6 Upper West Side Schools Shuttered Due To Ventilation Problems

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Six schools that share the same building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan will not reopen to staff Tuesday, after inspections revealed problems with the building's ventilation system.

Since last month, the city has been inspecting ventilation systems at all of its public school buildings to determine whether they are safe enough to reopen on Sept. 21. A properly working air filtering system helps prevent the spread of coronavirus, and the city agreed to inspect each building after teachers and principals raised safety concerns.

The inspections found that 21 schools had ventilation problems in need of repair, including the six schools inside the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus on 122 Amsterdam Avenue, near 66th Street.

The following schools are housed within the building:

• The Maxine Greene HS for Imaginative Inquiry
• Urban Assembly School for Media Studies
• High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice
• High School of Arts and Technology
• Manhattan / Hunter Science High School
• Special Music School

Last week one of the principals within the Martin Luther King Jr. high school building informed teachers that over 100 rooms in the facility had been put on the "condemned" list because they had little to no airflow, according to the New York Post.

Not a single classroom in the Martin Luther King Jr. building has a window that opens.

Staff, who had been slated to return Tuesday to prepare for the start of school, will instead work remotely until the repairs are complete. Some of those repairs will be complete "within the next couple of days," the city said, but the city is also looking for alternate spaces if the repairs aren't done by Sept. 21.

Patch report Nick Garber contributed to this report.