They fought the law, and they won—or rather, they fought a city agency and won.

Residents of Bayside, Queens certainly had an extra reason to be thankful when the news broke just two days before Thanksgiving that the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA) would not be moving forward with its plan to build a 730-seat high school on the site of the former Bayside Jewish Center.

In a formal statement on November 24, SCA president and CEO Lorraine Grillo said, “Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach a consensus with Bayside residents and local elected officials on our proposed development site for a new high school in their neighborhood.”

Grillo’s statement, while accurate, makes it sound as if the whole thing were a simple disagreement, as if the biggest challenge was deciding what type of school ought to go on the site. In reality, the six-month battle between the SCA and Bayside called to mind the age-old question: what happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object?

As it so happens, the unstoppable force isn’t so unstoppable after all.

The Brewing Storm

In February 2015—after 77 years of serving the religious and social needs of Bayside’s Jewish community—the Bayside Jewish Center closed its doors for good, citing rising maintenance costs and plummeting membership as the impetus for the decision. It didn’t take long before they had a buyer. Armed with $114 million, the SCA approached the Center with an offer, and a plan to put a high school on the site that would help alleviate overcrowding in the area.

Overcrowded public schools have long been an issue in New York City—in March 2014, more than 7,000 students citywide were learning in a trailer classroom outside of the main school building. Bayside’s two high schools, Bayside High School and Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, are attended by 3,300 and 3,600 students respectively—putting them approximately 160% over capacity.

Susan Seinfeld, district manager for Community Board 11, says that overcrowding in Bayside schools can be attributed to the high level of achievement of its school district. District 26 has an exceptional performance rate, with 85% of students meeting state reading standards and 95% meeting state math standards. Because of the Department of Education’s open enrollment policy, students can apply to attend any school in the city rather than be restricted to their zoned school—and with such high performance rates, district 26 is very attractive to parents wanting to make sure their kids succeed.

“People flock to Bayside,” Seinfeld said. “The district performs better than most districts in the city.

David Solano, a Bayside resident and vice president of alumni group Friends of Bayside High School, agreed with her. “We looked at the numbers and the reason district 26 schools are crowded is because the schools are successful.”

Despite the apparent need to relieve overcrowding in district 26—a need expressed in Community Board 11’s statement of needs for 2016—the community does not want another school in the neighborhood. Parking in the largely residential area around Bayside High School is already a game of chance, and driving is a test of patience as people try to maneuver around the hordes of parents and buses that swarm the streets on a twice-daily basis to move kids in and out of the area.

Solano said that with the Bayside Jewish Center being located directly across the street from Bayside High’s athletic field and only blocks away from the school itself, a high school on the property would add about 700 students and 100 staff to the area and throw approximately 10% more cars into the vehicular fray.

Public transportation would suffer as well. Five bus lines pass through Bayside; two of them, the Q28 and Q31, make stops right by Bayside High and the three other schools located within five miles of it: Cardozo, Francis Lewis High School, and World Journalism Preparatory School. When classes are in session, anyone waiting for a bus at a stop that comes before one of the schools often has to watch in despair as multiple buses pass by without stopping. The addition of another school would exacerbate the problem and require the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to add additional buses along each route, which in turn could create further traffic problems.

“The students who attend Bayside High are so overcrowded on [public] transportation that I can’t get on buses,” Solano said. “Buses are full several stops before they even get to the school.”

Seinfeld stated, “Not all kids are walking from home…so the MTA would need to increase the number of buses. Often with high schools, they’ll dedicate certain buses to handle the volume.”

Other reasons are often given for opposing the construction of a new school—after traffic, decreased residential property values is the next biggest complaint, and with Bayside already being home to 15 schools at varying grade levels, residents feel that the town is oversaturated with schools anyway.

It’s clear that Bayside wants a solution to overcrowding that doesn’t entail building a new school. That much was evident back in 2013, when the SCA locked horns with the community over an elementary school it wanted to build on a former garden supply center that was located between a busy main road and a public middle school. Extreme backlash against the plan ensued; complaints about traffic and decreasing property values abounded. But Bayside lost that particular battle, and the SCA pressed forward with the plan, prompting the suggestion that the agency’s failure to collect community input on the proposed school signified that it didn’t care about the community and its desires.

