By Dustin Brown
The superintendent of School District 30 promised Tuesday to form teams that would address parents’ concerns that children from Queensbridge Houses perform worse than their peers in district schools.
But parents have yet to decide whether his plan meets their demands.
At the board’s public meeting Tuesday night, members voted to appoint Astoria resident Carolyn Scarano to fill a vacancy left when David Glassberg resigned from the board following a series of unexcused absences earlier this year.
Queensbridge Community in Action, an advocacy group based at the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, has lobbied the school board since April to establish a districtwide task force that would address the inferior academic performance of Queensbridge students compared to others in the district.
Based on numbers provided by District 30 Superintendent Angelo Gimondo earlier this year, the Queensbridge group calculated that only 22.4 percent of Queensbridge students met grade level standards in a state English Language Arts exam administers in grades 4 and 8, compared to 42.5 percent in the district as a whole. A comparable gap was found in math scores.
The parents also found that only one out of 1,150 Queensbridge children who attend public school in District 30 is enrolled in a gifted and talented program.
After months of inaction, the school board considered two plans Tuesday night that would address the Queensbridge concerns — the program devised by Gimondo in consultation with the Queensbridge parents and a resolution drafted by board member John Ciafone.
Gimondo’s proposal calls for individual schools to expand their school leadership teams into task forces that would devise ways of improving the performance of Queensbridge students.
School leadership teams, composed primarily of parents and school personnel, are charged with governing the policies and finances of individual schools in addition to performing assessments of school performance.
To address the Queensbridge concerns, the leadership teams would be expanded to include community members as well as education experts from the district, state and university level.
Gimondo said that once the teams present recommendations, “we will then meet the needs to the extent that our resources allows to ensure that improvement takes place.”
The expanded leadership teams would be formed at schools with large concentrations of students from Queensbridge, which parent organizer Yvette Grissom said have been tentatively identified as PS 76, PS 111, PS 112, IS 126 and IS 204.
Ciafone’s resolution, which called for the creation of “a task force to review the reading and math scores of students from Queens Bridge Housing,” was rejected by the board because it focused too narrowly on test performance.
Although the parents agreed that his resolution would have to be reworked, many commended Ciafone for attempting to address their concerns.
The parents have yet to evaluate where they stand on Gimondo’s proposal, which he can put in place without the approval of the school board.
“We’re still mulling it over,” Grissom said.
The board also voted unanimously to appoint Carolyn Scarano to a school board seat vacated by the resignation of David Glassberg earlier this year.
Scarano works as the assistant director for Children’s and Family Services at Martin de Porres. a private school in Springfield Gardens. She ran for a seat on the school board in 1999 and was one of a dozen former school board candidates invited by the board to interview for this position.
“I wanted to work to do something with the community,” Scarano said, indicating that she chose to serve on the school board because of her background in education.
She will officially join the board as soon as the necessary paperwork is completed and she is sworn in.
The board chose its officers for the coming year in an election Gimondo described as the smoothest he has seen in his more than 20-year tenure at the district, with every officer elected unanimously.
Giovanna D’Elia retained the presidency, Ellen Raffaele was elected vice president, Dorothy Wilner became secretary, and Lydia Chang was chosen as treasurer.
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
