‘Incubator School’ Approved for P.S. 158 Building
By Sarah Seltzer
Posted by Our Town on January 28, 2010 · View Comments
In a victory for local parent groups, District 2’s Community Education Council unanimously approved a new plan to relieve Upper East Side school crowding at a Jan. 13 meeting. The resolution they adopted called for a new incubator school in the P.S. 158 building, on York Avenue between East 77th and 78th streets. This new school, which will give priority to students zoned for overcrowded neighborhood schools like P.S. 59, P.S. 183 and P.S. 290, is expected to open in fall 2010. Parent council members are also working to come up with new zoning lines for the neighborhood, which would probably be implemented during the 2011-2012 school year.
The new school “ensures everyone will have access to a nurturing high performing school near their homes,” said Andy Lachman, a member of the group Parent Leaders of the Upper East Side, or PLUS.
The agreement is the result of several rounds of negotiation between the Department of Education and local parent leaders. At the end of 2009, the department presented the parent council with four options—two in November and two in December—for making use of available space in the neighborhood to ease pressure on crowded primary schools. Parents, particularly PLUS and the P.S. 158 community, were disappointed by the first round of proposals, which called for expanding the size of P.S. 158, a K-5 school. But support coalesced around the idea of launching another K-5 school in the P.S. 158 building that would grow to 400 seats. The new school would eventually be housed in the old Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat building, on East 63rd Street, when space becomes available in a few years once P.S. 59 relocates to its new home.
The department responded to this plan in December with a revised option of its own that included the incubator school, as well as zoning proposals. The parent council went ahead with the idea, although it declined to address zoning yet, saying that more time was needed to look at population growth data and create boundaries that made sense in the long term. They also wanted residents to have a chance to contribute to the process.
“We’re very close to getting the data we need to work on our analysis and have zoning lines in place for 2011,” said Sarah Chu, who heads the parent council’s zoning subcommittee. “We also want to give parents more lead time in terms of thinking about zoning. The lower Manhattan zoning meetings [for District 2] were highly populated because people had been dealing with zoning for years. But on the Upper East Side, people are just starting to hear about it.”
In addition to tackling rezoning, the parent council will be overseeing the inception of the new elementary school and helping make sure parents are involved in its creation. That includes ensuring that the admissions process makes it easy for parents to send children to schools that are close to home.
