A bitter clash over space has emerged in recent weeks at a beloved New York City school building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that two programs have shared for the past decade.
It is a battle that reflects events that have caused two of the biggest demographic shifts in New York City’s recent history: the Covid-19 pandemic and the surge of migrants from the southern border.
One of the building’s occupants, Public School 145, has added more than 120 new students as a result of an influx of newcomers. The Department of Education has proposed moving the other, West Prep Academy, which is losing enrollment, into a separate, but antiquated building to make room for its growing neighbor.
The conflict highlights broader fault lines in New York and other large U.S. cities. The country’s public schools have lost more than 1.2 million students since the pandemic began and are facing major budget declines as a result. Urban areas with large numbers of poor families have been hit the hardest. By 2031, enrollment could plunge by another 2.5 million nationwide, in large part because of declining birthrates.
On the flip side, the surge in new migrant families in New York and elsewhere is helping to offset some of those losses in schools that are well positioned to benefit from the influx. But it has prompted questions in some areas about how resources and space are being used and could place communities on divergent paths.
The plan to split P.S. 145 and West Prep Academy has illuminated how painful change can be. A school building is more than a collection of lockers and classrooms. It is often a neighborhood’s heart and the anchor for a village of children and educators.
“It’s always fraught with emotion,” the schools chancellor, David C. Banks, said at a press briefing on Thursday. “One of the schools has to move, and it’s just a whole hue and cry over which one.”
Two schools. Two population problems.
New York City once had 1.1 million schoolchildren. Today, that figure is down to about 915,000.
For the system’s leaders, the decline has prompted major concerns about the future. Roughly 12 percent of the city’s 1,600 schools had fewer than 200 students during the last academic year.
“Students equal dollars,” Daniel Weisberg, the first deputy schools chancellor, said at a town hall-style meeting in Brooklyn last fall. “That’s not the way we like to think of it, but that’s just the economic reality.” He added: We’ve got too many schools that have gotten below critical mass.”
Migrant children entering the system have helped offset the losses, but only partially, and not at all schools. The city has lost more than 120,000 students in recent years and gained over 30,000 migrant students, according to officials.
West Prep Academy is a tight-knit middle school that, among other offerings, runs a unique program for students with autism. About nine in 10 of its pupils are Black or Latino. More than 40 percent have disabilities.
It is a refuge for vulnerable children who were not welcomed elsewhere, parents said. Its students tend to have advanced more academically by the time they leave eighth grade than their counterparts at other schools with similar populations, data shows.
But enrollment at the school has fallen in recent years, to roughly 170 students this year from more 200 in 2018. The drop has largely been driven by the departure of Black families in the area, and school officials say West Prep needs to grow to a more “sustainable size.”
At its neighbor, P.S. 145, one in three students are homeless; two-thirds are Black or Latino.
In a neighborhood with several highly coveted elementary school options, P.S. 145 once struggled with chronically low enrollment. But as New York City became an epicenter for an influx of migrants from Latin America and Eastern Europe, the school’s dual-language programs in Spanish and Russian made it ideal for new families from those places.
Enrollment has increased 25 percent over the past five years and is now over 480 students.
The growth has forced the school to make tough decisions about space, teachers said. The library is gone. Therapy sessions for students with disabilities are held in cramped spaces. Media and arts programs have been scaled back.
“These are all the things that every student should have,” said Lauren Balaban, a co-president of the P.S. 145 parent-teacher association.
“But we have a problem,” she added. “We don’t have the space in our building to provide the services our children need and deserve.”
The Education Department wants to move West Prep to a nearby building next fall. The property was built in the 1890s, is not accessible to students with physical disabilities and has no outdoor space. Parents and teachers have asked whether their school would be treated differently if it served a more affluent and whiter student body.
“There is a perceived inequity here,” Jennifer Holland, a West Prep parent leader, said during a recent hearing on the potential move. She added that she was frustrated by the selection of an inaccessible building. “You’re forcing a population out for reasons that are not justified.”
‘It’s going to be happening more often’
As New York moves and merges schools after declines in enrollment, other cities are grappling with an even more wrenching issue: closings.
This month, San Francisco became the latest urban district to announce plans to close public schools. San Antonio has said it will 15 percent of its schools. Boston could close as many as half.
Other cities could feel similar pressure as districts anticipate the expiration of billions in federal pandemic aid, and schools with a higher percentages of disadvantaged students will most likely bear the brunt.
“It’s a really difficult thing — and it’s going to be happening more often,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University professor who has studied the issue.
Such closing plans have ignited mass protests and hunger strikes.
Marguerite Roza, a Georgetown University scholar, said districts sometimes delay changes to avoid “the backlash that comes with announcing school closures.” But putting off hard decisions often makes them all the more painful, she added.
New York officials have tried to tread carefully. Closing schools could be politically hazardous for Mayor Eric Adams as he tries to persuade the State Legislature to let him maintain control of the system — and as he seeks re-election to a second term.
As the system’s finances tighten, city officials have blamed costs associated with the migrant influx for recent cuts in the education budget. But enrollment rose this year for the first time in nearly a decade, largely because of the new arrivals.
Even with the new students, schools are still competing for a much smaller set of children.
Some West Prep educators worry that they are being set up to fail. Content with being a small community, they say that attracting new families may be difficult when the 127-year-old building they could be forced to move into is lacking compared with other local options.
“It’s an injustice,” said Tyi Ellis, the West Prep parents’ association president. “Nobody asked for this.”
