What We Do

Library Renovation 📚

After a ten-year absence, our school's library has been recommissioned!

We are creating a warm, inviting space that will encourage a lifelong love of reading and libraries for our students. This will require many more books — as, while it was decommissioned, many of the room's books were taken for other purposes — as well as rugs (there are none), freestanding shelving and other furniture, repainting the walls and columns, and uniform lighting to reduce eye strain.

Thank you to everyone who shopped at our September 2024 Book Fair, the proceeds of which are dedicated entirely to the library renovation project! Thank you also to the West Side Community Fund, which is supporting this project through a literacy grant!

Please donate to support this project!

Status: Funding approved on October 16, 2024! Walls and columns have been repainted, hundreds of books have been purchased, hundreds of existing books have been cleaned, replacement tables arrived in late January, and new shelving is arriving in early February.

Investing in our Classrooms

Our classrooms are awesome! But, in cases where furniture — such as rugs — have aged beyond their useful lives, or where in-class libraries would benefit from additional books, we are there to help.

In 2023–24, we replaced thousands of dollars of rugs that were fraying and had lost their padding, and purchased more than one hundred books to supplement in-class libraries.

As of early January 2025, we've made the following investments:

• Replaced the ten-year-old music room rug.
• Replaced three aging rugs in our classrooms, at the request of our teachers: Scheduled for delivery in late February/mid-March.
• At the request of younger-grade teachers, we purchased two Hoover deep clean vacuums, which will be used by the Pre-K through 2nd Grades.
• Purchased 14 28" 5lb traffic cones, to supplement the existing cones and replace the ones in poor condition (RIP, split yellow peeled-banana cone).

Status: Active. Investigating additional needs.

Composting & Container Garden

Wherever people eat, there will be waste. Rather than sending our food waste to a landfill, we'd like to compost what we can.

Not only will this educate our students, we could use the compost to support (1) the young trees on 10th Ave, 52nd St and 53rd St, and (2) a PS 111 community container garden that will be built in the Spring, thanks to a grant from kidsgardening.org and Crescent Garden.

This is complementary to food scrap collection at the school, as (1) the PTA could never compost all of the school's food waste, whether in quantity or content (e.g. we can't compost meat, bones, or "compostable" plastic); and (2) the City's collections are placed into methane digesters, which — though far better than ending up in a landfill — are environmentally less beneficial than composting and reusing the nutrient-rich output.

Status: Active! One composter and an open bin for brown/carbon material set up in December 2024. Initial collection of food scraps from lunch collected in December and January. The second composter will be set up in January or February, depending on volume on volume of scraps collected.