Brearley School Evicting Its Neighbors to Make Room for Robots

The Brearley School’s plan to purchase an adjacent apartment building and evict 29 rent-stabilized tenants is near completion, but the elite Upper East Side girls’ school’s headmistress and her entourage filled half the seats at a community-board meeting on May 28 in, she said, the “spirit of dialogue” to explain school’s “urgent need for additional teaching space.” Brearley, which last year claimed an endowment of $106 million, is currently housed in a fourteen-story building, with more than 50 classrooms and three gyms (including a double-height gym that’s rarely used) for its 687 students, but the headmistress, Stephanie Hull, said it only had fifteen classrooms for the middle- and upper-school schedules. Plus, she said, the school has “no regular orchestra space” and the six recently renovated science rooms are insufficient and “prevent us from adding a single new elective science course.” Already, she added the ”enthusiastic and very hardworking robotics team spills out of a tiny room that can’t accommodate the necessary equipment and members.” —Elizabeth Wolff