District 15 elementary schools will be rezoned for kindergarten starting in the 2022-2023 school year.
All Red Hook families will be zoned for PS 15 (The Patrick Daly School) kindergarten. PS 676 will not have its kindergarten anymore due to its transitioning into the Harbor Middle School. 676 will add a sixth grade in 2022-2023, which means it will serve students in grades one through six.
NYCHA residents, students in temporary housing, English Language Learners and low income families will have priority access to all of the rezoned schools.
These changes were made due to the time and effort that was put in by the parents on the Participatory Action Research (PAR) team.
“The Department of Education hired a professor from Brooklyn College, Maddy Fox, to become the head of a PAR team,” Randall said. “Maddy put together a group of parents from Red Hook, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill to become the research team on the ground talking to other families about what it is they would want for the rezoning.”
Fox has had experience with Participatory Action Research for many years. She had also previously done a PAR process in Red Hook with Red Hook Initiative, so the DOE thought that based on her experience in Red Hook, she would be a good person to lead this.
Randall initially joined the PAR team since she was a mom of two kids who were going to elementary school in the D15 sub zone. She then joined the Community Education Council.
The DOE defines sub zone three as the areas that encompass the seven schools that are being rezoned, which includes Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, parts of Gowanus, parts of Boerum Hill, parts of Downtown Brooklyn, Cobble Hill.
Starting in February of 2020 up until the summer of 2021, the PAR team did research and asked questions to their neighbors about what they wanted the rezoning to look like.
The pandemic started one month later in March of 2020, which made it a difficult time to be going out and interviewing people. They had to pivot a little since a lot of what they did was by Zoom, and they also got 800 responses from a survey that was given.
“It felt like we got a good amount of responses,” Randall said. “We got the same percentage of responses from parents at all of the seven schools that were affected by the rezoning.”
The survey was either sent out by email or the PAR team members who were Red Hook residents went with an iPAD or paper and would often go to the park or food giveaway lines to get the questions answered.
Questions included what they thought the purpose of education was and what does community mean. There were questions where parents could put options in order of preference for them, and some options were proximity to home and diversity of the school.
The overwhelming response was that the community wanted kindergarteners to be able to attend the elementary school closest to where they live.
“It came back over and over again that people wanted proximity to home for their kindergartner,” Randall said. “They did not want to travel far from home to take their kindergartner to school. This was across different neighborhoods and across different schools.”
They spoke to parents from the seven rezoned schools but also parents who had children in 3k or pre kindergarten, a DOE preK or not, since they might send their child to a DOE kindergarten.
This was a community-powered, community-accountable process that trained and paid local community members to conduct community research and develop recommendations for the DOE.
The PAR team included the vice president and president of the PTA at PS 676 and a long time resident of the Red Hook Houses. Of the eight mothers on the PAR team, three were from Red Hook.
According to Randall, the response was that with the constraints that the DOE gives where they are not giving more money to fund PS 676 and they are not going to provide busing then this was what families said worked best for them.
The PAR team took their kids to see how long it would take for people to get from the new zone lines to certain schools and nothing took longer than 10 minutes. Since busing is not offered for less than a mile, parents want their kids to stay as close as possible.
With every incoming kindergartener now being zoned to PS 15, that will in turn increase the enrollment of that elementary school, which will in turn increase its funding. PS 15 will get more money since the funding of each of the schools from the DOE is determined by the enrollment that it has.
PS 15 is now available to all Red Hook families who do not want to travel to go to any of the other schools. If any family wants their kindergartener to go to other schools, they are now no longer excluded from those schools due to zone lines.
The PS 15 enrollment will increase but in the last several years PS 676 has had a small kindergarten class, which has led to less funding from the DOE. Randall added that the DOE looked at enrollment numbers and saw that this would not in any way burden PS 15, which has also been under enrolled.
“One of the issues is that unfortunately the way the DOE does things is that the more students a school has the more money the school gets,” Randall said. “In many ways, this is good for PS 15 and for students who will go to PS 15.”
“It became frustrating to understand how the more students a school has the more money it gets,” Randall said. “It became about thinking through if the DOE is not going to give more money to a school like 676 then what can we suggest to families from Red Hook and Gowanus who have been excluded from certain schools because of zone lines.”
One major change is the transition of PS 676 into the first maritime middle school in New York City. People started to think this was an opportunity to transform 676 so all Red Hook kids would have a middle school to go to in the neighborhood.
It was an opportunity to not make kids have to cross Hamilton Avenue, and also since 676 did not have the enrollment to stay an elementary school, it could be more beneficial to the neighborhood this way.
“We did a town hall on Zoom where the PAR team got perspectives from a lot of parents about transforming 676 into a middle school,” Randall said. “Parents from PS 15 and PS 676 were enthusiastic about the idea. Families can feel more secure knowing their child is able to continue their education trajectory in Red Hook.”
The Office of District Planning had to put together a formal request for the transition of the school into a middle school. The rezoning ended up being separate from the transition into the middle school, which was announced first.
PS 676 Principal Figueroa, who was previously an assistant principal at MS 88 before coming to 676, was very enthusiastic about the transition to a middle school.
“It seemed like a seamless transition for her and she would know what needs to be done,” Randall said. “They have spent this school year preparing for the incoming sixth graders that will be there this September.”
MS 676 will now be able to take students from all of District 15, but Red Hook residents will get priority for the school. This means many more people will be able to apply.
The middle school applications were due March 1 and the offers will come out in May, which means the schools now know how many applied.
The enrollment will likely increase for sixth grade since there is lots of interest in the maritime middle school.
Randall has found out first hand about all of the interest since her son is in fifth grade and he has applied to the school, and she has been talking to many parents in different parts of District 15.
“From what I have heard, there is definitely a lot of interest in 676,” Randall said. “People are very excited about it. They did a presentation with the CEC. The principal has been doing an amazing job getting the word out about the transition.”
This rezoning was about how to prioritize the needs of Red Hook families (and Gowanus families).
The possibility of free busing for kindergarteners came up in the PAR team discussions. It’s complicated since there is no busing for distances under a mile.
“It would be wonderful to have more available school busing for students in NYC, as well as more funding for public schools,” Randall said.
Most families said that they would send their kindergartener to PS 15 but a few who had already been considering traveling said they would send their kindergartener outside the neighborhood.
“What was specific to these neighborhoods was that these are all zoned neighborhoods with a zoned public school,” Randall said. “The people choosing to send their child to that school are making the choice to stay close to home. It repeatedly came back to ‘we wanted to be as close to home as possible since we want to be in our community.’
On May 17, 2021, CEC15 passed a resolution asking for a change in the way school funding is done so that schools that service students with the most need may receive more funding.