In May 2015, it became apparent that 2013 had taught the SCA a few lessons on keeping its plans quiet until it’s too late to stop them.

An Outpouring of Outrage

State Senator Tony Avella was a decidedly unhappy man on the morning of May 21 when he, like the residents of Bayside—which is part of his congressional district—learned for the first time that the SCA had decided to purchase the Bayside Jewish Center in order to build a high school. According to a statement, when his office contacted Lorraine Grillo, they were told that the agency had purposefully kept him and other elected officials in the dark because they “didn’t want to give him time to organize” against them.

“Too many times, SCA has been allowed to barge into a neighborhood and construct a monstrous school wherever they choose,” said Avella, who held the first of numerous rallies outside of the Center the same day the SCA announced its plan. “Though at least one City Council member is carelessly supporting this plan, the residents of Bayside will not tolerate this proposal and are prepared to put up a fight.”

That City Council member was Paul Vallone, who had seemingly been involved in early discussions between the SCA and the Center. In a statement that appeared in the Times Ledger, Vallone gave his support for the proposed project. “There is no denying the overwhelming demand facing our district with regard to a long overdue high school for our students and community, but there is also never going to be a perfect place to build one.”

He was the only elected official to support the SCA, and there were very few community members who sided with him.

“The Board was very upset that the SCA hadn’t reached out to us first to discuss the purchase,” Seinfeld stated.

A petition that Solano started up shortly after the SCA announced the proposal garnered approximately 3,500 signatures from parents, students, and local residents who all agreed that another high school was neither wanted nor needed. Solano sent copies of the petition to the SCA and the Department of Education, neither of which responded.

Senator Avella, meanwhile, introduced a bill in the State legislature that would mandate that the SCA contact elected officials and community boards before making a final decision about where it will build a new school. It would also require the agency to provide a detailed explanation about why it needs a new school, what other properties it had considered, and why it felt that the one it had chosen was best.

The fight over what ought to be done with the Bayside Jewish Center’s property heated up even further as the summer rolled on. Once it became apparent that the SCA was going ahead with the purchase and would not back down from it, debates began over what type of school should go on the site.

One proposal was to move World Journalism into the new building from its current location one mile away, which would provide the school a bigger space but would leave behind an empty building and create more traffic problems in Bayside. A second proposal was to create an annex for Bayside High, to which the principal of the school responded by stating that he didn’t need it and that an annex would only let the Department of Education worsen overcrowding by continuing to admit students from distant districts into Bayside High. Finally, a third proposal was to create a specialized high school for Bayside.

“Bayside students have to travel for specialized schools,” Seinfeld said, noting that the closest specialized high school to Bayside is in Jamaica, Queens and is still a seven-mile and hour-long commute by bus. “York College only has 500 seats.”

The downside of a specialized high school would be that it would cause the performance rates of the district’s regular high schools to drop by funneling the best students into the specialized school and leaving the other schools with average and failing students.

“The three schools have to service the whole community. They can’t pick and choose,” Solano said, pointing out that specialized schools have the option of choosing which students to admit that public schools do not. “If they were to put in, say, ‘Townsend Harris North,’ they would skim the better students off the top [of the class.]”

Though the debate was framed as a discussion over what kind of school Bayside residents would prefer, it was really a discussion about what sort of school they would mind the least. The simple fact was that the community didn’t want any kind of high school on the site at all.

“The community wants it to go away,” Seinfeld said. “They’ll always think there’s a better place for a school.”

By September, it was obvious that the school wasn’t going away. On the eve of September, just a week before classes would be back in session and the streets would once again be teeming with slow-moving vehicles, the SCA announced that it had signed a contract with the Bayside Jewish Center finalizing the sale of the property. Once again, the agency failed to notify elected officials.

“It is an act of bad faith to sign the deal without hearing the concerns of local Bayside residents,” said Senator Avella, whose legislation had by now been passed by the State Senate and was being carried in the Assembly by Assemblyman Edward C. Braunstein. “This is a perfect example of why a law is necessary for including residents into the decision making process on where to build their schools.”

