Numbers game: rebuilding the Armory with school seats in mind
by Morgan Bettex & Mathilde Piard
There isn’t even time for lunch.
In the overcrowded public schools in the Bronx, students stand in lines that wind down hallways to enter the cafeteria. Then there’s another line and long wait for food.
The experience has become so frustrating that many students just don’t bother to eat.
“There are eight different lunch periods with two cafeterias, and there still isn’t enough seats or time to eat,” said Jesenia Mejia, 15, a sophomore at DeWitt Clinton High School. “You don’t get to eat lunch, so everyone complains about that.”
At DeWitt, where the enrollment is now about 4,500 students, almost a 1,000 more students than what the school was built to handle, missing lunch is just one consequence of cramped schools.
Students report that they have to wake up extra early to make sure they make it to class in time after waiting in long lines to have their ID cards scanned. They struggle to concentrate in class because there are too many students crowded inside rooms that were never designed to be classrooms. Fights break out in hallways as students push each other trying to rush to class within a three or four minute time frame.
“It distracts me,” said Elizabeth Vincent, 18, a senior at John F. Kennedy High School, which has about 2,100 students in a space designed for 1,500. “My government class has 34 students, and some kids are disruptive. I feel like I’m not getting the learning attention I need because there are so many kids.”
Some residents of Kingsbridge Heights in the northwest Bronx have proposed a solution for DeWitt Clinton, Kennedy and the other overcrowded schools in the neighborhood. They want 2,000 school seats to be included in the redevelopment plans of the Kingsbridge Armory, a vacant, brick castle-like fortress the size of four football fields located in the heart of the neighborhood. The structure has sat empty since 1994 when the city bought it from the National Guard, and the city’s Economic Development Corporation is expected to announce the developer and plans for its future any day.
“We are comfortable with our projected need of nearly 10,000 high school seats in the Bronx and are moving aggressively ahead with plans to build all of them,” said Marge Feinberg of the Department of Education in an email.
The Department of Education has committed to build 2,500 new seats in District 10 in its current five-year capital plan, set to expire in 2009. This figure is 1,500 less than the number of seats it had committed to at the beginning of the capital plan in 2004.
“I was very upset about that,” said City Council member R. Oliver Koppell, a lifelong resident of the Bronx, whose office recently conducted a survey of school principals in District 10. “Their calculations are flawed because they had said that schools aren’t overcrowded, but we have data from the principals of the schools saying that they are taking over art rooms, music rooms and other rooms for classrooms that should be reserved for specialized use.”
The Department of Education committed to 2,500 seats in its current capital plan based on a calculation that it uses to plan for construction. The calculation emerged from a study conducted by the Grier Partnership of Maryland in 2005. The study determined that only 36 percent of students in the New York City public school system actually advances to the 12th grade. The Department of Education uses this number to plan construction of school seats.
“They’re expecting this failure, they’re counting on this failure, and they are going to ensure it by not providing any seats for these children,” said Desiree Hunter, parent of a child at John F. Kennedy High School.
Council member Koppell said he intends to reclaim the 1,500 seats. “I think that the best chance that we have for an increase in seats is if we could free up the Armory site because if you could put two schools there, that would be close to 1,500 seats,” said Koppell, who plans to meet with deputy mayor Daniel L Doctoroff as soon as possible to discuss details of his plan.
But the spokeswoman for the Department of Education said the city can not depend on using space for schools in the Armory.
“The Armory land is simply not available to us at this time,” said Feinberg. “It would have been irresponsible for us to have the plan expire while we waited for the Armory land and risk not adding any seats for this district.”
The seats that the Department of Education has proposed for this neighborhood, however, are not enough to alleviate current problems and also reflect concern about the influx of new residents. And just because the projected seats are part of the current capital plan does not mean they will be built before the plan expires in 2009. Of the 2,500 new seats that the Department of Education has committed to build, only 1,900 have been planned to date. School officials said that there are locations for the remaining 600 seats although construction for them would not be complete before 2010.
According to Ava Farkas, director of the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance, residents will continue to advocate the education issue as the Department of Education prepares for its next five-year plan. They remain confident they can convince the Department of Education to add more seats to the area.
“We’re going to do a movement with all the parents to push the DOE to revisit the numbers,” said Hunter who is currently visiting parent groups at various schools throughout the Bronx. |
