MAYBE it’s time to recon sider public school. It’s curtains for Greenwich Village HS – the exclusive, insanely expensive private school backed by A-listers including Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and actor John Leguizamo.
The rope line was to crack open this September for the elite Brents and Britneys who were granted entry into the fledging institution. The place was designed not so much as a school, but as a venue in which kids might rub elbow pads with Pulitzer Prize winners, learn directing from Oscar nominees and sleep late in the mornings.
But abruptly, late last week, plans for the school, scheduled to cost an eye-popping $34,729 a year – down to $1,000 for what a Web site snarkily called the “token poor” – were abandoned indefinitely.
Officials pulled the plug after a “huge chunk” of funds promised by donors never materialized, and probably never will, Vanity Fair deputy editor Aimee Bell, co-president of the school’s board of trustees, told me. Greenwich Village HS was set to send out acceptance letters this week to the lucky few, or “Sorry” letters to the rejects, when the decision was made to scrap it.
“Our new goal was to open in 2010,” Bell said. “Who knows what’s going to happen?”
Instead, trustees will meet this week to decide if it makes sense to continue paying rent on the Vandam Street townhouse – technically in SoHo – that was to house the school. Also, whether they should keep on a new headmaster, dean and other staff who were hired to run the now empty shell.
It didn’t look this way just a month ago.
Greenwich Village HS was dreamed up with all the hype and drama of a Vanity Fair Oscar party. Architects were brought in to design a space replete with coffee bars and lounges, but containing not one classroom or desk – just “seminar rooms” featuring oval conference tables.
An advisory board was assembled featuring New School head and former senator Bob Kerrey. The program was heavy on “collaboration” – but it frowned on the thing that put us on the moon: competition.
Just last month, plans were well under way to welcome 45 lucky ninth-graders this fall. Eighty students applied for the slots. Eventually, the school was to enroll 300 students, grades 9 through 12.
But now, the building is shuttered. A phone that just weeks ago rang into school offices uptown was disconnected Friday.
One disappointed parent is Bell. She wanted her kids to attend.
“I’m just a Village parent,” she said. “This was really about the kids. We were trying to do something good and non-elitist,” she assured me.
“Right now, we are very vulnerable.”
The kids will have to wait until they graduate to crack the rope line.