City Announces Public School Admissions Changes with Significant Impact for Lower Manhattan
Highly regarded local middle schools, such as P.S/I.S. 276, in Battery Park City, will no longer be allowed to consider academic criteria—such as test scores, report-card grades, and attendance records—when evaluating applicants, under a new plan announced by the de Blasio administration in December.
On December 18, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza announced that they were provisionally barring public middle schools (for at least one year, and possibly longer) from evaluating applicants based on academic criteria such as test scores, report-card grades, and attendance records, while permanently forbidding public high schools from giving admissions preference to students who reside with the same district as those schools.
Both of these changes will likely amount to seismic shifts for Lower Manhattan families, for whom highly regarded local public schools have long been a magnet that has drawn parents to buy or rent homes Downtown. This nucleus of middle-class families, especially those drawn to Lower Manhattan as it rebuilt during the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, formed a critical mass who were largely responsible for the renaissance of Downtown as a new and thriving residential district.
For middle schools at which the demand for seats exceeds supply, competitive evaluations of academic records (or “screens”) formerly determined which students were admitted. This process will now be conducted by lottery. Middle schools will still be allowed, however, to give preference to applicants from within their district.
For the high-performing high schools attended by a preponderance of students from Lower Manhattan (such as Millennium, Lab, Beacon, Baruch, Salk, and Eleanor Roosevelt), academic screens will remain, but the option to prioritize students from within District Two (roughly, Manhattan below 96th Street on the East Side and below 59th Street on the West Side, with the exception of part of the Lower East Side) will vanish. And starting with the academic year following this one, those high schools will also be denied the opportunity to give preference to applicants from Manhattan.
Both of these protocols have, for years, translated into a significant statistical advantage for Lower Manhattan middle-school students, as they applied to some of the most sought-after high schools in the City, while those schools also sought to cherry-pick pupils with strong academic records, who were overwhelmingly likely to graduate and attend college.
These reforms will particularly jolt the affinity that students from Battery Park City, Tribeca, and the Financial District have long had for Millennium High School, which (unique among any public secondary school in the City) has been allowed for years to prioritize applicants residing south of Houston Street.
Also changing will be the capacity for high schools to rank students by the order in which they are to be offered seats: This process was once handled by the schools themselves, but now will be centralized within the City’s Department of Education (DOE). In another policy switch, the selection criteria used by each high school to select applicants will be made public, for the first time.
In anticipation of these moves, Community Board 1 (CB1) enacted a scathing resolution at its November 24 meeting, which noted that, “15 percent of New York City families have students in screened schools, for a total of roughly 165,000 young people, and any move to change this option for those families would be absolutely life changing and would result in massive disruption to these students and their families.” The measure also argued that, “due to COVID-19, it is impossible to have public forums that would allow for a full and complete consideration and weighing of public opinion on a policy change with such radical implications for the lives of so many students and families.” The resolution also pointedly observed, “the Mayor is in the last year of his second term and is term-limited, and a new mayor is more than likely to name a new Chancellor, meaning that both office holders have limited accountability to the electorate.”
CB1’s resolution concluded by calling upon, “the Mayor, Chancellor and DOE to abandon any plan to end screened schools in New York City until after the City has moved out of the shadow of COVID-19, more voices are engaged in public forums, and a new Mayor is elected.”
The Board also demanded the development of, “a plan for admissions that includes screened schools for the 2021-22 school year within this calendar year, preferably by December 1, so that New York City families are better served by the largest public-school system in America as they plan for their lives in the next school year.”
In the event, the Mayor, the Chancellor, and the DOE ignored these calls, and instead implemented the changes announced on December 18. Families can begin submitting middle-school applications the week of January 11 (and not later than the week of February 8), while high school applications will be accepted starting the week of January 18, through the week of February 22.
Matthew Fenton
photo: courtesy BPCA
Clamping Down on Vice
Niou Joins Lawmakers Calling for Rollback of NYPD Unit
State Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou has joined a coalition of elected officials calling on the New York Police Department (NYPD) to investigate and possibly disband the troubled Vice Unit, which has been plagued by allegations of bias and corruption in recent years.
Ms. Niou joined a bloc of State and City legislators, who co-signed a December 14 letter calling upon leaders of the State Senate, Assembly, and City Council to convene hearings and open an investigation into the Vice Unit, which enforces laws related to prostitution.
Their letter noted that, “this unit’s actions have cost the city over $1 million settlement fees in false arrests since 2014,” and that, “undercover police have consistently engaged in unethical and deceptive practices, including sexual violence and obfuscating police recordings, in order to earn overtime pay for making these low-level arrests.”
