Jackson Heights: Schools In

Kids in Jackson Heights will see their educational opportunities blossom with the recent opening of a new public school and the groundbreaking last week of an Early HeadStart facility scheduled to open within two years.
In their first formal meeting of the year, parents and school officials assembled at P.S. 222, a new early childhood center, to form a parent- teacher association last Wednesday.
About 200 parents, teachers, administrators and children packed the spacious cafeteria for the meeting, which covered general information about forming a PTA and ended with the selection of a small committee of parents to get the process underway.
The four-story school on 37th Avenue between 86th and 87th Streets opened its doors September 5 to pre-kindergarten through first-grade students, adding over 200 badly needed seats to an overcrowded school district.
With classrooms freshly painted in pastel colors, handmade ceramic murals brightening the cafeteria and hundreds of new books waiting to be cracked open in the cozy library, the building debuted to universal praise.
"The school is beautiful, the kids are great, the teachers are absolutely dedicated," said Principal Maria Cicone. "Its an ideal situation."
P.S. 222, named the "Firefighter Christopher Santora School" after a local fireman who died on September 11, opened to alleviate overcrowding at neighboring P.S. 69. Both schools are in Community School District 30, which ranks among the most packed in the city despite a 1,000-student drop in enrollment this year.
Cicone said school is off to an exceptionally smooth start, in part because the building is not yet filled to capacity. Enrollment at P.S. 222 is expected to top off at 320 students with the addition of second grade next year. But right now only about 210 kids are attending the school, with an average of 20 in each class.
Of those children, Cicone estimates some 80 to 90% are Hispanica figure that reflects a surge in Latin American immigration to Jackson Heights over the last 10 years.
The children have yet to take English proficiency tests, but Cicone said language has not presented a problem in class. "The children are fluent," she said. "But some of the parents have limited English."
To help address that, P.S. 222 plans to start an ESL class for parents. Parents will also have the opportunity to attend a weekly breakfast with their children in the schools library. A federal grant will help fund these extra programs.
Another promising development was the groundbreaking last Wednesday of the Ivan C. Lafayette Childrens Center on the corner of 34th Avenue and Junction Boulevard. Construction of the 13,000-square-foot facility is expected to take 18 months, and the center, named for the neighborhoods longtime assemblymember, will provide free pre-school day care and Early HeadStart programs to 138 children from eight weeks to five years old.
"Were going into labor," joked Lafayette at the groundbreaking ceremony. The centers gestation period has lasted three years, during which the assemblyman helped line up $2.4 million in state and private funds to pay for the project.
Lafayette added that money for childhood development programs is wasted in areas without facilities.
"What good is program money if the children in my community cant use those funds?" he asked rhetorically.
The center will demonstrate "what our children are capable of doing if they are given the proper resources," he said.
The mostly Spanish-speaking child population of Jackson Heights and Corona will be served by bilingual staff in a state-of-the-art facility run by the Queens Child Guidance Center (QCGC), a non-profit child care organization operating at several locations in the borough.
"The need is extraordinary here," said Barbara Greenstein, deputy executive director of QCGC. "Queens is the most underserved borough in terms of child care slots."
Harvey Newman, deputy commissioner of the citys Administration for Childrens Services (ACS), said that 6,000 additional child care spots are necessary to cover the boroughs needs. By the end of this year, an additional 194 spaces will be added to the boroughs roster in locations to be decided, according to Newman.
Although the planned center will serve just a fraction of the child population that needs care, Greenstein was confident about her organizations ability to provide quality care for those children.
"We believe that a positive, strong relationship between parents, children and teachers is the bedrock of all learning and development," she said.
Programs at the center will emphasize individual needs at the earliest ages, and will add reading and group socialization for pre-kindergarten students. Ninety slots are reserved for day care for children up to five years old, to be funded by ACS. Early HeadStart, a federal program designed to prepare disadvantaged children for school, will provide 48 slots for children aged eight weeks to three years, funded through the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
Key to the centers opening was funding from state and federal agencies and private groups like the Queens County Savings Bank, the Independence Community Foundation, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Time Warner Cable, all of which provided construction funds or financing for the land. The project was organized by the Jackson Heights Community Development Corporation.