PS 199 on West 70th street was named as one of 286 “Blue Ribbon Schools” this week by the U.S. Department of Education, meaning it stood out as one of the top academic institutions in the country. It was the only school in Manhattan to make the list.
“The National Blue Ribbon Schools award honors public and private elementary, middle, and high schools where students perform at very high levels or where significant improvements are being made in students’ levels of achievement,” the US DOE said in a release.
The school stands out in particular because it is not a gifted & talented school and yet students consistently score higher than almost any other school in the city. Lots of students come from the middle class neighborhoods nearby like Lincoln Towers. Last year, students at the school scored particularly high on the common core tests, with an average of 76% passing the math and English exams across all grades. The Anderson School, a local school for gifted and talented students, scored the highest in the city, with an average of 97% of students passing.
And to think, just a few months ago, the city Department of Education was considering tearing it down.
Re: “And to think, just a few months ago, the city Department of Education was considering tearing it down.”
Mais Oui ! or, rather, wee-wee, which aptly describes most of what the DoE does, as this writer knows from his 31 years of watching the DoE emasculate/mis-manage what was once an excellent school system.
Oh, and don’t blame Bloomberg entirely! The DoE (or Board of Education, as we ‘lifers’ knew it) was perfectly capable of ruining things on its own in the decades before Bloomberg ever appeared.
Wow!!! I love this. Many thanks for sharing it and for all the good work you did to help save the school.
Bonnie Osinski 5R
But it’s riddled with PCBs. So imho Blue Ribbo should take the health of students into consideration when doing ratings not just test scores. And one of the reasons the DOE considered tearing it down, was precisely because PCbs are airborne and affecting children everyday.
Each classroom and every enclosed space in the school has ultra high capacity air filters to keep any issues with suspected PCB’s down. The School is safe. Agreed that It’s to bad that they had a problem but what does that have to do with the Schools academics and the incredible community that exists in the district.
Just because the DOE tears down a building does not mean the school disappears. They’d move PS 199 elsewhere, temporarily or permanently. Would that hurt 199? Maybe, but in the long term it’d probably come out OK.
Great recognition for PS 199, but the “considering tearing it down” sentence is a cheap shot aimed at the DOE (you honestly don’t have something more substantive to criticize??). The building was suggest for tear-down due to the PCB problem (are you advocating that we keep kids in a dangerous building?), as well as the possibility of creating a mixed-use residential/academic building…which has its own set of plusses and minuses. But let’s please not let facts get in the way of a good newspaper story!
No cheap shots here. Just the facts.
The PCB problem was not why the city was going to tear down PS 199. In fact, DOE has dragged its heels for years on the PCB issue, even failing to notify parents when there were active leaks, a fact that has been amply documented. Politicians have been tearing their hair out just to get the city to take out the PCB’s within 5 years. In fact, parents had to sue the city to speed up the process.
https://www.westsiderag.com/2013/05/22/under-legal-pressure-city-agrees-to-remove-chemicals-from-schools-by-2016
Are you still sure that the DOE’s number one priority here is to protect kids?
If the city was planning to tear down every school with a PCB problem, they would be tearing down nearly every school on the Upper West Side.
West Side Rag broke the story about the proposal to tear down the schools, and we followed it closely. We asked the DOE for comment several times. Not once did they mention PCB’s. Please read all of our coverage, starting with the story that broke the news: https://www.westsiderag.com/2013/02/17/exclusive-the-city-is-planning-to-demolish-ps-199-and-ps-191
Avi
Fair point on PCBs, but the “cheap shot” reference was more to the point of underlining that there has never been any intent to close 199 (which is implied in the article). The tear-down is a real estate issue, and the debate was around the temporary impact on the children, not around the permanent status of the school. All i’m saying is that there is so much to legitimately criticize from the DOE (large class sizes, overcrowded buildings, poor school-population/placement planning, lack of co-curricular activities, etc.), I’d rather see the focus on actual facts. Nonetheless, this takes away from the true focus of the article, which is that non G&T publics, albeit those with well-resourced and engaged communities, can shine brightly in any survey. Congrats to 199!
I am the only person who thinks it is ridiculous to call Lincoln Towers a “middle class neighborhood.”? While I applaud the achievements of PS 199, the story makes it sound like the children at the school come from neighborhoods where one might not expect to have a goup of relatively affluent and involved set of parents. One need only do a three minute search on line to find out that the average 3 bedroom 2 bath 1600 square foot apartment in Lincoln Towers costs between $1.5 – $2M. When did we start calling someone who can afford a $1.5-$2M apartment “middle class”? In any other part of the country this would buy you a large house and you would be deemed at worst “upper middle class” if not “wealthy.”
Many of the recent 3 bedroom sales in Lincoln Towers have been to empty nesters who have the cash to spend 2.2m ++ the post- closing liquidity requirements for a 3 bedroom from the sale of their houses in Westchester and Long Island.