Editorial

School crowding crisis

There are school crowding problems all over the city, but the issue is particularly acute in Chelsea and other nearby neighborhoods—and it may get worse faster than anywhere else.

Borough President Scott Stringer released a report a few weeks ago classifying Chelsea as one particular area threatened by not keeping school construction on pace with new development. Of all the neighborhoods studied, Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen ranked as having the highest amount of new dwelling units added over the past eight years—nearly doubling its closest competitor, Lower Manhattan. With that figure, a grand total of zero new school seats have been introduced since 2000, while approximately 1,200-1,700 new students have moved in.

With this rapid development in Chelsea—seen in the towers and gleaming architectural wonders now rising on the West Side—“existing school capacity is insufficient to meet the demands of new residential growth if it continues at its current rate,” the report stated.

It went to project that 110 school seats would be added over the next five years to a neighborhood already bursting at the seams, hardly enough to keep up with the 151-215 new students that have arrived each year since 2000.

The situation in the nearby Flatiron-Madison Square area, as well the Village-Soho and Lower Manhattan, is even worse, with those neighborhoods earning “high risk” tags in the report. According to Stringer, the Flatiron-Madison Square area had the distinction of housing no elementary schools and just one middle school.

School crowding is an issue that Community Board 4 became intimately familiar with during the Hudson Yards rezoning process, when it was determined that two additional elementary schools would be required to meet the predicted population influx. However, neither has been delivered, according to Board 4 Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Land Use Committee chairperson Anna Hayes Levin. She said that those additional 110 seats would come from an expansion of PS 51 north of the Hudson Yards, and that development of the railyards might also include a 630-seat joint elementary-middle school. But “that doesn’t address the overcrowding problem at all,” Levin said, because all those seats should be going solely for K-5 students.

As well as simply adding more seats, we think the city’s School Construction Authority needs to find more creative ways to build these facilities on already overtaxed land by incorporating innovative, vertical design techniques. The SCA should take note of current residential and commercial construction in the area and investigate incorporating classrooms into existing or planned developments.

But before any architectural improvements can occur, the SCA at least has to become a more active participant in the community planning process. It would benefit from regularly attending local meetings and working harder to coordinate its school construction activities with building activities.

Board 4 has yet to take up the issue as it relates to the report, though district manager Robert Benfatto said its discussion is pending.

But with more students still streaming in, and no construction yet under way, Levin added, “it’s really too late.”