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It’s the priciest fix to school overcrowding yet.
Officials at a popular lower Manhattan public school have outraged dozens of parents whose kids are wait-listed for kindergarten by suggesting that they consider a $16,000-a-year private school down the block instead.
In an e-mail to prospective parents, PS 276 staffers gave parents scant hope of landing an open slot while touting the opening of “The Learning Experience Children’s Academy,” a new private school set to open next week.
The sales pitch hailed the private school’s class-size limits of 16 kids, and noted that it models its program on the Department of Education’s “core curriculum” for kindergarten.
Unmentioned in the e-mail from parent coordinator Erica Weldon — on which PS 276 principal Terri Ruyter is copied — is the private school’s price tag of $1,600 per month for 10 months, with summers off.
“For [them] to tell us to consider private is just unconscionable,” said Karen Behrens, whose 4-year-old daughter is wait-listed at PS 276. “That’s not why we’re living in lower Manhattan, paying the rents we pay, the taxes we pay, to live down there. We live down there for the schools.”
It’s the second time in recent years that parents in the perennially overcrowded downtown districts have been offended by DOE solutions to their problems.
Failed Schools Chancellor Cathie Black infamously joked last year that parents should try “birth control” to relieve school overcrowding.
“It’s a slap in the face,” City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents lower Manhattan, said of the private-school push.
“We need more school seats, not a presumption that because these families live downtown they can shell out tens of thousands of dollars for private school.”
Asked about the e-mail, DOE officials provided The Post with a “follow-up” message from Ruyter, the principal.
“We are confident that all children on the wait list will receive the opportunity to attend an excellent NYCDOE elementary school,” Ruyter wrote to parents yesterday. “It was not the intention of the school or of the Department of Education to recommend that families seek alternative options to a public-school education.”