Neighbors support sale of Number Five School in Cedarhurst

After a robust campaign by the Community Coalition of the Five Towns, voters in the Lawrence school district overwhelmingly approved the sale of the former Number Five School building, in Cedarhurst, to the Shulamith School for Girls in a referendum on Feb. 16.

The final vote tally was 1,605 to 142. Shulamith, which has been leasing the 97,000-square-foot building on Cedarhurst Avenue for the past eight years, is expected pay the school district $12.5 million. The school was built in 1929, and sits on 2.5 acres.

“We are very excited about winning the referendum, and the tremendous support that we saw from the community,” Dov Hertz, a member of Shulamith’s board of directors, said. “It has been the home for the Shulamith Elementary School for the last seven to eight years, and this was really an existential moment in Shulamith’s history.”

Josh Justic, a Lawrence resident who is president of the grass-roots Community Coalition of the Five Towns, issued a statement to the Herald about the referendum. “The CC5T would like to thank everyone who came out to vote and create a landslide victory in the fight against overdevelopment,” Justic said. “This vote proves that when residents have a choice, they stand against high-density apartment buildings and the urban blight that it creates.”

The coalition ran ads in local media and on social media in support of the sale.

A decade ago, the coalition was instrumental in spearheading opposition to the proposed $12.5 million sale of the former Number Six School, in Woodmere, to Simone Development, which planned to lease it to Mount Sinai Hospital to create a 60-doctor, 30-speciality medical care center. The Number Six School was eventually sold to the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach after the coalition and other community members supported a 2014 referendum.

The Lawrence district has sold four buildings since 1980, including the Number Three School, in Cedarhurst, which became the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway High School, and, in 2007, the Number One School, in Lawrence, which is now the upscale Regency condominium complex.

The least agreement between Shulamith, a girls-only Jewish school, and the Lawrence district began at $500,000 per year in 2015 and grew to $600,000 this school year.

The community coalition’s vice president, Avi Pinto, said he was ecstatic about the result of the referendum — and excited on behalf of the girls who go to school in the building. “I’m very happy Shulamith gets to stay,” Pinto said. “There are a lot of kids that depend on that school.”

Shulamith has an early-childhood school, a lower division and middle school that are housed in Cedarhurst. The high school is in a building on Franklin Place in Woodmere, the former site of a New York Sports Club.

Hertz said the girls were excited when they heard the results of the vote. On the school’s website, a video showed Shulamith students thanking those who voted by saying, “Thank you for giving Shulamith a home!”

The Lawrence district is expected to use the proceeds from the sale to undertake a $60 million to $80 million makeover of Lawrence High School, which will include new sidewalks, a new heating and air-conditioning system and flood protection walls. The balance of the money will come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as part of it funding for projects to repair damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“Through this vote, everyone enabled the Number Five School to continue to be a home for education,” Justic said, “and a wonderful asset to our community.”