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The disorderly file of children in white polo shirts and blue blazers streaming out of six Gilded Age mansions toward Central Park, chatting in French, has become a familiar sight on the Upper East Side. But with the sale of the Lycee Franais de New York's last two buildings to the Emir of Qatar for $26 million this summer, it's starting to hit home that the kids will be heading east, to a new school building under construction on 75th and 76th streets between York Avenue and the F.D.R. Drive.
There, construction crews have dug a 30-foot trench on the site of the new school, where, in June, they made a discovery that has some parents fuming: a band of petroleum-contaminated fractured bedrock on the north wall of the excavation. Some parents are now wondering why the school traded in six opulent mansions in New York's most exclusive ZIP code, at fire-sale prices, for a toxic plot of land against the East Side Highway.
"The children will be on a small street which is a dead end, surrounded by a substation of Con Edison," said George Rpeczky, who stepped down as co-president of the school's parents' association at the beginning of the summer. "And if you go a few blocks west and down to 72nd Street and see where the kids are now, close to Central Park, where they play every day, some parents are not very happy about it."
The move is the largest in a series of steps that the school, which is conducted according to French educational standards and traditions and caters to a small elite of French New Yorkers, has been taking to become more competitive with other Manhattan private schools. Many hail the massive change in the school's physical plant as a welcome update.
"As a parent, I think change is inevitable; we'd better embark on it," said Pierre Ciric, newly elected co-president of L'Association des Parents d'Eleves du Lycee. "The buildings as they are are landmark buildings, and they're not the right buildings for the future infrastructure of the school .... The education system is changing, and we can't stay behind."
But not everyone thinks this was the way to do it. School officials knew that some contaminants...