“It’s just sad,” said Mark Federman, the school’s principal. “You look at a suburban school or a private school and it’s just something that you would never imagine — a high school without a gym.” The East 12th Street high school is just one of many in the area without recreation space, according to a new report from District 1’s Community Education Council. The report found that more than a third of schools in the district do not have a gym or must share their gym with other schools, making it difficult to fulfill state physical education requirements. At East Side Community High School, the gym is only big enough to fit 50 students at once, triggering a “scheduling nightmare,” Federman said. The school’s sports teams sometimes have to forfeit games if the borrowed spaces they use in other schools aren’t available. “We don’t have adequate gym space, adequate space for movement,” said Lisa Donlan, the president of the District 1 CEC, which covers the East Village, the Lower East Side and part of Chinatown. You can read the rest of the article in DNAinfo by clicking here

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