At PS 163 on 97th Street, two trailers parked outside have become more like permanent wings of the building for the past 10 years.
These trailers provide additional classrooms as the school operates at 105 percent capacity, with at least two more classrooms full of students than it was built to hold, according to Helen Rosenthal, former chair of the Upper West Side Community Board 7. She predicted that the school is likely to see a huge influx in new students as the Columbus Square development—which includes five new apartment rental towers—nears completion on Columbus Avenue from 97th Street to 100th Street. Two of these residential buildings are already on the market.
Wendy Clapp-Shapiro, PS 163’s liaison to its local Community School District 3, said that since the development is still under construction, the school has not yet seen a major influx of new students. In the meantime, she is concerned that the new high rises will soon intensify an already critical situation.
“We are very concerned that there are 700 apartments in those five new buildings, and over the coming years we are concerned about having a large influx of students,” she said.
Clapp-Schapiro added that, although additional space for PS 163 in the Columbus Square development might have been beneficial, the school had no power to fight for it at the time. “Everything they did was within the zoning laws so there really was no leverage for people to say that they had to build school space. So there was nothing that the community board could hold them to,” she said of the unrestricted development.
Space and size
In order to meet class size maximums and hold onto its cluster rooms—which are rooms shared by the whole school as space for science, art, music, and computer labs—PS 163 has resorted to these trailers to house kindergarten classes.
Yet “trailers are not a permanent solution,” Rosenthal said, explaining that she and other CB7 members have begun to seek solutions to overcrowding in schools located in the north part of CB7’s neighborhood.
The school has formed a committee to address the lack of space. “We’re working on it, but we don’t have anything to present publicly yet,” Clapp-Shapiro said. PS 163 principal Virginia Pepe did not return multiple calls for comment.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a non-profit working to reduce class sizes around the city, said that overcrowding is a citywide problem that has become particularly potent on the Upper West Side in the shadow of large new developments.
“This year on the Upper West Side it’s getting quite critical,” Haimson said. “Children’s education has been dramatically eroded because of the overcrowding.”
Although the Department of Education has added space in certain areas of the city, she said that this has been merely symbolic and not enough to accommodate the growing number of students. She noted that 500 public school students were put on waiting lists for their schools’ kindergarten classes this fall and, according to Haimson’s estimates, the Upper West Side will need about 2500 new seats for the upcoming year.
“Despite the fact that we’ve been warning the Department of Education that the crisis is getting worse, we haven’t yet seen an adequate response,” she added.
Will Havemann, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education, countered by saying that overcrowding and class size do not necessarily correlate.
“Overcrowding is a function simply of how many students are in a building, and how many students that building was designed to accommodate,” Havemann said. “Class size is a function both of space and the number of teachers that a school can hire.”
DOE estimates show that there has only been one percent of growth between 2008 and 2009 in the eligible public school population for PS 163, according to Rosenthal.
But Sheldon Fine, a CB7 member and participant in the borough-wide Task Force on School Overcrowding, said that a systematic change was needed. “I think there needs to be a trigger when new developers come into an area that forces the DOE’s hands and the city administration’s hands to begin planning for the additional population,” he said, adding that there lacked a sense of local urgency.
Comments
We're looking for comments that are interesting and substantial. If your comments are excessively self-promotional or obnoxious you will be banned from commenting. Consult the comment FAQ and legal terms.