Sunset Park School Activists Push School Construction Authority on Transparency

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — A group of Sunset Park school activists met Monday with Lorraine Grillo, head of the city's School Construction Authority (SCA), having what one participant said was a constructive conversation about ways the community and city can work together to bring more school seats to the area.

Cesar Zuniga, who chairs the education committee for Community Board 7, said he was part of Monday's meeting, along with representatives from local group Make Space for Quality Schools in Sunset Park and Friends of Sunset Park. Local Councilman Carlos Menchaca was also in attendance, Zuniga said.

Sunset Park, which sits in Education District 15, is in need of thousands of new school seats to meet demand. In an October letter, the SCA, which is in charge of school construction, said its five year capital budget includes $325 million to bring 3,840 seats to the district, including nearly 1,100 to Sunset Park.

Reflecting on the meeting, Zuniga said Tuesday that the city thinks it will likely move forward with converting the neighborhood's former police station at 4302 4th Ave. into a new school, though he said it remains to be seen whether demolishing the existing building will be recommended (a contentious issue, as some community members want to preserve it).

The city recently announced it will initiate a public review process on a former C-Town supermarket at 4525 8th Ave., which could host a 300 seat elementary school. Zuniga said officials are "feeling pretty confident on moving on that site."

Zuniga said the community members pushed the SCA to be more transparent about the process by which it assesses possible school sites. He said Grillo, the agency's head, explained that the SCA can't reveal all of its reasons for rejecting certain sites, as that could unfairly hurt the chances of owners wishing to resell their properties later. (For example, he said, if the SCA rejects a property on environmental reasons, such information, if made public, would make it more difficult for the property to sell.)

However, Grillo reportedly emphasized that the SCA's October letter provided useful details on numerous properties the agency is evaluating, or previously rejected .

Grillo also said the SCA's "brokers are pounding the pavement" looking for sites, according to Zuniga.

Even so, the local activist said he wants to put together a running and publicly available document listing potential school sites and any evaluation of them the SCA has provided.

"There was a real desire to have a record of all the properties that have been in the hopper," he said, adding that such a list has been missing in the past.

SCA officials said they'll host a public meeting to update the community on their work within the next two months, Zuniga said. The agency's last public meeting was in June.

Overall, Zuniga said he was satisfied with the meeting, adding that community members "should create a meaningful way to work together" with the SCA, to ensure that "everybody is on the same page."

"Hopefully, [the SCA] can become part of the struggle," he said.

Top image courtesy of Historic Bremen on Flickr

[Editor's note: this story has been updated to reflect that Friends of Sunset Park was also represented at Monday's meeting.]