Immaculate Conception School Closes Doors for last time, Ending its 159 yr run
The school has served the Lower East Side, the East Village and was in the area long before Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were even built. Now it is shutting its doors permanently. It’s final day was June 16th. The parish said it had spent close to $1 million to sustain the school over the past two years and keeping the money draining school going could have bankrupted the parish.
| 19 Jun 2023 | 04:45
For the first time since the waning days of the Civil War, there will be no Immaculate Conception School serving the East Village and the lower east side.
“It was a great school,” said Lana Kim as she and her husband Jason picked up the their two children for the last time. “The teachers were wonderful and very involved. We’re really very sad.”
Next year, they are enrolling their children in the nearby public school, PS 40.
Other parents and grandparents said the kids were scattering. Rosa Avarante said her kids will unfortunately have to be going to different schools next year. Her seventh grader Mia will miss her eighth graduation at Immaculate as she finishes at St. Joseph’s uptown. Another daughter, Mayla, will be going to a new school on East fourth St.
Leslie Wong was bringing balloons to celebrate her four old daughter Lila’s graduation from pre-K. “We’re obviously very sad,” she said. She said her daughter is going to PS 110 next year. “She got into the gifted and talented program,” she said proudly. “She received a great education here and it’s a community she really loved.”
The parish formed in 1859 and the school traces its roots to 1864. At one point the parish had over 20,000 members and the school had had over 2,100 students, but in recent years enrollment declined and COVID saw its student population shrink again to under 150.
The school along with the original Immaculate Conception Church was demolished when Robert Moses was knocking tenements over an 80 acre area then known as the Gas House District to make way for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village as a middle class housing oasis for returning war veterans from World War II. The church and school were able to move to its current site on the south side of East 14th Street near First Ave. when a neighborhood Episcopal Church that have vacated the buildings several years earlier to move further uptown sold the buildings to Immaculate Conception Church in 1947.
Msg Kevin Nelan, the current pastor of Immacualate Conception had said he could have sustained the school if its enrollment stayed at at least 250 studets. He said prior to COVID, he had gotten it up to 275. But in the current year the K-8th grade enrollment slipped to only 138. He said last year he spent $400,000 on the school and expected he will have spent $500,000 this year.
“It’s a sad day of course,” he told Our Town Downton in Feb. when the decision by the Archdiocese was first announced that 12 schools were closing including Immaculate Conception and four Catholic elementary schools in Manhattan. But he said keeping the school afloat could have bankrupted the parish. One thing he said he may do is rent out the now unused gym on weekends to pickleball players or to other not-for-profit organizations.