Yonkers schools may get $1.4B face-lift

YONKERS — School officials are proposing a $1.4 billion modernization plan that could result in razing seven schools over 10 to 15 years.

The plan includes the reconstruction of 17 schools with additional space and the rehabilitation of four others.

The district’s priorities are Gorton High School, Kahlil Gibran School and Martin Luther King Jr. High Tech and Computer Magnet School.

Schools Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio told members of the Board of Education on Tuesday night that city taxpayers would not have to shoulder the entire burden of the modernization plan. He estimated that the state would reimburse the city for 39 percent to 53 percent of the cost, or possibly more if city officials are successful in lobbying state officials for more financial aid.

Pierorazio noted that Buffalo is in the final stages of a $1 billion modernization plan that got a 92 percent reimbursement from state officials.

“By having the plan done and voted on by the Board of Education, it now gives us the impetus to start working together with our legislators in Albany to start to tweak the reimbursement factor,” Pierorazio said.

“We can’t come and knock on the taxpayers’ doors and ask them to come up with five-hundred to six-hundred million dollars.”

About 75 percent of the classrooms in the city school district don’t meet current state Department of Education requirements, said Carl T. Thurnau of the state Education Department’s Office of Facilities Planning. Thurnau attended Tuesday’s meeting to express the Department of Education’s support for the adoption of a modernization plan.

Before the meeting, Thurnau said that many of the district’s school buildings are suffering expensive, age-related problems that have caused school evacuations, such as a Jan. 9 boiler explosion at School 21 that cost the district $707,000.

“The bottom line is that we have to provide quality educational facilities for our children,” Pierorazio said. “We just can’t continue to house them in 70-, 80-, 90-, 100-year buildings that are dark, that are dank, that have ventilation issues.”

Kelly Chiarella, president of the Yonkers Council of Parent-Teacher Associations, agreed with Pierorazio’s assessment.

“It’s a necessity. Our buildings are outdated,” Chiarella said.

Pierorazio said that for 16 years, before 2005, the city only gave the district about $4 million a year for books and maintenance of the buildings, which contributed to their decay.

A district of Yonkers’ size with its aging buildings should have spent about $20 million yearly, Pierorazio said.

The Board of Education must vote to adopt the plan, by Cannon Design, but that might not happen this month because the board’s Aug. 19 monthly meeting was canceled and no replacement meeting was announced. The board’s next scheduled meeting is Sept. 16.

The seven schools that could be replaced are:

• Patricia A. DiChiaro School
• Gorton High School
• Museum School 25
• Paideia School 24
• Rosemarie Ann Siragusa School
• School 21
• School 22