| Community Board 1 (CB1) is seeking to organize opposition, both in Lower Manhattan and City-wide, to a Department of Education (DOE) policy that combines gyms and auditoriums into a single space, known as a “gymnatorium.” The DOE has adopted this policy in recent years as a way to save on both cost and space when building new schools, especially in communities where land is expensive and square footage is scarce. But this has inspired criticism, because both athletic facilities and performances spaces are often utilized to capacity in New York schools, which means that combining them inevitably results in scaling back both functions.
Lower Manhattan has three elementary schools that were built before the DOE shifted to a gymnatorium approach to school design: P.S. 234, P.S. 89, and P.S./I.S. 276. Each of these have separate, full-sized gyms and auditoriums. The community is also served by two elementary schools that were built after DOE’s embrace of the gymnatorium standard: the Spruce Street and Peck Slip schools. Both of these schools have struggled to reconcile the need for physical education space with the demand for a facility in which to hold assemblies and stage performances. (This struggle is compounded by the need for both rooms on days when the weather makes outdoor recess untenable.)
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| CB1’s Youth and Education chair Tricia Joyce: “I went door to door to our three schools in Lower Manhattan that have a gym and an auditorium. What I found was that the gyms are booked from 8:00 to 6:00 pm weekdays and 8:00 am to 8:00 pm on weekends. They are being used every single minute of every single day.” |
“I went door to door to our three schools in Lower Manhattan that have a gym and an auditorium,” explained Tricia Joyce, chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee, at CB1’s May 24. “What I found was that the gyms are booked from 8:00 to 6:00 pm weekdays and 8:00 am to 8:00 pm on weekends, to the point where there are concerns about hygiene and maintenance. They are being used every single minute of every single day.” She added, “and the auditoriums have only 25 percent vacancies at all three schools.”
“Clearly, both of these rooms are necessary,” Ms. Joyce concluded, “in addition to the regular outdoor recess space that is necessary.”
The concern about gymnatorium design is more than theoretical for Lower Manhattan, because one new school that will serve the community is now under construction (on Morton Street, in the West Village), and is slated to open in 2017, while another (to be located on Greenwich Street, in the Financial District) is currently in the planning stage. The DOE plans to build gymnatoriums in both.
If the current dynamic of 100 percent of capacity being used for the space as an athletic facility, and 75 percent of capacity being utilized as a performance and assembly venue, the result will be that 43 percent of all uses for the combined space will have to be eliminated. This figure was obtained by diving 100 (as the baseline representing full usage of a gymnatorium), by 175 (the combined baseline of a standalone gymnasium in use at all times, and a standalone auditorium in use for 75 percent of the time). The resulting quotient is 57 percent, which signifies how much of the combined demand for both spaces a single facility will be able to meet.
That would mean slashing nearly half (or approximately 43 percent) of all physical education classes, team sports, and other uses of the facility as a gymnasium, along with the same percentage of assemblies, performing arts recitals, and other uses of the facility as a auditorium.
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| BP Gale Brewer |
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In March, 2013, CB1 enacted a resolution expressing concern about the use of gymnatoriums, because one had been included in the design for Peck Slip School, which opened in 2015. In March of this year, CB1 passed a resolution calling on the DOE to design a separate auditorium and gymnasium in the Greenwich Street school. And in May, CB1 ratified a measure that calls upon Borough President Gale Brewer and other elected officials to, “support public efforts to guarantee that gymnasiums and auditoriums are provided in separate standalone spaces and not combined in gymnatoriums in all new schools in New York City,” and also urges, “all local and citywide organizations concerned with the quality of education in New York City to join in an organized campaign to advocate for standalone gymnasiums and auditoriums in all new public schools constructed in New York City.”
The DOE and the School Construction Authority (the arm of the DOE that designs and builds new schools) ignored the March, 2013 and March, 2016 resolutions. Whether it will respond any differently to the May resolution remains to be seen.
Matthew Fenton
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