State Senator Daniel Squadron and Tweed Courthouse at 52 Chambers Street

One State Senator has an idea as to how the city can combat overcrowded schools in Lower Manhattan: convert the Department of Education’s own office space.

In response to the DOE’s recently released re-zoning plan for schools downtown, State Senator Daniel Squadron has suggested that the city open new schools in space it already owns or leases, such as the Tweed Courthouse, at 52 Chambers Street, instead of shuffling kids from school to school. He made the remarks in a strongly worded letter to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, DNAinfo reported today. The historic building currently holds DOE offices and some classrooms. [more]

The city has reached an agreement with the United States Postal Service to buy the site of the Peck Slip Post Office and turn it into an elementary school, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced yesterday. “The contract has not been signed, but we’re far enough along to announce it today,” Walcott said of the highly-anticipated project. According to DNAinfo, the city plans to begin the public review process for the new school site next week; the design process should get underway in December, though the Department of Education hasn’t yet decided whether it will renovate the current 70,800-square-foot structure or knock it down and start over. [more]

The city’s Department of Education has announced plans for a new elementary school inside its Tweed Courthouse headquarters in Lower Manhattan, a step towards reducing overcrowding in the fast-growing neighborhood, according to the New York Times. The new elementary school will open next year at Tweed with 50 spots for kindergarteners, and will have a three-year stay there before a permanent home is found. That location could well be the four-story Peck Slip Post Office building nearby, if the city’s negotiations to buy the property come through. [more]

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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