Waterfront library's opening pushed back to 2019

From LIC Post:

Construction on the the Hunters Point Library is delayed once more, and is expected to be completed in August 2018 with a possible opening in 2019.

The update on the $40 million project was announced on Dec. 18, when the Department of Design and Construction and the Queens Public Library testified on the progress of several library projects during the City Council Subcommittee on Libraries meeting, chaired by Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Long Island City).

“It is a unique design,” Walcott said at the meeting. “When we talk about outfitting a normal library it can be three to four months. With Hunters Point we are saying six months.”

Van Bramer questioned the DDC and the QPL on the series of “horrific” mistakes that have led to the project’s multiple delays, including the fiasco involving the glass used for the library’s windows.

The architect, Steven Holl, insisted that a specific type of glass be used for the building due to its lighting and heat features. The glass chosen was manufactured in Germany, glazed in Spain, and eventually exported to Connecticut before reaching Long Island City. The glass was held up in Spain, however, due to a strike by dock workers at a port.

Only "under two years" of additional delays? It's a Festivus miracle!

New Elmhurst Library opens - finally!

From the Queens Tribune:

The $32.4 million, 32,000-square-foot library, which is projected to serve 1.2 million visitors annually, is now open. And to celebrate the official opening, CEO and president of Queens Library Dennis Walcott, Borough President Melinda Katz, and every civic leader and elected official within the confines of the district gathered together at the Elmhurst Community Library at noon on Tuesday for a ribbon cutting, followed by the official opening of the doors to consumers.

Originally, the Elmhurst Community Library, which had broken ground in 2011, was set to open in 2013. However the date continued to shift back. The 2013 grand opening was then set for spring 2014, followed by a set opening for spring 2015.

Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) said the new Elmhurst Community Library is the most beautiful building he had ever seen in his life, and is “one of those buildings that will be cherished every time anyone walks by.”

This guy must not get out much if he thinks that's the most beautiful building in creation.

Queens Library makes historic photos available online

From the Times Ledger:

The Archives at Queens Library has collected more than 50,000 items since 1912, detailing the history of the four counties that originally comprised Long Island, including Queens, Kings, Nassau and Suffolk, before New York City consolidated in 1898.

The new space for the archives features climate-controlled storage units to preserve the older items, and users accessing the archives online will be able to search through the contents by neighborhood, material type and collection name. The archives include maps, books, newspapers, musical scores, and thousands of photographs from throughout the history of the four counties.

The archives can be accessed online at digitalarchives.queenslibrary.org.

Walcott is new Queens Library CEO

From the Daily News:

Respected former city Schools Chancellor and Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott is poised to take over as CEO of the Queens Library, the Daily News has learned.

Walcott, who grew up in Queens, is expected to bring a steady hand to the busy system that was rocked by the free-spending ways of former CEO Thomas Galante.

“We are confident that Dennis Walcott has exactly the right skills and depth of experience to lead the library through the challenging years ahead,” said Carl Koerner and Judith Bergtraum, who served on the Queens Library Board’s search committee.

Walcott was chosen after a six-month national search, officials said.

Building more towers on top of schools

From CBS New York:

The city reportedly has plans to knock down two Upper West Side elementary schools to allow high-rise apartment buildings to go up in their place.

The Department of Education’s Educational Construction Fund listed the sites, on 61st Street and 70th Street, in Crain’s New York last fall, calling for interested developers to come forward.

City Councilwoman Gale Brewer is up in arms over selling P.S. 191 and 199 to developers, WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb reported. Brewer said millions of dollars that have been plowed into improvements into those schools will go down the drain.

“Do we want more tall towers in our neighborhood? We have Riverside South, we have three tall towers, some of which are 60 stories going up on Amsterdam Ave. and 69th Street and I could go on and on about the development on the West Side,” Brewer told Lamb.

But Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott noted that any new construction would require the developers to build cutting-edge schools for free on the lower floors of whatever structure they put up.

“We have several projects out there like that. There’s a project up in the 90s East Side where there’s a building with condominiums and below that is a great school at no cost to the taxpayers,” Walcott told reporters including Lamb on Monday.

Walcott added he would never sacrifice a school.

Brewer said taller towers mean more families with kids and bigger schools. Though there will be hearings, Brewer added that knocking down schools “to build more towers is being foisted upon us.”

City reopened Zone A school prematurely?

Bloomberg looks like really big asshole

From Gotham Schools:

An arbitrator has ruled that the city’s plans to reform 24 struggling schools by shaking up their staffs violated its collective bargaining agreements with the teachers and principals unions.

The arbitrator’s decision adds a new and abrupt twist to months of uncertainty at the schools. It also guarantees that the city cannot claim more than $40 million in federal funds that the overhaul process, known as “turnaround,” was aimed at securing.

The turnaround rules require the schools to replace half of their teachers, and the city was trying to use a clause in its contract with the teachers union, known as 18-D, to make that happen. In recent weeks, “18-D committees” told hundreds and possibly thousands of teachers and staff members at the schools they could not return next year.

Under the arbitrator’s ruling, all of those staff members are now free to take their jobs back.

The decision is a shocking blow to the Bloomberg administration, which turned to turnaround in January in a bid to win the federal funds without negotiating a new evaluation system with the United Federation of Teachers.

24 high schools to close and reopen

From the NY Times:

A bit before midnight, more than three months after the idea was proposed, the Panel for Educational Policy voted to reconstitute two dozen city schools by closing them, replacing most of their staff members and reopening them with new names.

