City Council Vote Seals P.S. 133's Fate

Playing devils advocate here, and I also hate to see those beautiful old school buildings demolished, however if an actual school is going to remain at the location then I tend to side with the DOE. I am a former school administrator, and those old school buildings just do not work for modern education anymore. A condo conversion, apartment building, retirement home, etc, yes, but a modern place for learning, no. Real schools today are not held in classrooms as we knew them. The 4 walled schoolroom with 30 desks and a teacher are not how we teach kids today – successfully anyway. So in order to actually make this into a modern school of learning, you would have to take out most of the walls (and asbestos), rewire for internet, distance learning, wifi, a/v systems, heating and air, disabilities, etc. Most of these old beautiful buildings are not structurally able to house a modern school with open classrooms, integrated technology, multiple learning styles, etc. Not to mention how many of you have actually tried to learn in one of these old buildings in the heat of October while the window unit hums louder than the teacher, or sit next to a scalding radiator in the dead of winter while trying to learn to the depth we are requiring students to know nowadays. If you’re over 30 the world is an entirely different place with regard to education. What may have worked for us does not work for today’s teaching. If we want our actual education process to catch up to the rest of the modern country, we have to make our facilities ones where that can take place. In the cramped, old-school style of teaching, real learning just doesn’t take place – to the extent that kids are ready to graduate and make something of themselves. Maybe if they could preserve the facade and somehow structurally engineer the inside around it, then both sides would be happy, but the cost of doing such a renovation far exceeds the wrecking ball method. So unless we want to see NJ rates of taxation per household, we can either give up the local school entirely and ship the kids off to other boroughs like Queens or SI where they do have some more modern facilities, or else live with the fact that sometimes we just can’t preserve history and still educate our kids, so we have no other choice than to let it go.

Oops- let me just clarify because I am not against the plans for Coney Island, or asking more questions. But Yassky favors letting Thor do whatever they want (like we want another replay of AY)

Hey Montrose, when’s the next walking tour?

“Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.”—Russell Baker

It’s ironic that Yassky supported the garden’s destruction. He’s been a major advocate for legalized beekeeping and touts his environmental record in his mailings and on his website. I’m saddened to think of this bit of habitat—a tiny gem of green amidst a sorrowful sea of concrete—destroyed needlessly. I continue to believe that incorporating this garden (along with the beautiful old Snyder building) into the new plan could have produced a model school structure with numerous educational possibilities. Alas, expediency trumps imagination yet again.

Very shortsighted and disappointing. To all those who think we preservationists win them all, this is the reality. More buildings are lost to the wrecking ball than saved. Alas, short sighted, unimaginative thinking usually wins out over community wishes, and preservationists’ pleading for some kind of compromise or thought, outside of the traditional box.