No. 2 School lease plan raises parents’ concerns

With excess space in two under-used buildings, the Lawrence School District (No. 15) is again looking to consolidate and lease some of that space to an education-related program that would generate savings for the district, officials said.

The proposed plan calls for Lawrence to lease space in either the Number Two or the Number Four school, both in Inwood, to the Martin De Porres School in Elmont, which is part of a group of schools that offer educational and vocational services to students with special needs.

Lawrence Superintendent Gary Schall said the idea is to create what he is calling the Close-to-Home Program, designed to help district students whose individual educational plans are vocationally centered and who require a variety of therapies. They currently travel to schools outside the district, because existing Lawrence programs don’t address their needs. The program could also be used by students from neighboring districts.

There are nine empty classrooms in the Number Two School that would be used for first- and second-graders, and a separate wing for the special-needs students. The existing library would be consolidated into the classrooms. A half dozen classrooms are now unused in the Number Four School.

Schall said that working with the Martin De Porres School would save Lawrence thousands of dollars a year. The average cost of sending a high school student to the BOCES career preparation is nearly $90,000 per school year. The De Porres School cost could be less than $40,000, and after the first $38,000, 50 percent is reimbursed by the state.

“We’re at the very, very preliminary stages, looking at the feasibility of this, and no formal presentations will be made until I feel very confident and can address all the parent concerns,” Schall said, responding to comments made by Central Parent-Teacher Association members at a meeting on April 1.

Three of those members, Jennifer Bouderau, Marisa Cannon and Matthew Russo, told the Herald that they are concerned about having teenagers with behavioral issues in the same buildings as much younger students.

“I basically told them it is absolutely ludicrous,” said Bouderau, a Meadowmere Park resident whose children attend the Number Two and Four schools as well as the middle school. “I’m extremely involved in all three schools. There is no way, shape or form this justifies putting them in harm’s way.”

Cannon, who lives in Atlantic Beach and is the mother of a first-grader and a sixth-grader, said that having “tremendous changes” in the past year, then another change, is “unfair to the kids.”

Within the last year, Lawrence leased out the Number Five School to the Shulamith School for Girls, moved all third-, fourth- and fifth-graders into the middle school building and created the Lawrence Elementary School at Broadway. The first- and second-graders are in the Lawrence Primary School at the Number Two School, and the Lawrence Early Childhood Center at the Number Four School is home to pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students.

“I’m worried more about the safety of the children,” Cannon said. “You don’t know what those high school kids are capable of, honestly. Though they could be in a separate wing, who’s to say someone won’t have a bad day and figure a way into the main building?”

Schall gave a Herald reporter a tour of the area in the Number Two School where high school students would spend the morning before heading out to their job sites, if that Inwood building were used for the program.

There is a double door that separates that wing from the main portion of the school. It could be locked, Schall said, as was done when the middle school was used as the high school three and a half years ago, when Hurricane Sandy forced the closure of Lawrence High.

“We want to develop a program that addresses student needs,” Schall said. Those needs range from immigrants who need help to graduate from high school, to students with issues such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or anxiety disorders.

Russo, the father of a special-needs student, said he believes it would be better to have the first- through third-grades at the Number Two School and lease the Number Five School for the Close-to-Home Program. “It is not safe for younger children to be with high school kids,” the Woodmere resident said.

The next school board meeting is 8 p.m. on Monday at Lawrence Middle School, at 195 Broadway in Lawrence.

Have an opinion about Lawrence leasing out space in another school? Send your letter to the editor to jbessen@liherald.com.