Mandy Hass is a parent at Lower Lab, as well as the director of marketing and business development for Insideschools.org.

Last week's Village Voice cover story, Inside a Divided Upper East Side Public School: Whites in the front door, blacks in the back door, has succeeded in bringing two co-located Upper East Side schools closer together: virtually everyone in the building feels he got much of the story wrong.

Author Steven Thrasher focuses on two schools -- Lower Lab, a "gifted and talented" elementary school open to top-scoring kids throughout District 2, and PS 198, a zoned neighborhood school -- which have shared a building for 22 years.

When Lower Lab was founded, in 1987, PS 198 had underutilized space. At that time, few schools in New York City shared buildings. Today, according Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld at the Department of Education's press office, there are roughly 740 co-located schools, and next year, that number is likely to rise to about 750. That's about half of the schools in the nation's largest school system. The reasons for colocation have to do with real estate realities and the trend in education reform to break large schools down into smaller communities, as well as New York's decision to allow charter schools to have space in traditional public school buildings.<!--more-->

It is not uncommon for heated battles to ensue when schools are forced to share space, particularly when the "host" school feels that the other school is getting more of its scarce resources (take PS 15 for instance, where parents are trying to prevent Pave Academy Charter School from taking over more of its space).

By contrast, the decades of space-sharing in our building have been more or less peaceful; the current principals, Lower Lab's Mara Ratesic Koetke and PS 198's Sharon Jeffrey Roebuck, get together often, even though the children in the two schools rarely interact. The goal has always been equitable co-existence, not integration of the separate schools. However (though Mr. Thrasher neglected to mention it) the schools have in recent years had a joint student council, and there are occasional "friendship" events where kids get together.

In most colocations, the demographics of the students in the separate schools are not so starkly different as they are in our building, which sits astride the border of the Upper East side and East Harlem. The separate and unequal feel is palpable; I know parents who avoided both schools because the "apartheid" aspect made them queasy. Some sought gifted and talented programs that are part of zoned schools - Lower Lab is the only G&T in the district that is a separate school - even though gifted and talented classes that are part of neighborhood schools often tend to be whiter and wealthier than the general education classes.

As is the case in many colocations, the schools in our building use separate entrances. Mr. Thrasher made much of PS 198 being assigned to the "back" door, but parents I spoke with at both schools do not perceive the schoolyard door as the rear entrance. According to Lower Lab's parent coordinator, both schools used only the schoolyard entrance until about five years ago, when, for safety reasons, the schools jointly decided to have Lower Lab start using the Third Avenue entrance and hire a separate security guard. A third door - not mentioned in the article -- is used by children from both schools who arrive by bus.

PS 198, by far the larger of the two schools, receives significantly more tax money per student. The school's enrollment also closely mirrors the diversity of the city's public school population (13% white, 25% black, 50% Latino, 11% Asian). It has traditionally had first dibs on use of the cafeteria, gym and auditorium and has exclusive use of the library. But the article omitted these inconvenient facts.

Mr. Thrasher implies that PS 198 it is a bad school, but it is an up-and-comer; in fact many of its students have been transferred there from underperforming schools. It got a fairly positive review here at Insideschools.org, which does not shy away from pointing out the failings of dysfunctional schools (such as KAPPA II, 30 blocks north of PS 198, which is slated for closure, and Brooklyn's IS 390, which has already been shut down). Our staff tagged both PS 198 and Lower Lab as "Noteworthy," for serving their communities well

However, if Lower Lab were not located in the building, I suspect PS 198 would rise even faster.

Principals at colocated schools are required to participate in a Building Council aimed and ensuring equitable sharing of resources and peaceful co-existence. But the Department of Education neither encourages nor discourages schools from making attempts to mix their populations or engage in shared experiences. Elementary schools sharing space typically do not mix at all. Some high schools have more mixing, particularly for sports teams; small schools can't field teams without pulling from the entire building.

Should schools sharing buildings strive to have their students interact with one another?

One of the first lessons we teach our kids, at home and at school, is to play well with others. However, the free-market flavor of education reform, as it is increasingly practiced in New York, is to encourage competition between schools as a way to foster improved student outcomes. But much could be done in shared buildings to foster a sense of cooperation rather than reinforce feelings of segregation.

For instance, the Voice article noted that PS 198 raised money for Haiti (and omitted that Lower Lab had also done so). But why weren't we raising that relief money together?

Scheduling times for recess and use of the cafeteria are often among the most challenging issues in colocation. In our building, the schools eat and play separately, but I would prefer that the younger and older kids from both schools have lunch and recess together. Lower Lab's previous principal told me that would be "an impossibility" due to the union contracts. Yet some schools have managed it. For our two schools, it might help mitigate some of the unintended lessons the kids are learning in a building that has historically been segregated by race and class.

Are you a parent, staffer or student in a building with more than one school? What's it like? What would you change if you could?