By Alex Davidson
Cindy Leon wakes up every weekday morning at 5 a.m. with her two teenage children to get them ready for their school day that starts at 7 a.m. at John Adams High School in Ozone Park.
She said her children have to wake up early as part of the school’s plan to stagger students’ attendance times to alleviate overcrowding. There are currently 3,300 students at the school, according to city statistics.
Leon was one of many parents at a public hearing last Thursday night at Borough Hall in Kew Gardens to talk with elected officials and educators about the impact of overcrowding at Queens schools and how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to defer and eliminate building new schools in the borough could worsen the problem.
Borough President Helen Marshall discussed cuts in education funding that would halt the addition of 16,748 new school seats for Queens. The borough is currently short 12,966 seats and is running at 105 percent of capacity, Marshall said.
“We are so desperate for (school) spaces, we will take them any place we can get them,” Marshall told an audience of around 50 people.
The borough already has the city’s most overcrowded schools and the cutbacks in education funds to Queens will eliminate or defer planned construction at 16 new school facilities, according to the mayor’s proposed budget.
The purpose of the hearing was for parents and educators to discuss Bloomberg’s cut of $800 million from the DOE’s capital budget, a majority of which would come from funds slated to build schools in the borough. According to city budget documents, the City Council could restore $384 million but only $66 million of that would come to Queens.
From that $66 million, only two new schools in Queens would be built: PS 263 in District 29 and PS 246 in District 24.
The mayor is proposing to defer construction of seven new schools in Queens, two in District 24, one each in Districts 27 and 29 and three high schools, according to figures distributed by Marshall’s office. Under the same plan, Bloomberg would like to eliminate the construction of new school sites or leasing of existing sites in Districts 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 and 30.
The High School of Global Communications would not be built in the new plan, according to the documents.
Terri Thomson, former Queens representative to the now dissolved Board of Education, said the city and mayor are ignoring the borough’s tremendous overcrowding problem by building schools where they are not needed. She and Marshall said the system of deciding where to construct new schools is too political and should be transformed into a need-based rather than geographic-based system.
“A computer should determine where we build new schools and that should be based on the needs of our children,” Thomson said. “In a city where education is our priority, it is not anymore.”
Thomson said adding grade levels at under-utilized elementary and middle schools and changing some schools’ academic calendars into year-round schedules could compensate for any cuts.
Marshall was joined by borough and state officials, including City Councilmen Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans), Joseph Addabbo (D-Howard Beach), John Liu (D-Flushing), state Sens. Toby Stavisky (D-Whitestone), John Sabini (D-Queens), and state Assembly members Michael Cohen (D-Forest Hills), Jeffrion Aubry (D-Corona) and Cathy Nolan (D-Ridgewood).
“The bottom line here is that we’re losing ground under this plan,” she said.
Reach reporter Alex Davidson by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 156
