Crumbling Yonkers schools seek revival plan

• Mayor Mike Spano wants to hire a consultant to craft state legislation to secure school-repair funding
• The district's aging schools require an estimated %241.5 billion in renovations
• Yonkers also needs to add classroom space%3B it has added 1%2C500 students since 2010
• With a total of about 26%2C500 students%2C Yonkers is the fourth-largest district in New York state

YONKERS – In the sub-basement of School 17, next to the boiler room, 27 third graders sit crammed in Victor Alcade's classroom, which is unseasonably hot on a chilly morning. The boiler rumbles behind a door, where the students hang their coats.

"It gets warm here," said Alcade. "But we make do."

Making do is the operative term in the five-story school building on Midland Avenue that opened in 1903, and has seen several additions since. Storage closets have become rooms for learning specialists. The library became a classroom years ago. School 17 lacks rooms for music, art or a computer lab.

There are just four bathrooms in the building that serves 600 students in grades preK-6. One bathroom's plumbing leaks into the classroom below , where the morning sunlight illuminates stained-glass windows that depict nursery rhymes. The bathrooms are in such bad shape that the custodial staff has been unable to get the urine stench out of the floor boards.

"We are way, way over capacity," said Principal Rita Morehead.

School 17 is among 40 Yonkers schools, which average 75 years old, in dire need of renovations.

Mayor Mike Spano launched an effort this winter to find the money to pay for the work. His administration is reviewing proposals from consulting firms, which would be asked to craft state legislation to secure that funding. The chosen firm would also develop a plan to renovate the district's school buildings.

More students

The district also needs additional space to address its steady rise in enrollment. Yonkers, the state's fourth-largest district with about 26,500 students, has added 1,500 students since 2010 — more new students than the entire enrollments in six other school districts in Westchester and Putnam counties.

Finding a way to finance the district's capital needs has proved elusive. The Yonkers schools in 2012 paid $700,000 to consulting firms that devised a plan to raise $1.5 billion from private investors to rebuild the aging buildings. But that plan disintegrated a year later when its financial assumptions were challenged, and the consultants never responded to the critique.

The state's building-aid formula in 2015 would reimburse Yonkers for 67 percent of its construction costs — a considerable improvement over the 51 percent reimbursement rate a few years. But the city needs to borrow the money for the projects before it is reimbursed by the state. Yonkers lacks the ability to borrow that much under the state cap on municipal borrowing.

"Even if we had the political will to fund the rebuilding of our schools, we don't have the ability to do it," said Spano. "That's where the state of New York needs to step in. This is our time now. We need a partnership, like the state has with other economically disadvantaged cities."

It's a decades-old lament — that Yonkers gets penalized for its comparative wealth in property and income. Financially strapped upstate cities do far better than Yonkers under New York's school finance system. Buffalo got 94 percent reimbursement for its initial building project. That rate has since grown to 98 percent. Rochester and Syracuse, which have both undertaken districtwide building projects, receive 98 percent reimbursement.

Buffalo trip

Spano recalls a trip he made to Buffalo in 2013, when he toured the $1.4 billion-project that rebuilt the school district over the past decade. Buffalo financed its project through tax-exempt bonds sold by the local industrial development agency.

"Buffalo was eye-opening," said Spano. "That's a district with declining enrollments, and they rebuilt the entire system."

The Buffalo school project was built by the firm LPCiminelli, which has come under questioning by members of the Joint Schools Construction Board, who have demanded an audit regarding $41 million the company received in the project's final phase. The company's senior vice president, Kevin Schuler, served as a media aide to Spano when he served in the state Assembly in the 1990s.

Among the companies that submitted proposals to Yonkers was Savin Engineers, a Pleasantville-based firm that has been involved in several Yonkers school projects over the past decade. Neil DeLuca, a former Yonkers city manager working with Savin, declined to comment on its proposal. Calls to LPCiminelli were not returned to determine whether the Buffalo-based company wants the Yonkers contract.

A 2010 study estimated that Yonkers needed to spend close to $500 million to address its building issues. Five years later, the city has spent about $80 million fixing the most pressing problems, said John Carr, the district's executive director of school facilities management. He estimated that the city has spent about $150 million in building upgrades since 2006.

A new plan is expected later this year.

"We've gotten the weather out of the buildings, and made sure the fire alarms work, and then we move on to other schools," Carr said. "But things continue to decay."

@davidmckay415