City Unveils Final Upper West Side School Rezoning Plan to Desegregate Schools

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — After months of debate, the city Department of Education released its final proposal to rezone schools on the Upper West Side during a contentious meeting of the Community Education Council for District 3 (CEC).

The DOE's final plan included zone changes for all 11 district schools from West 59th to West 116th streets designed to ease overcrowding and desegregate elementary schools within the Upper West Side.

The plan, for the most part, followed several recommendations laid out by the CEC — a parent group that represents the Upper West Side and South Harlem schools — in a letter to Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. This means that the plan includes proposals that inspired outrage among some Upper West Side parents who thought they had been unfairly rezoned for a "diversity experiment."

The plan would entirely relocate PS 452 on West 77th Street, which is at max capacity, to the building currently occupied by PS 191, a school full of students from the Amsterdam Houses, a nearby public-housing project. PS 191 would then get a brand-new building within the Riverside Center, a fancy new development a couple blocks south. The move would give PS 452, which currently shares a building, its own school facility and the ability to take on more students.

Despite support from the school's principal Scott Parker, who made an impassioned plea to support the school's move Wednesday, some school parents have vowed to oppose the plan to move the school 16 blocks downtown.

Then, perhaps most controversially, all future schoolkids living in two buildings in the Lincoln Towers community — 165 West End Ave. and 185 West End Ave. — would be directed to attend PS 191 as their default campus, instead of PS 199, where all their Lincoln Towers peers would still go to school.

During Wednesday's meeting, Gary Ramsey, a Lincoln Towers parent, said he is going to write to the mayor and governor to get the CEC disbanded and threatened that the Lincoln Towers community plans to vote out City Council Member Helen Rosenthal, who supported the CEC plan.

PS 199 has been a consistently high performing school and is made up of a mostly white student body with a low percentage of students receiving free lunch. On the other hand, the PS 191 student body is mostly poor and mostly black and Hispanic. In an effort to encourage parents to enroll their children in PS 191, the DOE announced the school would receive a Gifted & Talented program starting for students in the third grade.

Current students would not have to leave their currently zoned schools, nor would their younger siblings.

Here's a photo of the new school map:

During Wednesday night's meeting, tensions that had been building for months boiled over as frustrated parents interjected while DOE officials, CEC members and school principals spoke about the plans.

"Is it decided?" one man yelled during the presentation. "We might as well go home."

But perhaps the most fiery exchange of the night occurred between two members of the CEC, Noah Gotbaum and Joe Fiordaliso. Gotbaum, who was the only CEC member to not support the council's recommendations to the DOE, said that the plan was drawn up behind closed doors and the council was ignoring district parents. During his speech, Gotbaum called the actions of the CEC "Orwellian" and accused other members of the CEC of ignoring parents to push an agenda.

"I'm sorry to say that I believe the die has already been cast, that the decision has already been made," Gotbaum said. "And that's sad."

Fiordaliso shot back, claiming Gotbaum has a very long and successful career ahead of him as a fiction writer.

"You misled me, you misled this council and you're misleading a hell of a lot of people," Fiordaliso said.

But Gotbaum's statements appealed to many parents who called the rezoning process a "fix," a "sham," "rigged" and a "joke."

The CEC will now decide to either approve or reject the DOE's proposal. The council will vote on the proposed rezoning plan Nov. 22 and will hold two public hearings before the vote, scheduled for Nov. 14 and Nov. 21.

Photos: Patch