August 31, 2016

Ms. Lorraine Grillo

President & CEO
School Construction Authority
30-30 Thomson Avenue
Long Island City, New York 11101
Dear Ms. Grillo:
We write to urge you to work with the Sunset Park community to create an open
process and dialogue so that we can work collectively to finally resolve the chronic
school overcrowding in our community. For more than a generation severe
overcrowding has limited the opportunities of our children to reach their full
potential and negatively affected academic outcomes and futures.
This has been a motivated and active community, suggesting many sites that have
led to the construction of Sunset Park High School, PS 971, PS 516 and PS/IS 437
over the past few years. We have also brought to your attention the site at 3 rd
Avenue and 59th Street, for which SCA is currently designing a school, and 4302 4 th
Avenue, which is currently being considered. Despite these successes, our
community remains in great need of additional seats, particularly within the District
15 portion of Sunset Park.
Our offices continue to work together with our community residents to find
appropriate sites for new schools in the Sunset Park community. As you know, the
community faces overcrowded conditions in many of our elementary schools and
money has been allocated to build schools totaling more than 3,000 local seats in
the most recent five-year plan. Despite the Community Boards annual update and
submission of a list of properties that may be appropriate for new schools, we have
not been able to keep pace with the communitys population growth.
Recently a community coalition, Make Space for Quality Schools in Sunset Park, has
begun working with our offices to find additional locations for new schools, advocate
for their swift approval and construction to alleviate our severe overcrowding and to
educate neighborhood residents on the need for new schools and how they can get
involved. The coalition is quite eager partner with our offices, SCA and the
Department of Education to finally enable all our children to obtain an education in
their local community without the limitations imposed by a lack of space and
programming.

In a recent meeting, we were at a loss to explain to members of the coalition as to

why certain proposed sites were deemed unfit for a school. In fact, the Community
Board list often includes sites which were previously rejected because we werent
provided with explanations as to why this determination was made. At the meeting
we agreed that explanations on each of these properties would help to educate our
community members as to the attributes that were deemed unacceptable. This
information will allow us to refine our search for properties to better to conform to
standards and such open communication will help build trust and strengthen our
partnership with SCA as we work to resolve this decades-long community crisis.
Therefore, we ask that SCA provide us with the list of properties that have been
vetted for schools in the community and the specific reason for the negative
determination found for each, in the interest of an open public process and to allow
us to better focus our local search. Information on the list of properties submitted
by the Community Board in the spring would allow the Board to update its list in a
more knowledgeable fashion, allowing us to purge unacceptable properties. We
would also like to know specific outcomes for any other property studied in this
community.
We strongly believe it is in SCAs and the communitys best interest to work
together to resolve this heart-wrenching deficit and an open community-driven
process is essential to building trust and cooperation between the public and the
government entities involved.
As this need is urgent and long-standing, we hope you will be able to share a
complete list of properties and specific findings by September 30.
Yours in solidarity,

Carlos Menchaca
Councilman
38th District

Daniel A. Murphy
Chairman
Community Board 7/Brooklyn