Integration Plans Move Ahead on the Upper West Side

The Department of Education on Thursday proposed rezoning three schools on the Upper West side to alleviate crowding, while also promoting integration in the neighborhood.

One proposal outlined at a School District 3 meeting, involved moving P.S. 191 on West 61st Street, which draws a high concentration of students from a local housing project, to a new building a few blocks away. Another nearby school, P.S. 199, would also get a new catchment area. The old P.S. 191 building would become either a brand new school or the new home for P.S. 452, which is now on West 77th Street.

Sarah Turchin, the department's director of planning for Manhattan, said this solution would reduce kindergarten waiting lists at P.S. 199 and also prevent low-income students from being isolated in P.S. 191. She estimated that each of the three schools would have between 17 and 22 percent of students who receive free and reduced price lunch under this rezoning plan.

"We have a real opportunity here to equalize the percentage of students who are receiving free and reduced price lunch, and work towards our goals," she said, "to integrate our schools in the city and in District 3."

Under the Department of Education's more limited scenario, P.S. 452 would stay put. A new school would open in the old P.S. 191 building, but P.S. 452 and four other elementary schools south of West 89th St. would see their zoning lines change to reduce kindergarten waiting lists and overcrowding.

Many attendees came from P.S. 452, where a large number of parents oppose any relocation effort.

One man, who did not want to give his name, asked why the school should move at all if the Department of Education could create a new school inside the former home of P.S. 191.

"It still does eliminate all of their overcrowding issues and it increases the percentage of free and reduced lunch students in the southern part of the district," he explained. "Why would you then ask 452 families, who have already been rezoned once, to basically pick up the school that they have, and their neighborhood school that they've grown and they've developed, to move it to a new location?"

The principal of P.S. 452 and many staffers have said a move is necessary because their building is not only overcrowded, but inappropriate for elementary school students. They share the building with a middle school and a K-8 school.

Other parents and residents asked why the city officials were not proposing ways to integrate all of the District 3 schools, which includes parts of Harlem. 

"I guess I'm getting less patient with this process in light of what's happened in the last two weeks," said Lizabeth Sostre, a former teacher and member of the District 3 education and equity task force. "We can tinker around with the southern end and we can change the lines. But are we really addressing systemic racism and segregation in our district? We're not."

Turchin and Community Education Council 3 member Kimberly Watkins said a district-wide change would require a lot more planning, and that the department was trying to solve the current problem of overcrowding while also addressing segregation.

Both plans will be presented at a District 3 meeting on July 20. Turchin said she hoped the department would settle on one plan that it could present to the Panel for Educational Policy by late November. 

Downtown Plan Moves Forward

While the Upper West Side contemplates integration on a limited scale, a more ambitious proposal by District 1 in Lower Manhattan took a step forward. The Department of Education confirmed that it has given a contract to Michael Alves, the Cambridge-based consultant who has designed controlled choice admissions systems for other districts around the country.

Under this system, families applying for both prekindergarten and kindergarten would rank their top choice schools. The district would then use an algorithm to spread low-income students around more evenly, so they aren't highly concentrated in certain schools.

Luke Henry, president of the district's Community Education Council, said Alves will use data for students who enrolled in pre-k and kindergarten last fall to run a beta test for distributing students through the new criteria. "That will be presented to the community and the community will have an opportunity to provide their feedback" in September and October, he said. 

The district wants a controlled choice plan approved by December — just in time for when parents apply for kindergarten and pre-k applications for the 2017-18 school year.

Alves' contract was originally worth almost $750,000 over two years to work with District 1 and District 13 in Brooklyn. But according to District 13 community education council president David Goldsmith, Alves wound up doing very little in Brooklyn because of delays with his contract. As a result, Goldsmith said there will be serious modifications to the cost. But he said the district still wants to move ahead with an "equitable student enrollment policy" for middle schools.