“We had an idea it’d get there—we knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when,” Seinfeld said of the SCA’s agreement. “We wanted the SCA to be more upfront. We didn’t know until after it happened.”

The Best Laid Plans

Of course, the fight didn’t end with the contract signing. Residents continued to rail against the project, and parents made their frustrations known at a meeting with Councilman Vallone in late October. Though he still supported the school, Vallone conceded that the SCA’s site selection process was flawed and lacking in transparency; a week later, he introduced city legislation that would require the agency to allow communities greater input in the selection process.

At its monthly meeting in November, Community Board 11 voted almost unanimously against the school, with only a single board member out of 32 voting in favor of construction. Community boards, which are made up almost entirely of volunteers, lack actual legislative power, but carry significant political clout as liaisons between the community and government agencies. CB 11’s landslide vote proved to be a wake-up call to Councilman Vallone.

“The councilman realized the tides were changing,” Solano said of Vallone’s change in stance. “He succumbed to saying, ‘Okay, my community has spoken. I don’t want the school here and I’ll tell the [City Council to vote] no.’”

Two weeks after the vote, Vallone penned a letter to Lorraine Grillo asking her and the SCA to withdraw its petition for the school. He wrote, “Our community remains united in opposition to the site selection process…as evidenced by the most recent vote at Queens Community Board 11. Additionally, my fellow Council Members have already expressed their support to our opposition and remain ready to stand with me at any future committee hearings.”

“A more rational siting policy would have taken this opposition into consideration before the SCA entered into a contract with the Bayside Jewish Center,” reads another official letter to Grillo co-signed by Assemblyman Braunstein and U.S. Representative Grace Meng, whose district includes Bayside.

On November 23, Senator Avella held his fifth and final rally against the project, this time calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to strike down the proposal.

“You campaigned in our neighborhoods. You campaigned on having community involvement and more transparency,” Avella said in a statement printed by the Queens Courier. “Throughout this entire process it’s been the reverse. Well, now you have the chance to do the right thing and in effect do what you campaigned upon.”

On November 24, six months of protesting, rallying, and petitioning came to a fateful boiling point with a statement from Lorraine Grillo that came at around 3:00 p.m.

The community had won. The SCA was withdrawing its petition to build the high school.

Looking Ahead to the Future

Now what?

Overcrowding, both in Bayside and in the city as a whole, still remains a problem without an easy solution. In a February 2013 report showing enrollment projections for the city’s public schools over the next decade, the SCA estimates that Queens will have approximately 20,000 more K-12 students in the public school system by 2021 than it does in 2015; it also expects district 26 in particular to have about 1,000 more K-8 students in the same six-year time period. What needs to be done?

David Solano feels that instead of sinking more and more money into an overcrowded district, the SCA should use its funds to provide more resources to failing schools in districts that have plenty of empty seats.

“It would’ve been a travesty to waste $114 million of our education money when it was needed in other areas. There are 3,000 empty seats through the borough,” he said, adding that the community has repeatedly called for the Department of Education to “beef up” low-performing schools. “Bayside’s percentage of kids from the neighborhood is 29%. Everyone else is from outside the community. Why can’t they build a school in a [failing] neighborhood to serve those students and give them a real choice?”

Susan Seinfeld felt that, because seats in district 26 are highly sought-after, the Department should institute a cap on the number of students it admits there.

“If they could accept fewer students at Bayside, Francis Lewis and Cardozo, it would relieve overcrowding,” she said.

For now, the SCA has to deal with the matter of reselling the property it purchased for an undisclosed portion of its $114 million. That matter, too, feels like it could be the next fight waiting to happen—doubtless, the community will want a say in who the property is sold to, and for what purpose. Solano says that he would like to see the property be converted into a community center that would also provide services specifically for senior citizens. At the moment, Bayside only has two senior centers.

“A senior center is badly needed, but I’d like it to be a bit more accessible,” he says, noting that the community at large would benefit from such a center as well. “It could be a common area for reading, afterschool [programs,] and tutoring too. It could be a lot of things, and it’s going to take public money.”