“Tonight is a celebration,” Council Member Corey Johnson announced to the packed room of parents and other advocates who have been fighting for a middle school in the West Village since 2007.
75 Morton Street, an unused State building, has been their goal almost since the beginning. Started in 2008, the battle for the building was finally won in 2014, when New York State transferred the building to the School Construction Authority.
Their next hurtle was turning 75 Morton Street into a state-of-the-art school. Initial plans had not reflected what parents envisioned, like a large and well-stocked library. On May 11th, everyone in the room at the LGBT Center was anxious to see the fruits of their most recent round of campaigns.
As each speaker rose, and the names of some of the people who helped were called out and acknowledged, like Assemblymember Deborah Glick and Senator Brad Hoylman, as well as successive waves of parents who fought for a school their own children would age past any hope of attending, all eyes were focused on the stacks of drawings beside them. By the time Jeannine Kiely, a parent and a member of Community Board 2, Shino Tanikawa, the Chair of Community Education Council Two, and Heather Campbell, a member of the Community Board Two Task Force, began holding renderings of the school plans aloft, the assembled crowd was more than ready to revel in their hard-won victory.
The room erupted into successive rounds of applause as Melanie E. La Rocca, Chief of Staff of the School Construction Authority, explained what everyone was seeing—windows would be enlarged to provide a “sun-drenched,” cafeteria, and to give students a glorious space to “do what middle schoolers do best,” prompting laughter and knowing groans. Those large windows, she continued, would also shine light into the now impressive-sized library.
In addition to the enlarged library, plans for the seven-story building include one floor dedicated to District 75 students, three science labs, two art rooms, two music rooms, an auxiliary room which some parents see as a future dance space, and in the basement, a health center which will also include dental, vision and mental health services.
The only tense moment came when one parent questioned the design of what was called a gymnatorium, a combined gymnasium and auditorium. Some parents felt each should get their own room. Was this design set in stone, La Rocca was asked. Community Board Two Task Force member Jeannine Kiely acknowledged that in an ideal world they too would have preferred two spaces instead of one, but the size and design was an acceptable compromise, which softened the response to La Rocca’s answer, “The design is set in stone.”
Another parent asked if the school would also house a charter school and big cheers greeted Shino Tanikawa when she jumped up and said, “I will personally chain myself to the door to prevent the City from putting a charter school here.”
The school is scheduled to open in the fall of 2017, and “We’ve never missed a deadline yet,” La Rocca proclaimed. When a few people mumbled in skepticism, Democratic District Leader Keen Berger stood and declared, “It’s going to happen.”
The next big hurtles will be finding a principal, determining admission requirements and programming, and what the maximum number of students will be. While these decisions will ultimately be made by the future principal and the Department of Education, the Community Board Two Task Force has every intention of providing input and influencing these decisions.
Based on the history of 75 Morton Street, their efforts will likely be effective. To help them email 75Morton@gmail.com.
Stacy Horn in the author of Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing With Others.
