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School crowding protested at boro education hearing

By Kathianne Boniello

With Queens taking the brunt of city budget cuts through delayed school construction, nearly 200 parents and students packed a city council hearing Friday to voice their frustrations about the state of the borough’s overcrowded classrooms.

Forest Hills High School student Eda Pepi earned accolades with her testimony before the City Council’s education committee.

“You are depriving me of my future,” the Advanced Placement student said passionately about the effect of budget cuts and overcrowding on education. “The idea is that I go to school and come back to New York City and give back to New York City. You are telling me to ‘pack your bags’ and leave and move.”

The city council hearing was called after Schools Chancellor Harold Levy proposed postponing construction of 10 new schools around the city, including four in Queens, to help meet the budget slashing proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Between 150 and 175 Queens parents and students went to the hearing with many who testified before the education committee describing the effects of overcrowding in Queens’ schools and expressing their unhappiness. Queens has the most crowded schools in the city.

After sitting through more than an hour of the hearing, during which city council members berated representatives from the beleaguered School Construction Authority and the Board of Education’s Division of School Facilities, Marge Kolb Corridan, a parent from Glendale’s School District 24, spoke out.

“I find it really sad if we came here today for nothing,” she said. “It’s disappointing — this infighting between DSF and SCA — that’s not what we came here for today. I came here to say we need more money.”

Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts, to close a more than $4 billion citywide deficit, would postpone the majority of the borough’s 14 planned school construction projects for one to two years. The Board of Ed’s expected share of the budget reduction, $693 million, would be in addition to the $2.3 billion the board cut in December.

Budget cuts aside, city schools have been at the center of another debate lately: school governance.

Bloomberg would like control of the public schools but does not get to make that choice. The state Legislature is believed to be close to a decision about how to alter the nation’s largest public school system, from eliminating the central Board of Education to scrapping local school boards to giving the mayor total control of the system.

As the borough’s population has grown, the city’s failure to build enough schools in Queens has forced students into overcrowded classes and left little resources to meet increasingly rigorous academic standards.

Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.