Fort Lee Students Hold Town Hall Meeting On Redevelopment 5

Fifth and sixth grade students from Fort Lee Schools No. 1 and No. 3 hosted a town hall meeting Monday evening in the school No. 1 gymnasium, presenting their detailed proposal for Redevelopment Area 5 to Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich and other officials, members of the public, parents, teachers and school administrators.

Their teacher, Elsa Osso, who runs the gifted and talented programs at both schools, said the project played out over the course of two years.

“It worked out along the lines of the town hall meetings the mayor was holding in December 2009,” Osso said. “Some of the kids attended those meetings and asked questions, and it started there. Of course the children said, ‘Why can’t it just be a park? Why can’t we build a school?’ Why can’t we do something like that for the children? And then Mayor Sokolich came in at that point and explained to them how the value of the property is and the revenue to the town—that it was not going to be a park or a school. It was going to be developed.”

So the kids went to work, researching the property, following the news, walking the perimeter of the site taking measurements and coming up with “vision plans” of what they’d like to see there.

“From there they went to focusing in on merging their ideas,” Osso said. “And then Mr. Ed Mignone, the borough engineer, came in and told them all about the town requirements and all the regulations that they had to adhere to, and the height of the buildings and all of those kinds of things … All [the work with Mignone] was preliminary work to get them into the mindset of visual-spatial intelligence.”

Then it was on to Palisades Financial’s Ira Bergstein, who worked with the kids for the entire two years, and Mark Zurlini, whom Osso said came aboard this year, to “do the financial part—a budget plan.”

“They learned about how much it would cost,” Osso said. “They learned about hard and soft costs. They learned about contingency, for example. They learned a little bit about the financing part … they basically had an idea of how intricate [the financing involved] was.”

The last phase of the project was building a scale model to match their plans, which, along with their research, schematics and other information, was on prominent display in front of the stage Monday.

The students’ presentation began with a PowerPoint slideshow, complete with the history of the site, their methodology and plenty of pictures of their progress over the past two years—all set to live musical accompaniment by violinist Yiqing Guo and pianists Sharon Ahn and Sollie Kang, all of whom also played prominent roles in the project and presentation.

The program that followed included an introduction; presentations of the site plans, development budgets and revenue and expense budgets for the west and east parcels; sketch-up models; various challenges the students faced along the way; conceptual and aesthetic ideas; open space concepts and concerns—each of which were presented by the student or students who focused on that specific aspect of the project.

“I must admit that when we first started to think about developing this property, most of us couldn’t understand why it couldn’t be a beautiful park or why [we couldn’t] build a new school,” said School No. 3 sixth grader Jae Yong Lee by way of introduction and summary of the overall project. “During his first visit, Mayor Sokolich addressed these and other such questions for us. We quickly learned that Fort Lee has an opportunity to acquire a lot of revenue from this property and that the development of this property is likely to revive our town’s economy. What does this mean in simple terms? It means more money for our town and more jobs for our residents. It also means having a great place to shop, relax and spend quality time with our families. Granted that we have worked extensively on the project, and understanding the property owners’ interests in their investments and the cause of developing the property, some of us would still love a park and a new school. However, that thought didn’t deter us from working together to develop our own proposal for our wonderful town of Fort Lee.”

School No. 1 sixth grader Eric Hong was responsible for presenting the students’ list of “concerns” regarding the development of the project.

“Our list matched the list of concerns that Fort Lee residents voiced during the town hall meetings,” he said. “As we worked on this project, we grew to appreciate just how challenging it would be to solve the most obvious problems.”

A Q&A with the audience, acknowledgements of Mignone, Bergstein and Zurlini, among others, and student awards—“certificates of achievement for outstanding dedication to the development area number five gifted and talented project” presented by Sokolich—followed the student presentations.

“You guys were phenomenal,” Sokolich told the students, prompting applause from the audience. “We do this for a living, and we make presentations before boards that are not as thorough as this, that are not as detailed as this, and you should be very, very proud of yourselves …. We just couldn’t believe how detailed and how well thought out this was. Fort Lee’s future has never been in better hands with kids such as you.”

The students who participated in the project—as introduced by School No. 3 sixth grader Ellen Kim—were as follows:

School No. 1 Fifth Grade

• Alex Cho
• Tommasina DiMeglio
• Grace Kim
• Marin Moore
• David Yu

School No. 1 Sixth Grade

• Cameron Asharian
• Athony Chen
• Christine Chow
• Benjamin Chung
• Jorge Eckhardt
• Eric Hong
• Gavin Lifrieri
• Thomas Pflanz
• Tino Thoon
• Michael Wang

School No. 3 Fifth Grade

• Sharon Ahn
• Yiqing Guo
• Ava Fisher
• Sollie Kang
• Diana More

School No. 3 Sixth Grade

• Hiroka Kobayashi
• Laura Koszer
• Jae Yong Lee
• Ellie Schulman
• Patrick Wu
• Ellen Kim