Come summer, Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical High School, Herbert H. Lehman High School, Banana Kelly High School, J.H.S. 22 Jordan L. Mott, I.S. 339, Bronx High School of Business, J.H.S. 80 Mosholu Parkway, M.S. 391 Angelo Patri Middle School, Fordham Leadership Academy and J.H.S. 142 John Philip Sousa, all in the Bronx; Automotive High School, Sheepshead Bay High School, John Dewey High School, John Ericsson Middle School 126 and J.H.S. 166 George Gershwin, all in Brooklyn; Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School and High School of Graphic Communication Arts, in Manhattan; and August Martin High School, Flushing High School, Long Island City High School, William Cullen Bryant High School, John Adams High School, Newtown High School and Richmond Hill High School, in Queens — will no longer exist.

But before the meeting was the drama of a last-minute save for two of the schools that were on the list. As Anna M. Phillips reported for The New York Times, “The schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, retreated on Thursday from a plan to shut down a last-chance high school for students who have dropped out or have failed at traditional schools.”

That school, Bushwick Community High School, is a transfer school that was passionately defended by its students and public officials who had heard the stories of success and, in some cases, salvation, that the school, its staff and administration, had provided them.

Also saved was Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens.

Both schools had C’s on their last school progress reports and, despite very low graduation rates and other weaknesses, had shown signs of improving.

Get ready for some really bad acting

It may take you all weekend to recover from this...

Walcott out-of-touch with scheduling snafus

From the Daily News:

A Queens high school where the daughter of city schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott teaches gym is so disorganized that many students don’t know where their classes are or when they start.

Some kids at Metropolitan High School in Forest Hills have gotten 10 different class schedules in 11 weeks of instruction, angry parents say.

But this is all news to Walcott, because he refuses to talk shop with his daughter.

“We try not to mix our respective lives as far as education is concerned because she is her own person and teacher,” Walcott told a room of angry parents at the Panel for Educational Policy Thursday night.

DeJeanne Walcott, who earns $57,000 a year teaching gym at the school, has been a city teacher since 2010.

The chancellor blamed rapid enrollment growth at the school ’t mentioned the issue to him ."My daughter and I have worked out where she's not passing information," said Walcott, adding that he just heard about issues at the school "about two weeks ago."

3rd term's not a charm for Bloomie

From the NY Post:

Black's hiring took on a symbolic meaning far greater than the job itself. The secretive, unpopular choice of someone who was too far outside the box opened a window into Bloomberg's state of mind.

It wasn't a pretty picture. Starting with his manipulation of the term-limits law, Bloomy has been erratic. Even more telling than scandals like CityTime, the mayor is too flip about public concern.

Through his discipline and the persistence of talented staffers, Bloomberg mostly kept that imperious persona hidden for eight years. But the third term, staffed with a third team, has worked on him like a bottle of wine: It loosened his tie and his tongue.

He acts as if the job is somewhere between an entitlement and a consolation prize and that he can do it on automatic pilot. He's tuned out dissent and, in trickle-down fashion, some aides assumed a license to distort facts and trample truth.

From the Daily News:

So now Bloomberg, the only person in the whole city - besides Cathie Black - who thought [Cathie] Black should be schools chancellor despite her spectacular lack of qualifications, fires her because she isn't qualified for the job. It really is kind of wonderful. Bloomberg replaces Black with a different kind of crony, a City Hall insider named Dennis Walcott, apparently having just remembered that Walcott went to public school.

The mayor of New York is suddenly supposed to have turned into a very big guy because he said, "I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out." It was a huge relief, of course, to people all over town who started to worry that they were to blame for Black's appointment.

This is apparently how low we currently set the bar for our elected officials: We're expected to carry them around the room when they admit they made a mistake...

The mistake was a third term for Bloomberg, the sense of entitlement he brought to the whole process. He is still running television commercials even though he is no longer running for anything. Commercials about Bloomberg, paid for by him. Perfect.

EPA coming to a school near you

From the Daily News:

The Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines for schools grappling with older light fixtures contaminated by a cancer-causing toxin.

The recommendations announced Thursday are for schools handling and removing lights laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

The action comes on the heels of a Bronx mom's 2009 lawsuit against the city Department of Education over the cleanup of high PCB levels in her children's Co-op City school.

Steve Owens, EPA's assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, said in a statement that as the EPA learned more about PCB risks in older buildings, it would work closely with schools to make sure they were safe.

The EPA wants the city to remove the lights in about 800 schools in an "expedited time frame," but the city says the lights pose no immediate health risks and removing them would cost more than $1 billion.

The EPA is set to begin testing city classrooms for PCB contamination next month.

In 1979, the EPA banned PCBs, which were used in electrical resistors to control lights and have been linked to cancer, birth defects and learning difficulties.

City Education officials declined to comment yesterday, but a letter sent to the EPA by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott last week scolded the agency for singling out the city, when buildings across the country contain PCB-contaminated lights.

Giant school to tower over homes

From the Brooklyn Paper:

City officials did an end run around existing zoning to allow the construction of a large Bay Ridge school on the site of the demolished Green Church.

Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott quietly granted school construction officials a zoning waiver — without public review — in a maneuver that the city frequently employs when it wants to build a public facility that could not be built under the current zoning.

The waiver gave the green light to the 680-seat elementary school at the corner of Fourth and Ovington avenues — which will tower over five attached townhouses abutting it.

And that’s not kosher with the locals.

The override allows the School Construction Authority, which requested the waiver in March, to build to a height of 62 feet along 72nd Street, where existing zoning permits only 32 feet. The waiver also allows the city to build to a height of 75 feet along Fourth Avenue, where a 60-foot-high building is permitted.

The city’s ability to override its own zoning without public review is “unfair,” contended preservationist Victoria Hofmo.

“I’m really concerned about the people on 72nd Street,” Hofmo said, stressing, “I think it’s really wrong. I had no idea that the school was going to block people’s backyards.”