Glen Cove sells Coles School for $2.1M

Tiegerman to move middle school to the property

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The City Council voted 4-2 on Dec. 14 to sell the Coles School in Glen Cove to Tiegerman, formerly the School for Language and Communication Development, for $2.1 million. The school has stood vacant for eight years.
Tiegerman is a not-for-profit school for children in pre-K through high school with language and autism spectrum disorders. Additionally, it has a community service agency for adults. The pre-K and elementary school is on Glen Cove Avenue.
The decision to sell received mixed reviews from council members and meeting attendees, with Councilmen Efraim Spagnoletti and Roderick Watson voting against the measure.
“I just can’t get to a place of being comfortable with selling it or giving it away,” Spagnoletti said. “I promised my constituents I would fight to hold onto some assets in Glen Cove . . . It’s not personal at all.”
“Having gone to Coles School, I am overjoyed that it is remaining as an educational conduit,” Councilman Joe Capobianco said, noting he went there when he first came to the U.S. from Italy.

The city is selling the 1.87 acres at the front of the property, which includes the Coles School. Tiegerman officials plan to move their middle school program there.
The city will retain the rear portion, which is about two acres and includes open space and one building. Mayor Reggie Spinello said the goal is to move the Glen Cove Youth Bureau to the back so children have open space to play.
Former City Councilman Steve Gonzalez’s son currently attends Tiegerman. “They have been a pillar of the community, and my wife and I have truly enjoyed my son’s progress,” he told the Council. “This is one of the City Council [and] Reggie’s better moves in his term of office.”
Resident Drew Lawrence said that because Tiegerman is a not-for-profit, the city will not collect taxes on the property. “I would also request that consideration be given to some conditions and restrictions put on the sale of the property,” Lawrence suggested. “Should something occur, that the school would not be able to just sell it to a developer and have it torn down.”
The city purchased the school for $2.4 million from the Glen Cove City School District in 2002, and leased it to Solomon Schechter School until 2011.
“The amount of money that it would take to restore the Coles School — the plumbing, the asbestos, the air-conditioning — every single system in this building needs to be replaced for millions and millions of dollars,” city attorney Charles McQuair said. “Every year that we hold onto it, we have to pay the bond, and we lose money.”
Turning the property into a new school with the Youth Bureau out back also aligns with the Brownfield Opportunity Area study that the city is now conducting, officials said.
Spinello said the community benefit would go beyond dollars and cents of the deal. “I think that that piece of property, to stay as it is, is really a home run for us.”