You want to see school overcrowding? We’ll show you school overcrowding.
So said parents, teachers, students, and community members who protested and packed the auditorium of a Williamsburg school to capacity at a public hearing on Monday night to register their displeasure at a proposal to shoehorn a third school into that building, which already houses two.
“I was the first speaker and I congratulated the [Department of Education],” said Robert Burstein, an English as a Second Language teacher at PS 196 elementary school, which has shared space with MS 582, a middle school, for the past decade. “Because they have managed to galvanize and organize this community in a way I’ve never seen in my 26 years of teaching here — unfortunately against an insane proposal.”
The Department of Education wants to move a second middle school into the building on Bushwick Avenue between Meserole Avenue and Scholes Street, but the full house at Monday’s meeting on the proposal — 700 people showed up, some 90 people spoke, most of them skewering the proposal, and more were turned away by police, according to Burstein — said that three is a crowd.
The city claims that the schoolhouse that currently teaches 610 students is at two-thirds capacity and could easily accommodate a third school, but opponents counter that many classes and clubs rely on the wiggle room afforded by extra classrooms and say that putting 30 students in every room would kill electives and extracurricular activities, not to mention their kids’ ability to focus.
Department of Education spokesman Harry Hartfield declined to specifically address opponents’ claims but reiterated an earlier statement saying that the new school would help fix “a broken school system” by lifting poor graduation rates and providing parents with more options.
District 14 Community Education Council, a local advisory panel that covers Greenpoint, Williambrg, Bushwick and some of Bedford-Stuyvesant, had requested a new middle school somewhere on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, but even its members oppose the tri-school proposal.
The opposition has gathered steam in recent weeks, drawing the support of elected officials including Councilwoman Diana Reyna (D–Williamsburg), her successor Councilman-elect Antonio Reynoso, and Councilwoman Nydia Velazquez (D–Bushwick), and Burstein said he hopes the huge turnout at Monday’s meeting might make the city think twice ahead of an Oct. 30 Panel for Education Policy meeting, where he says the plan is likely to be rubber-stamped by appointees of Mayor Bloomberg.
A protest outside the school ahead of the hearing drew 300 and speakers pointed to the outgoing mayor as the brains behind this and other controversial co-location schemes and painted the effort to squelch the moves as a waiting game.
“We have 70 days left of this little tyrant,” said Brian Leavy DeVale, principal of PS 257 on nearby Cook Street.
In hopes of putting the brakes on the fast-moving process, Williamsburg Cares for Education, an opposition group of parents and teachers, is demanding another sit-down with the education department’s Division of Portfolio Planning, which introduced the triple-decker idea.
“We’re hoping that between now and [Oct. 30] the office of portfolio will meet with us again and truly take into account community input, which is severely lacking, not give lip service to it,” Burstein said.
— with Ellen Moynihan
