Wash Heights School Geared Toward Immigrants Merged With P.S. 173

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, NY — The merging of a small Washington Heights school geared toward Spanish-speaking immigrant students with another school that shares the same uptown building was approved Wednesday night, despite strong pushback from parents.

Harbor Heights Middle School will combine with P.S. 173, which are both located at 306 Fort Washington Ave. near West 173rd Street.

"Every student deserves a safe and supportive learning environment," a spokesperson from the Department of Education told Patch. "The merger at Harbor Heights is designed to give students in the community the best chances of retaining all of the programming and supports that they’ve been provided.”

Not everybody is happy about the merger, though.

The approval vote Wednesday night came two months after Crystaly Tejada, a parent of a student at Harbor Heights and a Parents Association member, created the "Save Harbor Heights" petition.

"We need to protect schools like Harbor Heights who serve our immigrant students and families," Tejada wrote in the petition that was signed by more than 560 people.

Harbor Heights offers a Transitional Bilingual Education program that primarily serves Spanish-speaking English language learners, including newly-arrived students from Spanish-speaking countries.

All of the staff also speak Spanish and are trained to support immigrant families, and 90 percent of the students are learning English, Chalkbeat reported, which ran a story Tuesday about the possible merging.

The issue, though, became the size of the student body at Harbor Heights.

Harbor Heights currently enrolls only 62 students. The majority of the funding the school receives is allocated on a per-student basis, which means raising the necessary funding becomes more challenging the smaller the school.

"With such low enrollment, Harbor Heights cannot afford to provide all the programming and services that students at the school need," Manuel Ramirez, the superintendent of Community School District 6, wrote in an FAQ put together for the uptown community and shared with Patch.

Thus the merger of the Harbor Heights student body with the 415 students at P.S. 173 will allow for the needed funding, Ramirez added.

Additionally, the Transitional Bilingual Education program will continue to be offered once Harbor Heights becomes part of P.S. 173.

"This means that TBE programming will continue and will also benefit from additional resources that will become available as part of a larger school so it can better serve current and future students in the program," Ramirez said.

P.S. 173 currently does not have a middle school, only an elementary school. Meaning that younger students will now have the opportunity to continue at the same school through eighth grade.

Harbor Heights opened as a middle school in 2006.