Last nights meeting - and my response to Julie Menin
Kahanov Learan
Last night, OUR Community Board cast aside the 1500 signatures from 145 buildings throughout Lower Manhattan and said our collective concerns to keep our communities together don't matter.
We need to turn it up a notch and let them know that WE WILL NOT STOP FIGHTING TO KEEP THE SPRUCE COMMUNITY TOGETHER. The CEC has its final vote next Wednesday, but before then, we need to tell all our elected officials from Julie Menin to Bloomberg himself that this cannot happen... keep the emails going and get more specific. Ask the Community Board to submit their so called data to independent scrutiny. Tell them DATA MUST BE OVERWHELMINGLY COMPELLING to support tearing apart communities and ignoring the Overwhelming voices of our community at large (or LOMA, as Elda called us last night).
Below is my email to Julie Menin, Chairperson of Community Board 1. Show all that we will NOT give up this fight!
Thanks, Kim (Tristan, 9 and Sebastian, 5)
Dear Ms. Menin,
I spoke at last night's Community Board Meeting as Co- President of The Spruce Street School PTA and Core SLT member. I would like to share with you a letter I wrote to Julie Shapiro of the Downtown Express (immediately following this one), that best sums up my deeply troubled dismay and rapidly growing sense of injustice around last nights meeting. I need to first say that I appreciate the enormous sacrifice public service carries and have utmost respect for people like you who volunteer to serve. However, with service, comes leadership and power, and thus responsibility. The bare minimum I would expect from a Community Board is an effort to fully understand the concerns and needs of the ENTIRE community it serves and to best reflect the majority and balance of those needs in its recommendations, which in this instance, carry enormous weight.
There are too many things I witnessed last night that are so concerning to me as a citizen of Lower Manhattan to enumerate...but I would be glad to do so in person. And, let me reiterate, I must believe the Board is earnestly trying to do the right thing. I respect this group - they are long time fighters for our kids. It is understandable that they, as they admitted last night, had lines in their heads that defined their advocacy (ease 234 overcrowding on the East with the now SSS.). Similarly, I think they assumed correctly back then, before so many people lived in FiDi, that The Battery Park City School could serve any FiDi stragglers. But things have changed due to their successful advocacy. One member last night exclaimed, "Since when is Spruce a Financial District School?", illustrating that they cannot see this reality. They simply are stuck in a 234/89 "generation gap".
In reality, their victory in gaining LOMA 2 new schools has changed the landscape in ways they didn't expect- and now this story is bigger that 234 overcrowding. These victories have built communities that have formed around these new schools in ways that are SIGNIFICANT. In Spruce's case, Danielle Elder and I have spent a year building solid business and community support for our school (and I think you can see from our email, petitions, and speakers that Spruce's community IS the combined Seaport/Fidi community all the way south). This community support has benefited not only our school but has given back to our community. Businesses financial support is the type of support necessary to take a new promising school and turn it into a 234 - thus increasing the value of said properties and businesses and attracting more businesses and investment to the area. After last night, there is no incentive for any of that. Last night, these same residents, businesses and investors were told that they do not belong in their own community and that our community is not worth keeping together. The 1500 signatures from 145 buildings say the opposite. And really, can anyone say that the "data" unveiled at last night's meeting contributed in any legitimate way to knowing which option worked better to reduce overcrowding. I am a physician and trained to evaluate an evidence base - it seemed to be there was NO new data presented. The only legitimate data presented was compile by the DOE. This was cast aside, because it did not take into account siblings - about whom there is no data AT ALL!
As I say below to Downtown Express, with 4 community schools, we no longer NEED to break apart community to get our kids educated. Communities now should ONLY be broken if there is COMPELLING evidence to do so - and the burden of proof falls on proposals that seek to do that. I say that the burden of proof HAS NOT BEEN MET.
I am asking you and the full Community Board take a stand on this issue that considers, rather than dismisses the OVERWHELMING community support for 3R.
Thank you for allowing me to explain why LOMA and 3R supporters feel it is so important to take this fight to a bigger level and do whatever it takes to preserve our communities.
