Downtown School Trying to Spurn P.S. 8's Advances

In this town, everything comes back to real estate, even schools. Tensions can run particularly high when public and charter schools with strong track records and involved parents seek to expand by moving in on unused turf at schools where the student body has been shrinking. Just witness last year’s heated battle between the well-funded Arts & Letters and the less stable P.S. 20 in Fort Greene. A similar scenario is now playing out in Downtown Brooklyn, where P.S. 8, an elementary school in Brooklyn Heights which has enjoyed surging popularity over the last decade and recently completed a physical expansion of its own, is making a play to launch a middle school at the Westinghouse and Polytechnic High School on Tillary Street which is less than 80 percent full. (Great building, by the way. It was a Building of the Day last month.) According to the Brooklyn Eagle, more than 30 P.S. 8 parents turned out on Monday night to express support for the plan. Council Member Steve Levin was also there to speak in favor: “The expansion into a middle school will mean that students from P.S. 8 will be able to continue their education at a local, quality public school.” Levin is joined in his support of the expansion by State Senator Daniel Squadron and Assemblymember Joan Millman. Though everyone in the P.S. 8 crowd is saying the right things (we’re going to be good neighbors, this is not a take-over, etc.), parents of the vocational high school aren’t buying it. “I hear everyone talking about being a good neighbor,” said Khem Irby, first vice president of the District 13 Community Education Council. “A neighbor doesn’t live in your house.” She also warned that mixing middle school and high school students could be trouble: “High school students might be having sex in the hallways.” In addition to the obvious class and race tensions just barely below the surface, there’s also the conspiracy theory that city has been deliberately shrinking Westinghouse to make room for the P.S. 8 expansion.
P.S. 8 Middle School Plan Meets Westinghouse Resistance [Brooklyn Eagle]