The Buzz

BLISSFULLY LATE FOR SCHOOL: We tried for weeks to check in with Clara Hemphill for our two Back-to-School issues to no avail. Hemphill, founder of Inside Schools.org and author of the best-selling parents bible “New York City’s Best Public Schools,” had been in Europe with her family this summer, only to return this week, happily unaware of terms like “Contract for Excellence” or the latest debate about its relationship to class size. While Hemphill told us to trust advocates like Javier Gomez of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity to give us the scoop, she did caution that all the emphasis on class size should not distract from core issues of competence and quality of instruction. “Some of the worst schools out there have really small class sizes, and some of the best the largest,” said Hemphill, in part because parents vote with their feet. “Schools that parents perceive as really good—parents will fight to get their kids in, even if classes are big. The ones they see as bad? They’ll do everything they can to get them out.”

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO ECHO: After three-plus weeks of messing around with the story about the Hotel Breslin, the SRO whose tireless tenants are trying to fend off its conversion to luxury quarters, we were hardly surprised when Breslin Tenants Association President Stephen Colvin reported a phone call from Gregory Beyer of the New York Times. “I told him I only wanted to talk to you,” Colvin said with a startling loyalty to Chelsea Now. Sensibly enough, we learned from co-president Lacrasia Duchein that the association relented after Chelsea Now finished the last of our four-part series. “The New York Times came to call. But you got it first!” she wrote. We contacted Mr. Beyer, whose pieces often adorn the paper’s The City section, and he was gracious: “My story will definitely mention your series, and I hope prompt readers to check it out, since I just won’t have the space to reach into the story’s more remote corners.” If Times readers do stop by, we hope they’ll also peek at Chelsea Now’s less remote corners, like Nicole Davis’ fine Arts section or Al Amateau’s never-miss Police Blotter.

SPEAKING OF CLASS SIZE FOR 40 YEARS: Velma Hill, the civil rights heroine, Penn South resident and Community Board 4 member featured in this week’s Back-to-School section, chided us for not including the United Federation of Teachers in last week’s story on class-size reduction. The union, she wants the record to show, has been fighting for class-size reduction since 1967.

To trump a Trump: After Chelsea Now ran the story last month of the Soho Alliance’s getting set to possibly sue Donald Trump and co. over their planned 42-story condo-hotel at Spring and Varick Sts., some wondered why the alliance waited until Trump had already put up four floors to get their act in gear. The answer is simple, said Sean Sweeney, the alliance’s director: They had to file Freedom of Information Law requests with the Department of Buildings and Securities and Exchange Commission to get the information they needed to make their case to try to convince D.O.B. to pull Trump’s building permit. Even after The Villager story came out, Sweeney said they were still waiting for more information that they had FOIL’d. P.S., Andrew Berman, director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, objected to the article referring to G.V.S.H.P. as a “quiet supporter” of the alliance’s effort. While G.V.S.H.P. isn’t a party to what eventually could become a lawsuit — since they don’t get involved in lawsuits — he said they’re hardly quiet in their opposition to the towering condo-hotel.