New York, NY —
Parents anxious about the waiting lists for some Manhattan kindergarten classes aren't finding much comfort in the Department of Education's promise to find everyone a seat nearby, if not within the school of their choice. Dozens of Manhattan parents rallied with their children at City Hall yesterday calling on the city to alleviate overcrowding. WNYC's Beth Fertig has more.
REPORTER: Nicky Perry is something of a local icon in the West Village. She owns the restaurant Tea and Sympathy and has lived in the neighborhood for almost 20 years - just down the street from PS 41. But her five year old daughter is on a waiting list with 89 other children to get a kindergarten seat this fall.
PERRY: This is the biggest catastrophe, this is ridiculous, unbelievable.
REPORTER: Perry was standing on the steps of City Hall in the protest with other parents. She says the Department of Education should have anticipated overcrowding in the Village and other parts of Manhattan because of what was until recently a booming residential real estate market.
PERRY: If they gave a damn they would have done something about this a year ago, two years ago, three years ago.
REPORTER: The community education council for District 2 in Manhattan claims 35 percent of its schools are over capacity. Alex Stachelberg, whose son has a kindergarten seat at PS 3 this fall, worries about crowding.
STACHELBERG: If you keep building all of these family friendly buildings in a very nice area with great schools, these schools are going to get overcrowded and now we're here and these kids are going to suffer. And this is their early childhood experience we're talking about and their early education experience.
REPORTER: The Department of Education says it expects the wait lists to disappear in most parts of Manhattan once families accept their gifted and talented placements later this spring and choose other schools. Those still on wait lists will be given several options within their neighborhoods according to John White, the chief executive in charge of planning new schools. White says the real solution involves creating more seats.
WHITE: To find real estate in Manhattan that is school appropriate, to work with developers, to build those properties and to ensure that they're the right properties for school usage is an incredibly complex and longterm prospect so we're just beginning to see the fruits.
REPORTER: White says more than 3000 seats will open in Manhattan over the next couple of years and another three thousand are included in the next five-year capital plan. Because school construction plans are set every five years, White says the Bloomberg administration didn't get a crack at the problem until 2005.
But for a mayor who promised to be held accountable in exchange for control of the schools, some parents think Bloomberg is failing his own test. Patrick Sullivan is the Manhattan borough president's representative to the panel on educational policy.
SULLIVAN: I don't see seats coming on line in the neighborhoods where we have the most acute problems. And I wish the department would stop evading their responsibility and passing the buck. They've been administrating the schools for seven, eight years now.
REPORTER: Long enough to know the controversy won't go away soon. The department of education has yet to reveal its estimates for the wait lists in other parts of the city, and parents in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn say they're also worried about crowding. For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.