Schools open smoothly - with one surprise!

To start the 2007 school year, officials opened 40 new schools and added 3,700 classroom seats citywide.
In Queens, one new school opened, another school added a completely new student body, and a third - Scholars Academy in Rockaway - added classes for ninth-graders.
The new school - Bell Academy, a middle school in Bayside - now officially occupies space within P.S. 169, located at 18-25 212th Street.
“It’s been quite an overwhelming experience. We are very pleased. We have a fabulous student body, terrific parent participation and a great staff and we are really rolling,” said Principal Cheryl Quatrano, explaining that the Bell Academy is part of the “school wide enrichment model.”
“We look for and develop each child’s gifts and talents through enrichment,” she said, adding that the 192-student school is fully equipped with video conferencing in each classroom.
Other programs include a partnership with St. John’s University, extended day homework help after school, and enrichment clusters where students focus their own interests like community service or documentary filmmaking.
In Kew Gardens Hills, North Community High School - a transfer school serving 150 students grades 10 through 12 - opened in the former site of the Queen of Peace school.
City school officials said that transfer schools are academically rigorous, diploma-granting high schools for kids who have fallen behind and who have asked to be re-enrolled. They can be teens who have experienced a death in the family, English-language learners or students struggling with their work, and officials touted the transfer-school graduation rate of 56 percent. Otherwise, the kids would be characterized as “over-age” or “under-credit,” of which about 19 percent finish high school.
However, Kew Gardens Hills residents blasted the Department of Education (DOE) for placing “troubled youth” in their community without proper notification.
“Did the [DOE] and its partner, Good Shepherd Family Services, really think that they could sneak a high school for chronically truant, troubled youth into a residential neighborhood like Kew Gardens Hills without anyone noticing?” questioned community activist Pat Dolan, President of the Kew Gardens Hills Civic Association.
Councilmember James Gennaro also called for state legislators to give the Council the right to approve plans for DOE-leased school sites.
Nevertheless, DOE spokesperson Debra Wexler said in a statement that information about the school had been made publicly available and that all city councilmembers were invited in April to a briefing on the 40 new schools that opened this year.