Protect Greenacres' Legacy

This letter was contributed by Mike Greenberg of Brite Avenue: I'm a 15-year resident of Greenacres. Two of my three children have graduated from Greenacres Elementary. My daughter is now in 3rd grade there.

I attended the Board of Education meeting on Monday, May 16, at which the proposed renovation (Option B1) or demolition of Greenacres Elementary and construction of new school across the street on our existing fields (Option C) was discussed extensively, and I would like to note a few things.

First, I'm not sure why Option C supporters continue to compare the finished Option C building to the current school, PRIOR to renovations, as I often heard at the Board of Education meeting on Monday night. This is an irrelevant comparison. Obviously, the correct comparison is between the finished Option C building and the finished Option B1 renovated school, which will, in almost every respect that matters, be the equal of Option C at a far lower cost. The school board's most recent proposal and proposed budget illustrates that. Other than a handful of rooms at the current school that are smaller than comparable rooms at a new Option C school, as the article above points out, the RENOVATED Option B1 building will be substantially equivalent to a new Option C school, especially when features of the more expansive Option C are inevitably stripped away during the highly-charged public review period that precedes the community's vote on every substantial bond issue. This is the consistent history of every major bond issue for capital improvements in this town, as long-time residents of Scarsdale understand and those more recently here apparently do not.

Similarly, the suggestion that those favoring Option B1 primarily abut the playground defies explanation. 860 people signed the original "Save the Field" petition. As of last night (I checked with a Greenacres resident who helped create the original Save the Field petition), it is my understanding that 20 or so residents of Greenacres have withdrawn from that petition. I think its fair to say that while the handful of homeowners who abut the playground mostly oppose Option C, they are joined in that opinion by many hundreds of their neighbors. To suggest otherwise simply distorts the truth. And while we're not deciding this by counting votes, the preponderance of opinion within the Greenacres neighborhood counts. While the Save the Field petition still contains some 840 signatures, the Option C petition, despite vocal campaigning and advocacy and no shortage of publicity, has crested at 154 votes, which has not changed for several days. Based on that, it appears that the Save the Field group outnumbers the Option C group by more than 5 to 1.

The suggestion that Option C is the "safe option" also is incorrect. As described at Monday night's School Board meeting, the Scarsdale Board of Education has tremendous experience renovating old schools while students continue to attend, while it has no similar experience demolishing large school buildings that contain hazardous materials. Of course, the law requires abatement of hazardous materials before demolition occurs, but the precautions that will be taken to do so thoroughly in an empty school building that's about to be torn down, will be minimal, as anyone familiar with the hurried pace of demolition knows. Anyone concerned that renovation work will release toxic dust, as some eagerly pointed out at Monday night's meeting, even when extraordinary precautions are taken, should be more concerned about what will happen when a demolition team knocks down the entire school and releases all of those toxic substances into a pile of debris that will be shoveled from the ground into a legion of dump trucks. This sort of work threatens to release such materials not just in the limited areas of a careful abatement project, where rooms are sealed and air is filtered, but instead into the entire neighborhood. Hopefully, none of us will be down wind that day.

And can't we conduct all asbestos and lead paint abatement over the 2.5 month summer of 2017? It seems to me that with sufficient staffing, we could knock out that part of the project over the summer, at least for a large portion of the school, which would allow ordinary (non-abatement) work to take place on abated areas while students are in school.

I also have to say how insulting it is for those of us who support Option B1 (i.e. renovating the current school and saving the fields), and those on the Board of Education who are in the direct line of fire, to be told by parents of children who will attend Greenacres when it is renovated, that those in our community who won't have children there are either ambivalent or simply don't care about the welfare of their children. Do they honestly believe that a single one of us would put anyone's child at risk of injury? Do they believe the School Board would do so? Do they know a single one of us well enough to make such a claim? Their temerity in making this sort of personal attack on the basic humanity of their neighbors is beyond the pale.

I realize that the old option B (which preceded B1) was rejected, in part, because of the heavy use of temporary classrooms, which some found unsightly or inadequate for teaching or simply too expensive to justify. To at least partially address the concerns of Option C supporters about toxic dust, perhaps we use a small number of temporary classrooms to house, on a rotating basis, students who would otherwise be located in the classrooms closest to construction. That way, we could "belt and suspender" our precautions with dust. Those precautions would include sealing off areas under construction (and not with the thin plastic sheets that most homeowners are familiar with in their home renovations, but with full, temporary construction barriers, that are essentially walls that that seal off one area of a building from another), together with a second, buffer area of empty classrooms adjacent to the construction area. The "buffer area" of empty classrooms adjacent to construction areas would place students who remain in the school during construction even further away from ongoing work. The buffer area, like the sealed construction area, would be sealed off with full construction barriers and contain a filtration system to capture airborne dust and, perhaps, equipment to monitor air quality. So if any dust passes a sealed construction area into the "buffer area", it would be detected and filtered. And if dust migrates to the buffer area, we could stop work temporarily and make adjustments until air quality testing in the buffer area again indicates zero dust.

Our school and field have spent a century at the center of our neighborhood. They are part of the legacy of Greenacres and should be cherished and protected, just as the old buildings and open spaces at Yale and Harvard and other schools among our nation's academic treasures are so carefully preserved and updated to match modern building codes and academic missions, The idea that we should lose the existing school and much of our fields because of concerns about exposure to toxic substances, that have no basis in fact and are contradicted by the extensive past experience of this town with earlier renovations -- and that we must spend tens of millions of additional tax dollars over the life of the bond issue to finance this downgrade to our neighborhood -- must be called out for the misguided effort that it is. As the meeting on Monday night and some of the conversation in these threads have made clear, emotion and hyperbole have been substituted for logic. Its time for the School Board to act and approve the only sensible course, which is a thoughtful and careful renovation of our existing school, which brings our school's interior into the 21st century while preserving a field that benefits us all.