By Alex Eriksen
After seven years of seeing their enrollment swell and their available space dwindle, relief is now in the works for The Robert Fulton School in Brooklyn Heights.
Construction of an annex, which began last year, is due for completion in seven to eight months.
“Space has gotten really tight,” said school principal Seth Phillips. “Where other schools have art rooms and other kinds of room we don’t because we don’t have the space for it.”
The school on Hicks Street, part of District 13, was built to serve 430 students. Today they have 550 enrolled in classes pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The boosts in enrollment are all thanks to an explosion in the child population of Brooklyn Heights. DUMBO is also seeing new families move in and send their children to local schools. The Robert Fulton School has seen its population jump every year in the seven years Phillips has been principal.
The staff has nearly doubled in size to match demand, growing from 24 to 40 full time teachers. Due to the lack of space, teachers work without a lounge. They’ve taken to eating lunch in the library. Teachers have developed several methods for coping with the squeeze. A tight schedule is in place to shuttle students to different classes, to lunch, and to recess.
Some fixes, however, are not perfect. The art teacher pushes a cart of supplies from room to room. The dance teacher moves the desks against a wall to turn a classroom into a dance floor. The drama teacher teaches class in the auditorium. None of them have ever had rooms of their own. Everyone on the faculty is affected. For the past year, the principal shared his office with his assistant principal. He also held every staff meeting there, in a room that looks like it could hold ten people at most.
“It’s a scheduling nightmare,” says the school’s librarian, Amanda Green. Teachers are unhappy having to jump over so many hurdles she says, but can see the finish line up ahead. Green looks forward to moving into a brand new library once the annex is finished.
Teachers aren’t the only ones feeling the strain. For the students, the school’s playground says it all. To make way for the construction, the jungle gym was dismantled. All that remains is a small basketball court with a single hoop and a narrow stretch of concrete next to it. Trailers installed for the school’s two pre-kindergarten classes further shrank the playground. Luckily, this year, the New York State Parks Department allows the school to use the nearby and newly renovated Squib Park for recess.
Back in the classroom, the noise of a construction site intrudes. When the foundation was laid last February the noise was so loud and lasted so long that classes had to move and doubled up in rooms away from the site, jamming 50 into a room meant for 25, half sitting at desks and the other half on the floor.
“The entire building shook,” says Phillips, but says its gotten better over time. Most work now is done early in the morning before students arrive and on weekends. Rarely is their noise during classes, according to Phillips.
Local residents, however, hardly enjoy beginning their mornings to the sounds of jackhammers. The school lies in a far corner of the Brooklyn Heights’ historic district, surrounded on all sides by brownstones. “It’s pretty annoying, you can’t sleep in,” says Aaron Harnley, who lives directly across from the construction site.
Phillips says he gotten mixed reactions about the construction. “Some people are very supportive, some people are not,” he says. “As a whole the neighborhood is behind it, they understand a good school building makes a better neighborhood, it helps housing prices, it helps everything.”
While residents ask when the construction will be finished, teachers are asking why it didn’t begin sooner. Overcrowding has been a longtime problem and only after six years of it did the Department of Education decide to expand the school.
There have been some delays and unique problems when it comes to building. The school is over a hundred years old and so was built using asbestos. Special measures are taken to prevent exposure to it, which has been proven to cause mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. Tents are used to seal off areas and work is often done on weekends and during this past summer, says Phillips. The School Construction Authority, who oversees and runs the project, could not be reached for comment.
Building codes are stricter in the historic section of the Heights, where things like telephone poles are strictly forbidden as to preserve the neighborhood’s iconic image born out of the mid-19th century. Gas lamps instead of electric ones line some streets.
The project first got it start when Phillips asked to downsize, not expand. When he asked permission to no longer have pre-kindergarten, the Department of Education said they would build instead.
“I never expected something to get built,” says Phillips. “District 13 is an undersized district, we’re the only school in District 13 that’s over crowded, and they usually give money according to districts by how overcrowded they are, so we’re a aberration.”
When the four-story annex is finished it will boast nine new classrooms, a library, and an exercise room, adding a total of 18,000 square-feet to the school. The addition will expand the schools capacity to 590 students, which Phillips says the school will likely reach in two years.
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