On November 23, the morning after his home was drawn into a different school zone, Mark Gonsalves slipped out of his office in Midtown Manhattan and rode the subway to the Upper West Side. He met his wife outside a tan-brick building on West 61st Street. It was P.S. 191. Together, they entered the school’s library, a sparse room with butterfly stickers pasted to the wall and wooden shelves full of donated books. A promotional video was playing. It showed children of different races smiling as they made papier-mâché sculptures and visited a local museum. Gonsalves, who is an executive at a sportswear company, pulled out a pen and paper. The couple had come to size up the school.
It was not where they had dreamed of sending their youngest son, Justin. Seven years earlier, with their first child on the way, they had bought a co-op apartment around the corner from a school on West 70th Street, P.S. 199. In a district where most public-school students are poor, 199 is a bastion of privilege. Its parent association raffles off backstage Hamilton passes and weeklong ski-resort stays to augment the school’s budget. Its students, who are disproportionately white and Asian, score in the 97th percentile citywide on standardized tests. In fact, its success drew more parents to the neighborhood than the school could accommodate, so the city decided to shrink its borders. The proposal cut Gonsalves’s building out of 199’s zone. Suddenly, the path that he’d carefully plotted for his son from private preschool to elite public kindergarten was in jeopardy. He and his neighbors fought the plan. But, two days before Thanksgiving, the district education council approved it. Gonsalves’s family was now zoned for P.S. 191.
[For more of this story, written by Patrick Wall, go to https://www.citylab.com/politi...chool-choice/524202/]
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