De-funded nursery school may get reprieve

The Education Department is reconsidering an application from Riverdale Nursery School for the city-funded Universal Pre-K program, officials said this week, after they had initially turned down the application, citing a lack of demand for early education seats in the area. 

The department expects to make a decision later this week, spokesman Will Mantel said. No decision has been announced by print time Tuesday afternoon. 

“Our pre-K contracting processes are focused on continuing to meet demand for free, full-day, high-quality seats across the city,” Mantel said in an email to The Press. 

The move to reconsider came after the nursery school’s application for Universal Pre-K funding was rejected earlier this month and after school employees and local politicians in Riverdale appealed to the Education Department to review what they described as an unexpected denial. 

The Education Department had urged Riverdale Nursery School three times last year to apply for Universal Pre-K funding, the school’s administration said. When it finally did, the Education Department told the school—which has operated for 10 years—that there was not enough demand for pre-K in the immediate vicinity to justify opening 20 seats at Riverdale Nursery School. 

“We have not in the past applied for Universal Pre-K—many other nursery schools applied very early on—we were experiencing full enrollment for quite a long time, and we were also serving a special community, so at the time when other schools were securing the Universal Pre-K, it didn’t seem like it would be the right fit for our school,” the program’s director Susan Smelin said. 

But enrollment at the school has declined significantly, she said, since the start of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Universal Pre-K initiative, or UPK, which aimed to fund 50,000 early education seats throughout the city. 

Smelin attributed the decline to both the high cost of her school’s program and the better chances of admission parents saw for their children at other programs. 

“If there is free education versus a $17,000 tuition for a class, those are the choices—the hard choices—they need to make,” she said. 

As enrollment declined, the Education Department encouraged the Riverdale school to apply for funding, Smelin said. 

“So we did seriously consider it now and did all the work over the summer—they visited our [school] and as far as we knew everything was fine. We were asking for 20 seats, one class,” she said. 

Months went by with no response, while other schools were receiving their decisions. Riverdale Nursery School’s administration said it did not receive a response to its application until the second week of January. 

“We just found out, which is leaving us a little short on time to appeal this because they are registering on [Jan. 17], so the timing is a little difficult,” Smelin said on Jan. 12. “Our main argument is that they are comparing apples to apples, and that’s our argument to the politicians here, that’s the appeal that we’re making.”

About 30 percent of the students at Riverdale Nursery School have special needs. Many of those students cannot receive the services they need at another school, Smelin said.

“I had families coming to me saying that other nursery schools would not look at their children because they had children with special needs and they could not work with them,” she said. “I found that more and more families were talking to me and had that need, so we really, very purposefully, opened this as an integrated school to serve that population.”

In the 10 years the school has operated, it has created an environment where children with special needs study together and interact naturally with regular students, employees said. 

However, Smelin says the school now faces threat of closure if it does not receive UPK funding—a development that she said would deprive students of that environment. After the application was denied, the school asked local politicians for help. 

“It seems to me there is plenty of demand for these UPK seats,” Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz said. “There’s lots of kids and people who want to send their kids to these programs. We need that in every neighborhood.”