By Michael Morton
“It's a continuing indictment of our society to allow such meager resources,” Sanders said after he was led outside by school administrators and parents to look at several mobile classrooms, a necessity in a school that has 480 students but space in its main building for only 360.For Sanders, the Rosedale tour represented his fifth school visit in the last two months, with five more to come soon. With city education money tight and funds from a landmark court decision still far off in the future, the councilman is trying to assess conditions in his district, which encompasses the far corner of southeast Queens and Far Rockaway, and determine the most urgent needs before the upcoming budget battle with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Schools often rely on their elected leaders to provide supplementary funding, and the faculty and parents of PS 38 at 135-21 241st St. requested that Sanders pay them a visit. Saddled as it is with overcrowding, the school also lacks a library, and it was an unwitting victim of a corruption scandal involving a former district superintendent that left them without new computers that had been promised. In addition to the problems in the lone lab, the machines in the classrooms are so outdated they can take 20 minutes just to go from one program window to another.”This is one of the schools that really suffered,” third-year Principal Lenon Murray said of the scandal. “We really haven't recovered from that.” Murray, who has been praised by the community for his work with limited resources, described his school as a “tweener,” one that was not bad enough to qualify for additional funding but still managed to remain in the upper echelon in School District 29 based on student test scores.PS 38 is just barely below the cutoff for the federal Title I program, which provides extra money to schools where a certain percentage of the student population qualifies for free lunches based on low family income. When the cutoff was 55 percent of students a year ago, the Rosedale school had 52 percent, and the standard has now been raised to 60 percent.”It makes our budget situation very difficult,” Murray said.PS 38 sits on a whole city block with room to spare, and for years the school has been pressing the city Education Department for an expansion. But after an addition was finally promised, the department canceled the project because of the opening of PS 270 in Laurelton in 2003. Murray said since the new school was a district-wide magnet school rather than a zoned school, it did not reduce the overcrowding at PS 38 as much as first thought.Timothy James, president of the area's Community Education Council, warned that School District 29 needed additional seats, with more students pouring in as developers race to construct housing. More students may come from St. Pius X, a Rosedale Catholic school that will close at the end of the year.Facing such problems, parents and faculty sat down with Sanders last Thursday to present a list of their needs. Their No. 1 priority was two computers for each classroom, followed by after-school programs and a library.”Every night we sit and wonder how we are going to get these necessary programs,” parent Mack Scott said.Others said they thought Sanders, a former school board president from the Rockaways, had been biased.”We're the forgotten school,” Parent Teacher Association President David Fowler said. “The funding goes right past us and it goes to the Rockaways.”Sanders replied that two-thirds of his funding goes to the “mainland” and added that he has to spread limited money around 30 schools in Districts 27 and 29.”I find myself a fireman instead of creating models of excellence,” he said. While receptive to all of PS 38's requested items, he said he was inclined to focus on a library, although he noted a building extension would cost at least $5 million. Still, he said he would do what he could during the looming budget battle.”I will be a part of the change,” Sanders vowed.Reach reporter Michael Morton by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
