In Push to Open Small Schools, a Big Obstacle: Limited Space
Officials maintain that there is space available across the city, in some cases precisely where it is needed most, but that getting the classrooms can be difficult because principals rabidly protect their turf, at times lying about their needs.
“There’s overcrowding,” Mr. Turay said. “And there’s political overcrowding.”
With the Bloomberg administration pushing forward in its drive to create more than 200 small schools, city education officials have crashed into a cold reality that has long vexed New York City dwellers: They are running out of space.
In the Bronx, 500 students in two high schools are not sure where they will go when classes start next month. The schools were supposed to share a former elementary school, but nonprofit groups that have occupied the building since 1982 refuse to leave and a lawsuit has been filed. The students are likely to end up in trailers outside the building.
On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a furor has erupted at Martin Luther King Jr. High School because the Department of Education announced last month that a sixth small school would join five others already jockeying over shared space.
And in Lower Manhattan, in perhaps the starkest example of the space crunch, Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced two weeks ago that a new charter school would be housed in the basement of the department’s own headquarters.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 10:29 PM
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