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.
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Learning a lesson
Without pressure from the DOE, the Columbus Square developer Stellar Management has not planned any construction for local public schools.
Talia Mann, a spokesperson for Stellar Management, wrote in an e-mail that the company does not “have formal data on the increase in children to the development.”
In response to questions of overcrowding in public schools, Mann instead cited two private schools—The Mandell School and the Solomon Schechter School—which are both moving into space at Columbus Square.
Rosenthal said the city should hold the developer accountable for responding to the growth in student population due to its new residences. If PS 163 continues to struggle with overcrowding, she said, “we’re going to have demand for four additional classrooms in four or five years, and we’re trying to talk to the DOE about that.” The next four months will be pivotal to determining how the community and city will cope with the overcrowding, she added.
Fine agreed, saying, “There’s no solution available for parents raising children there, other than adding to the overcrowding.”
“People are just beginning to move in so there aren’t existing members of the community to organize—it’s just the schools who will have to deal with the situation,” he added.
Still time for the South
This frustration has led the community board to take action in a comparable overcrowding scenario at the southern end of the district. Riverside South, another large mixed commercial and residential development between West 59th and 61st streets along the Hudson River, has already brought an influx of students.
PS 199 on West 70th Street experienced an increase from five kindergarten classes with 20 students each in 2006 to nine kindergarten classes with 23 students each this past fall, Rosenthal said. This year, 120 of the new students come from the new Trump Towers development, and she added, “If the new buildings hadn’t been built we wouldn’t have had this problem.”
While the community board is currently focused on Riverside South, which is in the planning stage of researching school options, Rosenthal said that there are some key differences between the north and south developments.
In 1996, when the community board was negotiating with the city and the Riverside South developer—Extell—they reached an agreement that the developer would notify the city when it had built a number of new apartments that warranted a new school. At that point, the Extell would have to give the city the option of buying a plot of land to build a school.
Rosenthal said that two years ago—after four or five buildings had gone up—the developer reached the threshold number. Yet the Department of Education did not see the demand for a new school.
“We are very concerned about this,” Rosenthal said.
Havemann of the DOE said that the Bloomberg administration has made an unprecedented effort to reduce overcrowding in public schools throughout the city, though he could not comment on specific developments.
“We recognize that enrollment in some neighborhoods is going up, so we target our school construction to where that new space will be needed most,” he said. “This year we opened 23 new school buildings, and next year we’re on track to open a large number of buildings as well.”
Rosenthal said they are looking for a temporary location to incubate new classes that will ultimately be moved to the Riverside South neighborhood, once the DOE has built a new school on that site.
Meanwhile, Clapp-Shapiro said that PS 163 parents remain optimistic about their school to the north.
She said, “We feel like we’re on top of it, and we’re certainly following things closely, and we’re still interested in working with the neighbors on our block.”
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