A Look at Four Recent Brooklyn Elementary School Rezonings
The start of the school year means it’s School Week here on Brownstoner. The children are coming! As the Brooklyn population swells and the residential units created in Brooklyn’s ongoing development boom continue to fill, the borough is seeing a stretch of its amenities — including in the realm of education. With limited funding, the Department of…
The start of the school year means it’s School Week here on Brownstoner.
The children are coming! As the Brooklyn population swells and the residential units created in Brooklyn’s ongoing development boom continue to fill, the borough is seeing a stretch of its amenities — including in the realm of education.
With limited funding, the Department of Education (DOE) can only afford to buy or build so many new buildings to house incoming students. But with or without new infrastructure, a common tactic used by the DOE is to rezone schools to move children from overcrowded districts and into less-crowded ones.
Rezonings to balance enrollment can be popular — and sometimes controversial. Here’s a look at four recent and big DOE rezonings at Brooklyn elementary schools.
Park Slope’s incredibly popular — and overcrowded — P.S. 321 and P.S. 107 received hugely controversial rezonings in 2012. While parents on exiled blocks protested loudly, in the end District 14 Community Education Council approved the rezoning, prioritizing the school’s overcrowding problem over local complaints and calling the move “imperfect but necessary.”
“My daughters would be an experiment,” the parent of two children being zoned out of P.S. 321 told the Times in October 2012. The zoning has since been approved and enacted, with little fuss or fanfare from parents or the media after the fact.
P.S. 321. Photo via Wikipedia
AÂ more recent rezoning in District 15 was far more popular, according to media coverage at the time. In the 2014 proposal, four elementary schools in the Windsor Terrace and Kensington area were rezoned — P.S. 130, P.S. 131, P.S. 154, and P.S. 230.
The elementary schools had their zones respectively shrunk and expanded to reduce the need to bus students. As well, P.S. 130 was divided into two buildings to better accommodate increased numbers of students. The district also got a new middle school.
A year out from the rezoning, though, at least one parent was not pleased. Windsor Terrace resident and Times staff writer Charles Duhigg said the property value of his home had gone down since being redistricted out of P.S. 154. He spoke during a question and answer session on affordable housing at the Times’ Cities for Tomorrow Conference Brownstoner attended earlier this year.
P.S. 154. Photo via Google
A similar situation played out in Bay Ridge’s District 20 where, starting in 2012, new schools were approved and built for the chronically overcrowded district. The affected P.S. 170, P.S. 69, P.S. 105, P.S. 127, and P.S. 176, were rezoned to accommodate two new schools.
The rezoning was approved by a unanimous vote from the Community Education Council, reflecting a broader approval of the new schools from the District 20 community.
P.S./IS 30. Photo via Google
Lastly, in a current, controversial rezoning, Dumbo and Vinegar Hill’s P.S. 8 and P.S. 307 have been rezoned to compensate for P.S. 307’s space availability and P.S. 8’s overcrowding. While a solid attempt at balancing numbers in theory, the rezoning to 307 caught some P.S. 8 families off guard.
Photo via Dumbo Parents
P.S. 8 Rezoning Coverage [Brownstoner]
P.S. 321 Rezoning Coverage [Brownstoner]
DOE Unveils Plan for New Middle School and Rezoning in District 15 [DNA]
District 20 Council Votes to Rezone Bay Ridge Schools [Eagle]
Top photo by Dumbo NYC
PS 38 in the heart of Boerum Hill is a school that could alleviate some overcrowding if the DOE would remove that ineffective principal Yolanda Ramirez. So many families leave that school because of the Admin.
DOE – when will you replace Ramirez and allow this school to flourish? We need another good school and 38 has the potential to be great, it just needs to be liberated from an oppressive leadership.
Such a no-brainier. Why do they allow Ramirez to stay year after year?
PS 38 in the heart of Boerum Hill is a school that could alleviate some overcrowding if the DOE would remove that ineffective principal Yolanda Ramirez. So many families leave that school because of the Admin.
DOE – when will you replace Ramirez and allow this school to flourish? We need another good school and 38 has the potential to be great, it just needs to be liberated from an oppressive leadership.
Such a no-brainier. Why do they allow Ramirez to stay year after year?
I’m curious to hear that the NY Times writer was sure his house had declined in value since the rezoning in Windsor Terrace– I was wondering if we would see that, but around us (former 154 zone, current 130) prices seem to keep going up. I know when we were looking at houses we were interested in both zones, and other buyers seem to feel the same.
I’m curious to hear that the NY Times writer was sure his house had declined in value since the rezoning in Windsor Terrace– I was wondering if we would see that, but around us (former 154 zone, current 130) prices seem to keep going up. I know when we were looking at houses we were interested in both zones, and other buyers seem to feel the same.
They can rezone all they want it will not solve the overcrowding problem. Our areas are bing stretched to the limit.
We need a building moratorium until we have new school seats
I guess I think we need to work on both simultaneously and thoughtfully. I think fear and misinformation can lead to ugliness and I think we do the best we can to work through the underlying causes of ugliness. I also think more informed people still wind up making choices among schools with available seats, and I think we should do more to understand why those relatively informed people are making those choices, with a view to improving all schools.
I guess I think we need to work on both simultaneously and thoughtfully. I think fear and misinformation can lead to ugliness and I think we do the best we can to work through the underlying causes of ugliness. I also think more informed people still wind up making choices among schools with available seats, and I think we should do more to understand why those relatively informed people are making those choices, with a view to improving all schools.
Are you familiar with the work of dobroschools.org? That group has done a lot of work to map out new development in each of those schools zones and has made a pretty compelling case that there is a need for new capacity. Maybe not now in all parts of downtown Brooklyn, but in the next very few years. And we don’t start planning for new capacity now, it’s not available when we need it.
That said, it’s also important to figure out and try to remedy or respond to whatever dynamics — and I think they are complicated — are in place that have left some schools underutilized even as new development has begun to bring new schoolchildren to downtown Brooklyn neighborhoods. There are many schools that touch on the greater downtown Brooklyn area that, even if not overcapacity yet, have started to grow as a result of all the new development; others not so much. Trying to understand the why behind those differences seems important.
Are you familiar with the work of dobroschools.org? That group has done a lot of work to map out new development in each of those schools zones and has made a pretty compelling case that there is a need for new capacity. Maybe not now in all parts of downtown Brooklyn, but in the next very few years. And we don’t start planning for new capacity now, it’s not available when we need it.
That said, it’s also important to figure out and try to remedy or respond to whatever dynamics — and I think they are complicated — are in place that have left some schools underutilized even as new development has begun to bring new schoolchildren to downtown Brooklyn neighborhoods. There are many schools that touch on the greater downtown Brooklyn area that, even if not overcapacity yet, have started to grow as a result of all the new development; others not so much. Trying to understand the why behind those differences seems important.