Does the West Side get the school?

Maybe. The fights are not going to stop once the school is built. Who gets the school?

and where is a new middle school?

They want a K-8 school.

it had better be large if it intends to meet the ongoing middle school needs as well.

That's why the Community Board rejected the 75,000 sqft plan.

Plain and simple, we need more seats. What the allocation is can be fought over only once we have the physical plant. Building a school in the high 50s & 60s also permits revisiting the existing zone lines for PS111 and PS191, which are not good schools and are far from, ahem, integrated.

it's interesting that so much more progress has been made not only downtown but also midtown and ues.

District 2 maybe has its act together more? D3 is more diverse, and less coherent in demands? I dunno.

i don't either, but it is kind of odd. here's hoping for progress. actually, i don't know if you'd agree, but i think it would be kind of awesome for the area if the extell property had only a very large middle school, and the district found space to open another lower school elsewhere. the city is definitely paying for new schools elsewhere. it would add immeasurably to the neighborhood if it had a new middle school. i realize this would add it's own headaches, but I believe even IS89 opened as a selective middle school in BPC.

The need is there for a very large zoned middle school. There are issues of "underutilization" - perhaps deliberate, perhaps not in the northern part of the district. This is the excuse the DOE has given in the past for not paying for schools, and letting the school not be built in the northern part of the Hudson Yards project. I don't know if D2 has pockets of lower use in the same way D3 does. Maybe the baby boom came earlier to D2?

There is also great need for a zoned high school. I really don't know if there was an era of very high public school usage on the UWS. Alanhart/W81? The Mickey Mantle school on WEA at one point was given over to special-needs/access children, so the demographics must have really changed in the 60s. Not to mention PSXXX - the condo conversion in Harlem. And also, many fewer privates exist than used to. Anglo-American? Walden? YMCA-Boys?

how many zoned high schools still exist? i know of so few. i read recently that washington irving downtown has been spared for now the chopping block because of [fill in the blank] but i think it was new administration as an official excuse. honestly they can't possibly eliminate it because they don't have the means to provide alternative seats for so many. and it sucks.

a number of the privates have been increasing their class sizes, but not generally by much, because they don't want to change the tenor of their schools. and they see future declines in enrollment as these few years have definitely been a peak for NYC (i'd be stunned if the numbers increased further, but i've been stunned before).

but i think you're right, although the press focuses on district 3 issues a fair amount, i suspect that district 2 has far more effective representation.