Effie Serlis with pastel landscape drawings that she made during art classes sponsored by the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

For more than two decades, the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy has been offering free, weekly art classes for people of all ages from May 1 through Oct. 31. In the summer, there's also a course for teens in art portfolio development.

Yesterday, the Parks Conservancy held a reception for its annual exhibit of art created in these classes. It will be on view weekdays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at 75 Battery Place through March 28.

Video: Andrea Couture on Battery Park City art classes

Some of the people who come to art classes at the BPC Parks Conservancy have studied art elsewhere. Some have never tried to create art before. They come from all over the city, some traveling an hour or more each way.

The drop-in art programs and classes use varying media including watercolors, charcoal and pen, collage, wood and clay. All art supplies are provided by the Parks Conservancy. While adults work individually (though engaging in group critiques), children often collaborate on large-scale group projects. With the guidance of Parks Conservancy staff and art specialists, and frequently using recycled materials and supplies, children transform pounds of clay and giant cardboard boxes into fanciful cities, animal menageries, puppet theaters, vehicles, and other projects.

Video: Instructor Elise Engler on Teaching Art to Children

Some of the Parks Conservancy's art instructors - Enid Braun, Larry Dobens, Elise Engler, Susan Hamburger and Sara Wolfe - have been teaching at the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy almost from the time the program started. Larry Dobens is one of the old timers. He said he has been teaching in Battery Park City for around 20 years.

Dobens, who has a BFA from the Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Yale University, remarked on "the great variety of people who come through here. Some are professional artists and illustrators. Some haven't picked up a pencil since maybe high school. I take each and every one of them where they are with their work." He said he helps people to draw from imagination as well as from observation.

"What I try to do," he said, "is find something positive to say to make sure that people understand that there is value to whatever they're doing."

Aixa LaCroix, 11, with a collage that she made during a Go Fish art event sponsored by the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

"Locals, pols fear school shortage," trumpets a headline in Crain's New York Business, 1/26/14. "Downtown population surge fuels worries of classroom shortfall," says the subhead.

This actually isn't news. Locals and pols have been fearing a school shortage for years, and the Department of Education has been denying for years that there's a problem.

"Department of Education data show that only one of the area's five existing schools, as well as a sixth one being incubated within the old Tweed Courthouse in back of City Hall, are operating above current capacity standards," says the Crain's article. "Meanwhile, DOE officials note that they take residential construction numbers supplied by the Building and City Planning departments and put them into a formula with birthrates and immigration data to determine where to situate new schools and how many."

According to Crain's, the "DOE has added 4,300 new elementary-, middle- and high-school seats in lower Manhattan during the past decade, and the new school now in temporary quarters at Tweed will open on Peck Slip next year. What's more, plans are afoot to add another school at a still-to-be determined location downtown and one north of Canal Street, just outside the area. Both would add a total of 1,000 seats."

A DOE spokesman call this, "a historic commitment to school construction in the area."

Tricia Joyce, who heads Community Board 1's Youth and Education Committee, says that the DOE is "spinning the facts."

"The DOE determines capacity by square footage, not by classrooms," she says. "This doesn't serve our children well as hallways and closets are not classrooms. Three of our schools downtown are over capacity in this year's kindergarten, not one."

Joyce says that PS 89 and PS 276 each have five kindergarten sections this year but have only three classrooms per grade. The Spruce Street School, she says has three kindergarten classes but only two classrooms per grade.

The situation is getting worse, not better, says Joyce.

The Crain's article mentions that in the wake of 9/11, State and federal Liberty Bonds lowered the cost of creating new housing units helping to "spur the development of more than 10,000 units of housing in lower Manhattan." A Community Board 1 study showed that "the number of children under 4 had tripled in some downtown neighborhoods, including Tribeca, since 2000."

Joyce says that the DOE plans on a sub-district level instead of a neighborhood level. "It makes no sense to look at all of Manhattan below 14th Street when planning a school that will be zoned below Canal," she says. "Below Canal we have had 77% growth - over 200% growth just in the Financial District. The neighborhoods around us have either had negative growth or very low growth. Averaging this when planning our neighborhood zoned elementary schools is a failure  before it starts."

Joyce also takes issue with the "4,300 new seats" that the DOE says it has created in lower Manhattan over the last decade. "The city has relocated schools downtown," she says. "This is not new seats. This is a relocation, which they have done only because of overcrowding in the neighborhoods that they have come from."

She says that "The DOE's P.R. department writes press releases claiming the thousands of seats have been added without explaining that they are for all of downtown, including the West Village, Chinatown, Gramercy and the Lower East Side," and include relocated schools and schools built by developers, not by the DOE.

According to Joyce, the DOE's five-year capital plan "includes seats that are to open, if there is funding, in the future. The children are here now. It does no good to tell us how many seats we may or may not have in 2016 if we have a wait list of 175 for this year's kindergartens downtown."

She says that she is hopeful that the de Blasio Administration "will be more responsive and develop planning methods that keep pace with and are concurrent with construction. The method used presently has failed our children and in a time where there is so much focus on performance, we are handicapping them further when they have only 25 minutes of gym a week (if that) class sizes in 1st grade of 30, and are eating lunch at 10:30 am or at 1:45pm because of overcrowding."

For the Crain's New York Business article, click here.

Artwork created in classes offered by the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy will be on display at 75 Battery Place through March 28. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)