PS41 » PS. PAC

PS41 Parent Advocacy Committee (PS.PAC)

About PS.PAC

Worried about school overcrowding? Middle School? Standardized testing? The availability of special services? School reform? Get in touch with PS.PAC, a group of concerned Village parents formed two years ago, to help us pull together and get parents’ voices heard in decision-making in public education.

We have scored some notable successes: most significantly, siting a new public elementary school at the Foundling Hospital, which only happened because parents showed up at community board meetings and nagged the developer of the St. Vincent’s residential project to do something about school overcrowding.

We really need the involvement of parents, in large and small ways. We can only make a difference if we speak out together. Sign up to get regular bulletins from us, and pitch in when you can!

And make sure to visit the general PS.PAC website, where we share posters, buttons, and other tools that we create for our events, as well as information with colleagues at other schools and a calendar of school events. Speaking of which, almost every week in New York City there is an important meeting affecting your child’s public school experience. It would kill you to go to all of them (we can tell you from experience), but it’s great to go to one or two, and learn more about how our schools are run.

Current Initiatives

75 Morton Street [updated 02/27/09]

On August 6th the City formally requested that the State allow 75 Morton Street to be converted to a public school, rather than sold off to the highest bidder for development. Your letters and months of work by local residents and parents, working with city and state officials, paid off!

Since then, we’ve been working to get 75 Morton Street converted to school space, so that Greenwich Village Middle School can move out of its current home squeezed into the rafters of PS 3. This would create more elementary school seats in our neighborhood, and also more middle school seats. We’re especially worried about middle school, because, though our district has some great programs, there aren’t very many of them and they’re very crowded and hard to get into. Parents of young kids: you can make a difference for your own child by helping us get more middle schools in District 2! Click here for the CB2 resolution on 75 Morton Street.

Many thanks to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Deborah Glick for sending this excellent letter to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein urging vigorous pursuit of 75 Morton Street as a new home for Greenwich Village Middle School! At a meeting called by these officials and the Community Education Council on February 24, Village families were unanimous in calling for an expanded home for GVMS, which would broaden our local middle school options and free up space in PS 3 to house all the students of our neighborhood.

The NYC.DOE Capital Plan [updated 11/09/08]

On November 5 the NYC Department of Education released its new proposed 2010-2014 capital plan, which commits funds for school construction for five years hence. Many parents feel that the capital plan does not meet the city’s real needs for more school capacity going forward. If you would like more information on the capital plan and its specific consequences for our neighborhood, write to ps.pac@ps41.org. We encourage parents who are concerned about overcrowding and the need for more schools in our neighborhood to attend meetings of the Community Education Council and the Panel for Educational Policy (see the Meeting Schedule below) to express their concerns.

Here is some press coverage on the issue of overcrowding:

New York City schools suffer massive overcrowding, statistics show (Daily News)
Parents: NYC School Overcrowding A ‘Crisis’ (WCBS - TV)
New York City Parents Sound Off on Crowded Classrooms (WNYC radio)
Public Schools Are Too Crowded (Gothamist)
School overcrowding to go under microscope (Staten Island Advance)
Arts Organization Calls for Preservation of Arts Spaces in NYC schools (MarketWatch)
Parents, elected officials urge better education capital planning (Gotham schools)

Pier 40 [updated 10/03/08]

We’re closely watching developments at Pier 40, where parents have been pushing for school space as well as public amenities for kids. The DOE sent a letter of interest [att'd] to the Hudson River Park Trust last June about placing high schools on Pier 40. Since then reports indicate that these spaces will be taken up by high schools from elsewhere in the city that have lost their leases. We need to push for schools on Pier 40 that will relieve local overcrowding and serve our community’s needs.

Press coverage:

“City Interested, Pier 40 School May Make The Grade”

Downtown Express, June 27, 2008
“Giving a major boost to a plan to keep Pier 40 afloat as a community-friendly, low-impact part of Hudson River Park, the New York City School Construction Authority wants to build up to three high schools on the sprawling West Houston Street pier. On June 2, Sharon Greenberger, S.C.A. president and C.E.O., wrote to Noreen Doyle, Hudson River Park Trust vice president, “to confirm the S.C.A.’s interest in the potential development of a new public high school facility on Pier 40.”
http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_269/cityinterested.html

“Pier 40 Plan Shown; Event Space Makes Some Waves”
The Villager, July 9, 2008
“After its board meeting at the end of March, the Hudson River Park Trust told the Pier 40 Partnership and Urban Dove/CampGroup to merge their separate redevelopment plans for the pier, and gave them 90 days to produce a final design. What was shown last Wednesday [July 2] is the result.”
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_271/pier40.html

K-5 school to be built at the Foundling Hospital site

At the May 8 Community Board 2 hearing at PS41 on school overcrowding St. Vincent’s Hospital and the Rudin Organization announced that they had reached a deal with the School Construction Authority to convert the former Foundling Hospital on Sixth Avenue and 17th Street to a zoned Pre-K through 5 elementary school! The deal calls for the SCA to begin construction in 2012, but there are indications that this timeline may be generous.

The PS41 community wants to thank and acknowledge the Rudin Corporation for this visionary step and hopes it is a business model for other organizations to put school overcrowding first on their agendas.

Press coverage: The Villager, Westview (Link to a 65K pdf), New York Sun, NY1, WABC

Potential sites for new schools [10/03/08]

Last February, in collaboration with our beloved partners at Community Board 2 we held a hearing to review potential sites for new schools in our area, including 75 Morton. Click here to look at our power-point presentation.

Ongoing Initiatives

Here are some of the issues on which PS.PAC has spoken out:

Class Size

The current administration has argued that teacher quality and accountability are more important to student performance than class size, but many public school parents feel that reducing class size is a pressing need in our city. If this issue interests you we encourage you to become involved in the advocacy group Class Size Matters, directed by PS41’s own Leonie Haimson.

