by Jennifer Freeman

The City Council hearings on school siting today should be lively. In some districts DOE says it sees a need for new schools but cannot find proper sites, while other districts have potential sites but DOE finds no current need.

For people who seek truth in language, consider the word "current." DOE officials continue to say that they do not think a new school building is currently needed in District 3. Parents, elected officials, and other District 3 community leaders continue to say they think we do need to build a school, and that the DOE should take advantage of a prime school site in a proposed new development called Riverside South. But what if we are all actually saying the same thing?

Schools generally take about eight to nine years to build. The Office of Student Enrollment, OSEPO, says that it does not plan for children until they register for seats in public schools. So the DOE has built a kind of failure into its model, making it difficult to take advantage of one of the best sources of new school sites--spaces designed as part of multi-use developments, planned BEFORE those developments are built and before school children live there.

In District 3 a few years ago, the developer Extell set aside space for a school in a big new development, but the DOE turned it down. Currently, Extell has set aside a new space for a school in its proposed development known as Riverside South-- now a parking lot around 60th St. and West End Ave.

DOE officials have said that if the families moving into all the new District 3 developments have the number of kids predicted by planning experts, the district will need a new school. But a site like Riverside South is not likely to magically reappear when the DOE is ready to play catch-up, in five or ten years. The time to move on the site is now.

When I was a young person just developing political consciousness, I was impressed to learn that when a politician says he "currently" has no plans to do something (seek a new term in office, for example) he could turn around and do it the next day without contradiction. I'm going to be optimistic and hope that what the Department of Education is actually saying, in code, that it really does want to build a new school in Riverside South and is just waiting for the developer to make a financial deal,like the one the DOE announced in District 2 . Perhaps, linguistic differences aside, we are all standing on the same shore and seeing the need for a new school on the horizon.