Opinion

Lost in space

The familiar symbols of the post-9/11 renaissance of Downtown Manhattan, the new skyscrapers, transit hubs and apartment buildings, may soon be replaced by a new symbol — hundreds of preschool children with no place to go to school and a Department of Education that denies a problem exists.

Downtown Manhattan is growing more than four times faster than any other area in the city. Elementary schools that opened there in 2009, planned to grow at one grade per year, already face severe overcrowding. PS/IS 276 in southern Battery Park City enrolled 124 kindergartners this September but was designed to take just 75. The school has over 160% of its intended enrollment. Next year it won’t have space for more than half of its zoned kindergartners.

PS/IS 397, just a few hundred feet from the Department of Education’s headquarters, has 84 first-graders but was built to hold no more than 50 children per grade. By 2013, or 2014 at the latest, it won’t have enough classrooms for its zoned kindergartners.

Parents are worried that the promised middle school, already delayed four years by the DOE, will instead be diverted to hold the overflow of younger children and will never open.

The older Downtown schools, PS 89 and PS 234, are also overcrowded far above their intended capacities. The latter had to eliminate pre-K years ago to accommodate overcrowding. Its art and science rooms are in a nearby community center. Even the new Peck Slip School, opened last month in temporary quarters at Tweed Courthouse, will not have enough space for all of its kindergartners in 2013 and 2014.

Worse overcrowding lies ahead. Downtown’s schools will have room for 475 kindergartners in 2015, the year that Peck’s new building opens, but 472 kindergartners enrolled this September. These kids were born in 2007, but between then and 2010, when the 2015 kindergarten class was born, births in Downtown Manhattan rose 32%, implying that Downtown will have about 650 kindergartners in 2015 and run 175 seats short just for that grade.

This shortage will build each year across the six elementary grades. Once the seats needed for pre-kindergarten seats are also added, Downtown urgently needs 1,200 more elementary-school seats, as much as two large elementary schools.

Parents and elected officials have tried to convince the Department of Education to fund and build these additional new schools. The DOE’s response is that Downtown Manhattan doesn’t need any more new schools and that plenty of seats are available.

The forecasts they roll out to support this surprising position, developed mostly by two out-of-state consulting firms, have serious flaws resulting from an adamant refusal to plan at the neighborhood level.

The DOE forecasts assume that Downtown has the same rate of population growth and birth rate as all of Manhattan. But while Manhattan grew by 3.2% from 2000-2010, with a 2010 birth rate of 12.3 per thousand population, the corresponding figures for Downtown are 77% and 17.8 per thousand.

The number of children under 5 living Downtown grew by 147%, as compared to less than 1% in all of Manhattan. As a result, the DOE forecasts have been far too low. Downtown’s kindergarten class has grown by as much in one year as the consultants’ forecasts said it would in an entire decade.

The DOE does attempt to compensate for additional seats needed when new apartments are built. Here again, it unfortunately assumes that the per-apartment adjustment for Downtown should be the same as for all of Manhattan, even though Downtown is attracting a much higher proportion of young couples and families. This disconnect removes the forecasts further from reality, since more than 20,000 new apartments have been built in Downtown after 9/11, and over 6,000 more are under construction or planned.

Perhaps the DOE refuses to ask the question of how many school seats Downtown needs because it knows it will not like the answer.

Sadly for Downtown, the DOE prefers to try to run out the clock rather than act, knowing that in a little over 14 months school overcrowding becomes the new mayor’s problem.

Over $20 billion has been invested Downtown since 9/11, and the city has given billions of dollars in tax incentives to developers to build apartments, yet it refuses to spend about $100 million, less than one half of one percent of this amount to provide badly needed schools to the families that heeded the mayor’s calls not to forget Downtown after 9/11. This inaction creates an illusion of financial responsibility, but the cost to the city if families move out because of school overcrowding Downtown will be much higher than the cost to build the schools.

Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE must acknowledge Downtown’s school overcrowding crisis, stop using faulty forecasts as an excuse for inaction, forecast enrollments accurately, and fund the new elementary school seats that Downtown needs. Although the mayor leaves office on Jan. 1, 2014, his administration will still be responsible if many hundreds of Downtown children have no place to go to school in the coming years, and that problem will become part of its final 9/11 legacy.

Eric Greenleaf is a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at NYU and a parent of two sixth graders in Downtown Manhattan.