By Stephen Witt
Score it as a touchdown for Grady High School. Falcon football fans will truly have a home field next season after Department of Education officials confirmed last week (DOE) they will renovate the field next to the school to make a gridiron field. Ironically, the field located next to the school at 25 Brighton 4th Road is named Grady Field. The announcement came about two months after the DOE and the Parks Department quibbled over which agency had jurisdiction over the field grounds. “We are very excited about the news of the field being renovated,” said Allison Smart, a parent of a Grady football player and one of several parents who have lobbied for two years to get a home field at the location. “We thought we would have been shoved and pushed around for years when we found out that the Parks Department and DOE couldn’t figure who had jurisdiction,” she added. The school’s gridiron team currently plays all their home games at Lafayette High School, 2630 Benson Avenue. They did use the large field for practice — except players had to walk the field picking up the debris before practice began. Parents had hoped the non-profit Take the Field organization that makes state-of-the-art athletic fields for high schools throughout the city would renovate Grady Field. However, Take the Field officials, who no longer are renovating fields, said they only work with the DOE and not the Parks Department, which had jurisdiction over Grady Field. In a Bay News article in March, Parks Department officials said it was the DOE who had jurisdiction. The bureaucratic runaround left Smart and other parents wondering if perhaps officials do not care as much about the 1,700 vocational students mainly from the areas of East Flatbush, Flatbush, Canarise, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Brownsville. However, after more media got hold of the story, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott became involved and found an obscure 1942 document transferring ownership of the field to the Education Department. DOE officials confirmed the department would do a $2.1 million overhaul of the field and turn it into an athletic field for the vocational high school. DOE spokesperson Alicia Maxey said the department would begin designing a new football field and track at the school this summer. Completion of the field is expected in the fall of 2006.
