More on the P.S. 187 Expansion

On Thursday evening, city officials presented an update at the local Community Education Council meeting about a proposed $61 million addition to P.S./I.S. 187 Hudson Cliffs, the historic elementary and middle school on Cabrini.

The presentation itself lasted just over four minutes. A question-and-answer session afterward surfaced new details — and lingering questions.

“We got practically nothing. It was like a two-slide presentation,” said Dion Algeri, who lives near P.S. 187 and came to the meeting hoping to learn more about the project. (In fairness: The presentation was slightly longer than two slides.) The expansion "may be the right thing to do,” he said. “But they certainly didn’t make the case for it.”  

First, for those who haven’t been following along, here’s a little background.

The Rationale

Last December, P.S. 187 Principal Emel Topbas-Mejia and District 6 Superintendent Renzo Martinez announced plans to build the addition. The reason, they said, was to comply with the class-size caps for New York City public schools that lawmakers passed in 2022.

The limit for a first-grade class, for example, was 32 students. As the new law is fully phased in, the maximum is dropping to 20 kids.

That has put a lot of pressure on schools like P.S. 187, where many classes are too large under the new rules, but there isn’t space to add new classrooms.  

The Project

Joshua Adams, an external-affairs official with the School Construction Authority, said on Thursday evening that the city plans to build a 377-seat addition to the school in a portion of the large schoolyard. The design phase will start soon and typically lasts around one year, followed by a three- to four-month-long bidding process before construction begins, he said.

That timeline would put the start of construction somewhere around late 2027. The SCA wants the addition to be ready by September 2030.

According to Adams, the addition will include seven early-childhood classrooms, nine general education rooms, and four special-education classrooms, in addition to a science lab, space for art and music classes, and guidance and medical suites.

Not everyone in the neighborhood is on board with the project, and objections have circulated among parent groups in the past few weeks. Some community members are worried about losing the P.S. 187 schoolyard, which is a heavily used neighborhood space. Adams didn’t have many specifics to share. “We are working with our design team to ensure as much play space as possible,” he said. He said he didn’t yet have any details about how much of the schoolyard would be accessible during construction.

Other community members have questioned why the city is investing $61 million into an addition when District 6 as a whole is facing sharp drops in enrollment. Some schools in the district are currently under-enrolled; the city projects that the district will experience a 30 percent drop in the number of elementary- and middle-school students in the next decade.

During the CEC meeting, I asked why the city had chosen to build an addition to the school, rather than reducing enrollment at P.S. 187 and sending children to other schools. An official told me they would not answer media questions at the event, but that I could email them to get responses from the press team. 

Eric Herman, an NYC Public Schools planning official, addressed the issue later in the meeting, after an attendee asked about other options for reducing enrollment at P.S. 187. "P.S./I.S. 187 is a very high demand and popular school,” he said. “In order for us to comply with the class-size law in this building, we would have to reduce the enrollment by a very, very, very significant number.” The officials, he said, didn’t want to do that.

One other lingering question: Will the city ultimately enroll more children in P.S. 187, or just spread the same number of kids through a much bigger building?

The Teachers

Some community members welcome more space, including many of the school’s teachers. 

Isabella Candido, a first-grade special-education teacher at P.S. 187, told me she had a classroom of 32 students last year. “It felt very crowded. It was very difficult to meet all the students' needs,” she said.

This year, after P.S. 187 sacrificed its art room to add an additional first-grade class, she has had 21 students. “It was a dream, honestly,” she said. “It was great.” The smaller classroom has allowed her to build stronger relationships with families and better meet children’s social-emotional needs, she said.

Candido told me that the school’s teachers are generally in favor of the addition. “What drew me to this school was the community and families here,” Candido said. “We just want to do right by them, and having this extra space will let their kids be seen.”

(Disclosure: I have children enrolled in local public schools and childcare institutions.)