seen is when overcrowding has been perpetuated for a long time, the building capacities expand on paper. You permanently lose your gym, you permanently lose your auditorium, you lose these specialty rooms into classrooms so on paper it appears you are not overcrowded. That false conclusion will lead the SCA and DOE to concentrate their resources in areas where overcrowding is emerging, which is the case with this Capital Plan.”
The DOE declined to speak in depth about the Capital Plan for this article, but spokesperson Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld provided the following emailed response:
“We closely monitor a range of data to make sure we’re building new school seats where they are needed most, and we update our plans every single year. While we would like to build new schools in every part of the city, we need to prioritize in these tough economic times, and unfortunately that means some neighborhoods receive less capital dollars than others.”
Editor’s Note: This article was developed through the New York Community Media Alliance’s Ethnic and Community Media Press Fellowship – Developing an Education Beat.
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