Another school is coming to the Financial District, following a unanimous vote from the Panel for Education Policy last month. The Greenwich Village Middle School, which currently enrolls 215 students, will relocate in the fall to 26 Broadway, an office building near the Bowling Green. The two-floor space will give the school a new library and computer lab (though, as parents have lamented, no gymnasium) and will allow it to increase its attendance to up 361 students. The school currently shares a space on Hudson Street with P.S. 3, leading to overcrowding. Parents and local politicians had originally opposed moving the school out of their neighborhood, arguing for a move to a state-owned building at 75 Morton Street, instead. But city negotiations to buy the Morton Street property stalled, and 26 Broadway was the remaining option. Private school Claremont Preparatory Academy, based at 41 Broad Street, has also announced plans to expand this year into a 200,000-square-foot space at office building next door, at 25 Broadway. [Downtown Express]

The new Spruce Street school

From the February issue: Newcomers are moving Downtown for a host of reasons, from deals on apartments to historic surroundings. And increasingly, another lure is good schools. They seem to be such a selling point that many of them are now seriously overcrowded. “They play a huge part in bringing people here,” said James Attard, an associate broker with the Tribeca-based Tabak Real Estate, who’s been selling homes there for six years. Top-ranked P.S. 234 on Greenwich Street, which many call a neighborhood jewel, appears to be significantly boosting property values, even when compared to P.S. 89 in Battery Park City, which is itself prized. Indeed, from 2006 to 2010, homes in the P.S. 234 zone were listed at prices about 30 percent higher than those near P.S. 89, according to StreetEasy, the real estate data company, though other factors may be at play. That may explain why even residents who don’t have children are upset over plans by the city to alleviate the overcrowding by reassigning kids from P.S. 234, which is jam-packed, to other District 2 schools through a large-scale rezoning. Adding two schools and carving up the neighborhood into new districts is meant to address crowding. Temporary rezoning was instituted last spring; a controversial rezoning was finalized in late January.

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