Pacific Park to create new middle school for Prospect Heights

Hi Esperanza.

PS 321 is an overcrowded zoned school, which means that access is limited to affluent people who can buy into the zone. In contrast, this would be a "choice" middle school for all of District 13. Given the demographic composition of the District and, in particular, the elementary school kids of the district, and the large size of the school, there is a much better chance that this school would remain diverse. The District's elementary school kids are currently 55% African-American, 29% Hispanic, 17% White, 5% Asian and 3% other.  If you remove PS8 and Arts & Letters from this figure (because they are both K-8 schools with their own middle schools and a disproportionate number of the district's white students), the proportion of Black and Hispanic elementary school students is even higher, at 60% and 21%.

Of course, given trends this may not stay the case forever. And there are ways to adjust admissions processes to protect diversity.  In any event, it is pretty clear that right now the diversity problem in our district is that most of our middle schools have none, and that drives our elementary schools to have less diversity than they otherwise might, because more privileged families tend to leave at the upper grades for schools/districts with more promising middle school options (and those schools/districts, perhaps not surprisingly, tend to be much whiter and more affluent than District 13).

These are numbers for kids IN district 13 schools. The demographic data for elementary-school age children in the district as a whole is probably quite different. A disproportionate amount of white/affluent families who reside in the district send their kids to private schools, charters or District 15 schools, and as a result a fair number of seats in D13 schools are occupied by residents of other districts. The evidence from Downtown Brooklyn is that even after many years, new condos do not meaningfully affect local public school demographics.

To parents in Prospect Heights, If you really love and care for your kids, I have one piece of advice. Get the hell out of New York City. Take your kids to a place they can breathe, enjoy nature, ride a bike without fear of getting run over or abducted, walk through a forest, play basketball in the driveway, go to a public school that is as good as the private schools in Brooklyn, have their own bedroom, have more than one bathroom for the family, walk home from school alone, not ride the bus through Park Slope with the most offensive teenagers imaginable, live in a home and not in an apartment surrounded on all sides by people who know too much about your life, expand their concept of "wildlife" beyond rats, pigeons and cockroaches, have a basement where you can send them when they drive you crazy, have a trampoline in your backyard, have a backyard!!!!!!!! For the parents, you don't have to thread the needle to get into preschool, to get into elementary school, to get into middle school, to get into high school. You can park your car in your own garage, you do not need to spend 45 minutes parking your car only to do the same thing tomorrow, create peace in your family by having enough space so you are not on top of each other all day long, watch your children thrive in their new environment, knowing they are better now than in the city. Don't wait. Do it now before your children miss too much. Don't wait for a new middle school, as if the new school will make it all better. We spent 13 years in Prospect Heights. We loved it. But we traded up to a better life. Stages in life. Signing off, Pima

Now that your children are suburban teenagers, they can start experimenting with drinking right around when they get their driver's licenses.

or, you could buy a house in east flatbush that has a yard, enough space for your kids, several bathrooms, and probably a garage/driveway. you know, if you could let go of your snobbish need for brownstone living.