An Idea to Solve Overcrowding Receives Emotional Response on Upper West Side

Facing persistent problems of crowding on the Upper West Side, and the thorny issue of school segregation, the City's Department of Education is considering another idea that's met with sharply divided responses.

The plan - which is still in the early stage - involves P.S. 452. The small school currently shares space with two other schools on West 77th Street. The city is looking into moving the school 16 blocks south, into the building now occupied by P.S. 191.  P.S. 191 would relocate into a brand new building right near its current home on Amsterdam and 61st Street, that was originally going to be used for a different school. 

Supporters, including P.S. 452 staffers, see an opportunity to have a bigger space of their own. They told an audience of more than 100 parents Monday night that the new site would be more appropriate because it was built for an elementary school. Currently, they described how first graders and fifth graders have to share the same bathroom; how young children overhear the language of middle schoolers; and how there's no space to store musical instruments or have recess indoors. 

But the majority of families at Monday's meeting voiced anger and hurt about a proposal they thought would destroy a beloved school that only opened six years ago to deal with neighborhood crowding. Some wore buttons saying "Do Not Move 452." One man said the move would "destroy" the school.

"Stop playing musical chairs with our children's education," said Jessica Donner to applause, referring to a New York Times article. 

Several parents said traveling an extra 16 blocks with very young children would be too difficult, because it would add time to already hectic commutes.

"We don't know if we would be able to do it," added Carolyn Kalos, who said she races to get to the school to pick up her twins and can't afford a babysitter. 

City officials said they wouldn't propose new zoning lines until the fall, and that the entire plan would need approval from the local community education council. But if the school's catchment zone did change, it would presumably include the P.S. 191 neighborhood. Many children at that school come from a nearby housing project and the P.S. 191 population is almost entirely black and Latino. By contrast, P.S. 452 is largely white. 

Last year, the city dropped a controversial plan to change the zone lines around P.S. 191 and a school on West 70th Street, P.S. 199, in order to achieve more diversity. Several parents saw the latest proposal on Monday as an attempt to go back to the drawing board by using their school, which is even further uptown from P.S. 199. They insisted their opposition wasn't based on diversity, but was solely about keeping their neighborhood school.

"To portray any opposition as classist or racist is as bad as it can get," said actor and comedian Jason Jones.

Brian Byrd, who's black, described growing up in a New Jersey district where he disliked having to switch schools at an early age because of a desegregation plan. He said New York City wasn't even solving the problem of school segregation with its plan to move P.S. 452.

"Here's the thing," he said of his New Jersey experience. "The diversity plan did not focus on just one school. All the schools that were reconfigured were done in such a way that everyone shared the pain of meeting the goal of diversity."

But a few parents voiced support for the move and said they were excited to have a new campus. Nancy Becker, who has a fourth grader, said the city has to deal with the fact that schools in the southern end of the Upper West Side have vastly different populations. As for a longer commute with children, she said, "We shlep them to camps, we shlep them to after school programs... That's just the nature of urban living."

At the end of the nearly three hour-long meeting, principal David Scott Parker said he appreciated the concerns of the families. But he said he would like to serve children better with more space, and that "it does seem that we could serve a larger more diverse population."