Upper West Side School Set for June Closure After 236 Years

By Caroline McCarthy

The Alexander Robertson School is in its final weeks of operation after failing to come to a lease agreement with the Second Presbyterian Church, which owns the building it operates within. The school, which is connected to the church on West 95th Street, will close following graduation ceremonies on June 13th.  

Head of School Brinton Parson said in a recent interview that all of Robertson’s nearly 60 students, in grades junior-K through 5, have an enrollment plan for the fall. Most will continue in the independent school system, while about 10 percent are expected to move to public schools.

Finances drove the decision for some families. Elias Issa, a father of three, has one child in kindergarten at ARS and two more at home. He says with the Robertson school closing, it no longer makes sense financially for his family to continue with private school. 

“ARS was more of an affordable private option,” Issa said, but “with three kids, it wasn’t sustainable to do private school for too long.” 

Robertson is private, but the annual tuition of about $36,000 is significantly lower than other nearby private schools – such as Ethical Culture Fieldston, where yearly fees are approximately $65,000. And last year, according to Parson, the school disbursed $1 million in scholarship aid to help defray tuition costs for many Robertson students. 

“Our student body is composed of children that would not normally be in the independent school world elsewhere,” Parson said. “The mission of this school, even when it was founded in 1789 by the Second Presbyterian Church, was to educate what they called ‘common folk.’”

The school was founded before New York City had a formal public school system. Church trustee Alexander Robertson donated land and money to the church to endow a school “for the congregation’s underserved children,” also described as “the sons and daughters of farmers and common folk.”

Robertson is located in a small, townhome-like facility a few steps west of Central Park; the church and school moved there in 1926, after a long history in lower Manhattan. Classes have as few as six students in each room. The classrooms are spread out across three floors, and there is a multi-purpose room that serves as a gymnasium, auditorium, and cafeteria, often all at the same time. 

The decision to close the 236-year-old school was announced by Parson in November after what she described in an email to the school community as “prolonged and arduous negotiations” between the school and the church.

The obstacle was not rent – the school and church had come to a financial agreement that the school would pay about $100,000 per year for its use of the building. The issue, from the school’s perspective, was whether the church would agree to stricter limits on outsiders accessing parts of the school at times when students might still be there.

“It’s a security issue, and that in turn means it’s an insurance issue and a legal issue,” Parson said. 

One stumbling block, Parson said, was a small swinging door that separates the first floor of the school from the church. The door is just beyond where students hang their backpacks and coats, and it does not lock, meaning that it is possible to access the school – including one of its five student bathrooms – from the church at any time. 

The church also rents some of Robertson’s classrooms to outside groups for use in the afternoons and evenings. 

“The church has a long-standing practice of contracting with other groups who have relevant missions and pay to use the space during after-school hours,” Reverend Thia Reggio wrote in an email, in response to questions about the impasse. “This widely accepted model for church stewardship is essential to our own broader mission and financial sustainability.” 

But the school and some parents say outside groups have entered school areas while students are still there, which Parson said raised security issues. While the school day at Alexander Robertson ends at 3 p.m., the school offers after care services and activities until 6 p.m. 

Last semester, members of an Alcoholics Anonymous group that meets in the school repeatedly arrived before their allotted 6 p.m. time, according to several parents of Robertson students. In one case the AA group left the school’s front door propped open and unattended while students were still in the building. 

According to Helen Pan, the mother of a second grader at ARS, after this incident parents asked for new steps to reduce safety risks – even offering to pool money to hire additional security. 

“We live with those [security] risks today,” Pan said. “[The parents] had made suggestions…could we pay for a security guard? Could we operate a FOB system, and  could we work out something with the church where we split the costs on things like that?”

According to Pan, those security conversations between parents, the church, and the school never came to fruition. 

Reverend Reggio, who took over as pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in 2022, said AA meetings are now held at 7 p.m. on Fridays and during weekend afternoons, all outside of school operating hours. 

Another concern for the school is the early arrival of some members of a Dutch language school that rents out classrooms starting at 4 p.m. Alexander Robertson teachers are paid to be on campus until 4 p.m. but are often kicked out of their classrooms as early as 3:15 when the Dutch language teachers arrive to set up for their classes, according to Parson. With the school’s limited space, there are few areas for teachers to continue their work after their classrooms are occupied. 

“Without exclusive use during school hours [until 4 p.m.], I was not able to sign a lease,” Parson said. 

Reggio countered that the school’s request for exclusive use during school hours was “challenging” to the negotiations. The church called Parson’s November letter announcing the school would close this spring a “precipitous announcement” and offered ARS an additional year of free rent to continue negotiations. With safety concerns in mind, and seeing no agreement in sight, Parson said, she turned it down. 

Pan said she and other parents were disappointed that negotiations between the school and church ended before finding a compromise. While safety is important, she said, she believes a deal on prime New York City real estate will always come at a price. 

“We all understand at the end the rationale,” Pan said. “But could there have been ways that could have worked themselves out? Absolutely.” 

Until 2014, the pastor of Second Presbyterian also served as head of the school. Parson took over in 2020, when the fiscal connection between church and school was formally ended. At that time, the church said the school could continue using the space rent free until 2025, with the understanding that a lease agreement would be negotiated in that period. When there was still no agreement on lease terms last year, the church offered another rent-free year to allow negotiations to continue. Instead, the school declined in the absence of agreement on their security terms, and Parson sent out the closure announcement.

Parson said she looked for other spaces to house the Alexander Robertson School back in 2020 but had no luck finding affordable rent. 

“This school is really too small, and I’m even going to use the word too fragile, to withstand either a move geographically, or a name change – nor could it really afford to pay market rent anywhere and still serve the population that we serve,” Parson said. 

“It’s the life cycle of a school, and 236 years is a good long time to have been around that,” she said. “The tragedy is that it won’t be here in the future.”

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