Overcrowded schools still big problem

As an estimated 1.1 million public school students in the city returned to the classroom this week, about 200 headed to new schools in Queens, which were built as part of the $13.1 billion, five-year capital and construction plan that will add over 14,000 new school seats for the borough's already-bulging student population.
On Tuesday, September 5, two new schools, The High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture in Ozone Park and an early childhood program at P.S. 78Q opened for their first classes.
With a ninth grade class comprised of 150 students at Construction Trades - total enrollment will expand to 992 over the next few years - and 41 enrolled in the P.S. 78Q program, more than 1,000 children will be given seats in the two new schools that opened this school year.
By 2009, an additional 50,000 seats will have been added citywide - in both new and restructured schools - at an estimated cost of $10.5 billion.
In Queens, nine other new schools are slated to be completed by 2009, and six schools under construction will provide more than 4,000 more seats within the next two years. Region 4 - which contains schools in western Queens and eastern Brooklyn - will have the most newly-created seats in the area.
In February, after Governor George Pataki had threatened to withdraw state funding for the 21 new schools set to be built throughout the city, the nine Queens projects - totaling almost 5,000 seats - were temporarily scrapped. In addition, work on three other Queens schools that had already begun was stopped, but now has resumed.
The School Construction Authority, which is responsible for all of the new school construction, is back on schedule, according to Alicia Maxey Greene, a representative for the Department of Education (DOE).
Nevertheless, relief cannot come soon enough for overcrowded schools - some with enrollment up to 177 percent over capacity. Only three public high schools in the borough have enrollments lower than their building's maximum capacity - Far Rockaway High School, Springfield Gardens High School, and August Martin High School. Moreover, the building's capacity is most often used to mark overcrowding instead of the school's target capacity - often a much lower number.
&#8220Anything that can help minimize the size of the instructional group, we are excited about,” said Kathleen Cashin, Region 5 Superintendent, about new seats to be added to the borough's school system.