New Call to Turn Former NYPD Academy into Public School

Recent reporting in these pages about how parents at the Jonas Salk Middle School (MS 255) defeated an effort by the Department of Education to merge their beloved school with a school on the West Side brought to mind the mostly dormant former NYPD Academy on East 20th Street, just 600 feet away. The new New York Police Department Police Academy has been open at College Point for ten years this week. But the NYPD still maintains its former academy building space in Gramercy, on East 20th Street. It’s reasonable to ask why.

NYPD says the Gramercy facility is used as a screening facility for new applicants, but that occasional function–one done only with a new academy class, or about four times a year–would seemingly be one easily accommodated at the new 730,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art training facility at College Point. The old academy also reportedly houses a gun range used by senior cops, as well as the offices of the NYPD Internal Affairs unit. Of late, it has been used as a shelter for migrants, but that seems to be diminishing.

So why is NYPD holding on to the facility? It’s an old rule of bureaucratic infighting that no agency of any type ever willingly surrenders budget, staff, or facilities if it can avoid doing so. For example, when the DSNY sold its old garage facility on East 73rd Street to build a new cancer treatment facility, the proceeds of the sale–some $215 million–should have gone to the city’s general fund, as dictated by the City Charter. But immediately after the sale, the city appropriated $200 million for the DSNY to build a new garage facility that was to be built at the site of the Brookdale Hunter College of Nursing on East 25th Street. (That plan was abandoned. I have no idea what happened to the $200 million that was appropriated for the garage.)

As with the DSNY, one can easily imagine NYPD brass want to maintain control over the Gramercy academy facility to sell it to a real estate developer to ameliorate some future budget shortfall or to fund some new NYPD capital project. It’s part of the well-honed NYC bureaucratic budget two-step.

But the interests of the community should supersede bureaucratic budget hocus pocus.

Community Board Six, which advises city government on land use, budget, and other matters for the neighborhood where the former academy is located, passed resolutions in 2008 and 2014 to repurpose the academy as a school, perhaps a high school, to complement the elementary and middle schools nearby. The resolutions were embraced by the elected leaders then representing the area.

The hope among some board members then was that students could move from the elementary school at PS 40, then to the middle school, then to the high school all in the same few blocks. Students could travel to and from school with younger siblings attending the other schools and “grow up” in a neighborhood they knew and where they were known. It was also hoped that having more older students in the area, who could “hang out” after school, would help ameliorate the loss of business neighborhood pizza shops and delis would suffer with the departure of NYPD Academy cadets and instructors who had moved on to College Point. Any vision to make the former academy a high school will now, instead, need to be modified in view of the state class size mandate. The former police academy would appear to be a suitable large facility to house the Jonas Salk Middle School independent of its current co-location on the top two floors of PS 40, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens School.

Not only could the academy comfortably accommodate the roughly 350 students from the Salk School, but might also accommodate many of the 300 students on the Salk School waiting list. Additionally, the academy facility has an auditorium, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool that would enhance the students’ educational and extracurricular experience.

A decade after the Gramercy NYPD Academy was closed, it’s time to stop it from festering in veritable disuse and to give the facility a make-over; to create a high-quality, comfortable, self-contained educational facility for middle-school students who have demonstrated the kind of superior academic potential that Salk School students clearly have. City leaders should demand NYPD show cause why that cannot be done and if it can, they should appropriate sufficient funds to refurbish the old police academy into a much needed middle school that children, parents, teachers, and administrators can be proud to call their own.

Jim Collins has served on Community Board 6 for over 25 years and authored the original 2008 resolution to transform the Gramercy police academy facility into a school The views expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Community Board 6, its officers, members or staff.