Beloved Park Slope Elementary School May Be Re-Zoned For Fewer Students
According to a re-zoning proposed by the city’s Education Department, the boundaries for Park Slope’s elementary schools will soon change, meaning that even fewer children than before will be able to attend the neighborhood’s coveted, unofficial magnet school, Public School 321.
Neighborhood parents aren’t as thrilled about this as you might have expected them to be.
“We are devastated about the rezoning and feel it’s disassembling our whole community,” said one neighborhood parent. Another explained, “My family bought a place in what we thought was P.S. 321. Now we’d be put into a new school. We played by the rules; we bought in zone because we want to be in that zone.”
Under the proposed plan — which will go to a vote by the Community Education Council within the next 45 days — Park Slope’s four current elementary school zones would be shrunk and re-drawn, with a new, fifth zone added in.
Citing overcrowding in the more sought-after schools, an Education Department official explained, “The goal is to decrease the 321 zone size so the amount of students fit better in the building, and the same with[P.S. 107]. This has been a conversation that has been occurring on some level for years.”
For the time being, parents are doing what they do best, flooding local meetings and complaining loudly. Which, you know, they probably should be. No one needs this city’s elaborate public education gauntlet to get more complicated than it already is. Or their brownstone’s property value decreasing slightly.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