Volunteering for Class Size Matters would probably be the most productive thing you could possibly do for education in New York City.

Mayoral Control

In 2002 the legislature of New York State reached the historic decision to grant control of the New York City Public School system to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This decision has had enormous consequences for public education in New York. In 2009 the Mayoral Control law will sunset and throughout the city parents, administrators, teachers, advocates, elected officials, and pundits are debating what will happen next.

Become involved in this discussion via the Parent Commission on School Governance, which meets monthly at Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East, 3rd floor student lounge, NYU. Meeting dates: Sept. 12; Oct. 3; Nov. 7; Dec. 5; Jan. 9; Feb. 6.

School Testing

Under Chancellor Klein the NYC public school system has embarked on a comprehensive regime of student “assessments,” which are based on standardized tests. The results of these tests affect everything from your child’s future school prospects to your school’s budget. For more information on the parental response to the dramatic increase in the volume and importance of standardized testing in the NYC public schools see Time Out From Testing.

School Funding

In 2007 the Department of Education radically reformed the means by which it distributes funding to public schools, assigning tax dollars on a per student basis without regard to historic commitments. Many high performing and impoverished schools would have seen budget cuts last year had the implementation of this proposal not been delayed two years through a deal with the teachers’ union. But this funding formula threatens, in the view of many parents, ultimately to restrict severely the funding in many schools, particularly with regard to teacher salaries. Its effects have been exacerbated by DOE evasions of its reporting responsibilities to the states under the Contracts for Excellence law and by budget cuts. Many parents advocate a repeal of this policy before the cuts go into full effect. See the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

Supervision and Support Services

During the 2006-07 school year the Department of Education implemented the third of a series of reorganizations, redirecting many of the functions formerly performed by regional superintendents to support services selected by principals and paid for out of school budgets. Many parents are concerned that this change was made too precipitously, that important services, particularly with respect to special education, are not being provided adequately. The redirection of support services is part of a general trend toward privatization, with important contracts for education services being awarded to autonomous private and non-profit companies, a cause for concern for many parents. A loophole in the law governing mayoral control of the city’s schools allows contracts to be awarded free of city and state laws governing transparency and competitive bidding, and parents are concerned that this creates a ripe environment for favoritism and waste. Schools have also lost the direct supervision of a local district superintendent.

Who is who in our School District

PS41 is in New York City School District #2. Our Community School Superintendent is Daria Rigney. Our District Family Advocate is Jennifer Greenblatt.

Our Principal Kelly Shannon selected as our school’s support organization the “Integrated Curriculum and Instruction” Learning Support Organization, headed by Judith Chin, former superintendent of Region 3 in Eastern Queens.

Other support services are to be provided to our school by our borough’s Integrated Service Center. Robert Wilson, formerly executive director of the Region 9 Regional Operations Center, has been appointed the executive director of the Manhattan Integrated Service Center.

Each district has a Community Education Council (CEC), which has eleven voting members, nine of whom are parents. The CEC meets monthly to consider matters of importance to the school district. These meetings are open to the public. PS41’s own Michael Markowitz is a member of the CEC for District 2.

Each district also has a Presidents Council, which consists of the presidents of all the district’s PTAs or their representatives. Presidents Council meetings are also monthly and open to the public.

The city’s Presidents Councils send representatives to a monthly meeting of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee. This is the only meeting where the city’s parents meet directly with the Chancellor. These meetings are open to the public.

A 13-member Panel for Educational Policy meets monthly, charged with deliberating educational policy for the city. The panel consists of the Chancellor, an appointed representative from each Borough President, and seven members appointed by the Mayor. These meetings are open to the public.

Our Community Board, made up of up to fifty board members appointed by the Manhattan Borough President (half of them upon nomination by City Council members) and public members appointed by the community board chair, represents the community on many issues of local public interest, including education. Meetings of the Community Board are especially important for tracking major development in the neighborhood that may contribute to school overcrowding. Meetings of the full board, the Social Services and Education Committee, and the Zoning Committee take place monthly. Click here for a calendar.

Meeting Schedule

District 2 Community Education Council (CEC)
See the CEC D2 web page for details
Meetings are held monthly at 333 Seventh Avenue, 7th floor
(bet. 28th/29th Street) at 6.30 pm

District 2 Presidents Council
Meetings are held monthly at 333 Seventh Avenue, 7th floor
(bet. 28th/29th Street) at 6.30 pm

Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee
Meets monthly at the Department of Education

Parent Commission on School Governance
The Parent Commission on School Governance is a group of active parents who are studying the issues around mayoral control in order to release a report making recommendations on future school policy from parents’ perspectives. Meetings are held monthly.

Join PS.PAC

To join the committee or add your name to an email list, please contact PS.PAC@ps41.org plus fill out and email back a Contact Information Form to let us know if you have legal or accounting expertise, or any other skills that may be of specific use in this effort. The PS41 Political Action Committee current members are:

Ann Kjellberg, Co-chair

Irene Kaufman, Co-chair

Leonie Haimson

Michael Markowitz

Resources

PS41 Speaks Out

Petition to relocate GVMS to 75 Morton Street - Summer, 2008

CB2 Resolution regarding 75 Morton Street - August 22, 2008

CA Letter of Interest in High School Development at Pier 40 - June 2, 2008

CB2 Resolution on School Overcrowding - February 29, 2008

PS.PAC Petition to include school space in the residential redevelopment of St. Vincent’s Hospital - November 8, 2007

PS41 PTA Resolution and cover letter to Councilmembers Quinn, Jackson and Gerson - May 2, 2007