Trevor Day Tries to Fetch Bigger Space on East 95th

Trevor Day School needs more space. This year, the posh private institution accepted just 9 percent of the 450 pre-kindergarten applicants whose parents were clamoring to burn through $25,000 a year on their tykes’ ABCs. So the school has embarked on an ambitious expansion plan that would require the creation of a new building on the Upper East Side.

Trevor Day School’s nearly 800 students are now dispersed at two different campuses on either side of Central Park. The little ones study in a school-owned townhouse on East 89th Street and in the nearby Episcopalian Church of the Heavenly Rest. The older kids study in a building at the corner of Central Park West and 88th Street.

“We have one campus on the East Side and one on the West Side, and we’ve outgrown both of them,” said Pamela Clarke, Trevor’s head of school.

In particular, Ms. Clarke would like to see the senior class, which right now has just 60 students, grow. The current class size, she said, “is not quite enough to have all the teams and the newspaper and the literary magazine we’d like to have.”

Which brings us to 312 East 95th Street, a five-story commercial building that Trevor bought one year ago for $25 million. Last week, the school filed an application with the Board of Standards and Appeals that would allow the school to erect a new building on the site of the current, 40,000-square-foot edifice.

The tentative plan would go something like this:

“Our east campus would go offline, and we would sell our townhouse [on East 89th],” Ms. Clarke said. “The younger kids could come to our west campus. Everybody would get more space, and we would increase the upper class.”