By Alex Christodoulides
At the meeting at the DOE headquarters, school officials attempted to sell parents on the 500-student Civic Leadership Academy to open inside the Halsey building, which was announced last week, but they were not buying.Parents and elected officials say Halsey, located at 63-55 102nd St. in Rego Park, with a student body of 1,100 sixth- through ninth-graders, is already too crowded. The DOE says the building's capacity is 1,500 students, so at 1,100 it is underutilized.James Purus, the local instructional superintendent for Halsey, and Jemina Bernard, chief operating officer of the DOE's office of new schools, did not return calls for comment.Bernard spoke at the meeting and later explained in an e-mail to Katz's office that the School Construction Authority keeps data about the capacity of city schools, and that utilization numbers are calculated by a system which accounts for all students at a school.A spokesman for Katz said the DOE was unable to say where the new students would come from.”The admissions policy for Civic Leadership Academy has not been finalized by the Office of Student Enrollment Planning and Operations, but [it] will serve students of your community,” he read from Bernard's e-mail. DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer said the admission process would be the same as for the rest of the district.Ellen Weissman, whose daughter attends Halsey, said the meeting raised more questions than it answered, such as where more students would fit in the building, where classes take place in rooms not designed as classrooms while more than a half-dozen vacant shop classrooms have not been converted to normal use.”This building is old enough to have asbestos. No way can they renovate [the shop classrooms] with children in there,” she said.”Construction will take place over the next few years to convert unused workshops and other areas at the site into usable instructional spaces,” Katz's office read from an e-mail from Bernard.”The Civic Leadership Academy will open in September, so whatever necessary changes need to take place will happen before then,” said Meyer.At the meeting, parents were concerned about an apparent connection between the new academy and the Child Center of New York, a nonprofit that offers at-risk children counseling, tutoring, and family intervention in cases of abuse, neglect or mental illness.A DOE spokeswoman said the partnership would offer support to students and faculty at the school but said it will have no role in admissions. “Enrollment and admissions will be same as at any other public school,” she said. The Child Center's role will be to train faculty in youth development and help connect students with community service opportunities, but it will not effect admissions.”Katz has backed a plan to put a middle school in the PS 3 building, which currently sits vacant at 108-55 69th Ave. The DOE announced in December that it plans instead to use the building for kindergarten through grade three.Reach reporter Alex Christodoulides by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