Imagine what it’s like to be a kid who, for some reason, isn’t on Santa’s list. Now, just imagine what a huge impact you can make in the life of a child and their parents by being their secret Santa.
Stockings with Care, a charity based in Lower Manhattan, steps in to help when parents cannot provide Christmas gifts for their children, so no child is left out. But the organization, which has benefited over 40,000 children since 1992, needs your help. The parents give the gifts that donors (such as you) provide to the child, preserving their dignity and connection, while ensuring the gifts received are the ones the child wished for. Stockings with Care has created five easy ways to contribute.
The Downtown Community is rallying around one of its own.
Tammy Oliver has worked since the late 1980s, serving thousands of children at P.S. 234, as well as at the after-school and Downtown Day Camp programs operated by Manhattan Youth.
In May, Ms. Oliver’s husband Joe (once a bus driver for Manhattan Youth’s Downtown Day Camp) suffered a stroke that requires him to have full-time home care. To cover this cost, Ms. Oliver is now working extra, part-time jobs (from 3:00 to 6:00 am, on weekends and holidays), in addition to her full time work at P.S. 234.
Both husband and wife are grappling with exhaustion, stress, and uncertainty. But many of the families who have benefited from Mr. and Mrs. Oliver’s work during the past 30 years are banding together by contributing to a GoFundMe campaign, to help pay for the care Mr. Oliver needs.
The Church Street School for Music and Art will continue a decades-long Downtown tradition (albeit, in virtual form, as a concession to COVID-19) by offeringGingerbread House Decorating Kits (priced at $85), now through Christmas week.
Each take home kit includes one homemade gingerbread house, a variety of candy, freshly made icing, and one foiled round to set your house up on. In addition to offering great holiday fun, this program is one of the most important fundraisers for the highly regarded non-profit institution that has brought enrichment to the lives of generations of Lower Manhattan kids.
Non-Profit Outlines Plan for ‘Safe Haven’ Shelter on Washington Street
The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to create a homeless shelter at a historic building on Washington Street, in the Greenwich South neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, in partnership with a highly regarded non-profit, the Center for Urban Community Services.
“This facility will not for warehousing,” said CUCS’s chief operating officer, Douglas James. “We aim to move people from the streets to permanent housing.”
DOT Overrules Community Concerns about Delivery Bike Facility in Tribeca
The City’s Department of Transportation has ignored calls from Community Board 1 to address concerns of Tribeca residents before installing a cargo bike corral on Warren Street (between West and Greenwich Streets), to facilitate the use of powered bicycles when making grocery deliveries. To read more…
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1968 – Cultural Revolution: People’s Daily posted the instructions of Mao Zedong that “The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty.”
401 – Pope Innocent I is elected, the only pope to succeed his father in the office.
1807 – The Embargo Act, forbidding trade with all foreign countries, is passed by the U.S. Congress, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson.
1808 – Ludwig van Beethoven conducts and performs in concert at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, with the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, Sixth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto (performed by Beethoven himself) and Choral Fantasy (with Beethoven at the piano).
1891 – Asteroid 323 Brucia becomes the first asteroid discovered using photography.
1937 – The Lincoln Tunnel opens to traffic in New York City.
1944 – World War II: Battle of the Bulge: German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”
1964 – The first test flight of the SR-71 (Blackbird) takes place at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, United States.
1968 – Cultural Revolution: People’s Daily posted the instructions of Mao Zedong that “The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty.”
1984 – Bernhard Goetz shoots four would-be muggers on a 2 express train in Manhattan.
1989 – Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife flee Bucharest in a helicopter as protesters erupt in cheers. They didn’t have a Merry Christmas.
1989 – Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate re-opens after nearly 30 years, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.
2001 – Richard Reid attempts to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63.
Births
1639 – Jean Racine, French poet and playwright (d. 1699)
1696 – James Oglethorpe, English general and politician, 1st Colonial Governor of Georgia (d. 1785)
1858 – Giacomo Puccini, Italian composer and educator (d. 1924)
1912 – Lady Bird Johnson, American beautification activist; 38th First Lady of the United States (d. 2007)
1945 – Diane Sawyer, American journalist
1970 – Ted Cruz, American lawyer and politician
Deaths
1603 – Mehmed III, Ottoman sultan (b. 1566)
2014 – Joe Cocker, English singer-songwriter (b. 1944)
2019 – Ram Dass, American spiritual teacher and author (b. 1931)
