By Patrick Donachie
The building at the corner of 48th Street and Barnett Avenue is vacant and abandoned, but parents and elected officials gathered on the second floor of the cavernous space on Monday to announce that a middle school would help alleviate the longstanding overcrowding in the school district.
The announcement that the School Construction Authority had sited the location for a new middle school came as welcome news to the community last week. Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Astoria) said the announcement was the culmination of a multi-year struggle.
“They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it took this village to raise a school,” he said, happy that the “eyesore” building currently occupying the property could be demolished. “We’re going to replace it with a state-of-the-art school where generations of students can learn.”
Elected officials and parents said overcrowding in School District 30 had been an issue for decades. State Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan (D-Sunnyside), the chairwoman of the state Assembly Education Committee, said Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood was extremely overcrowded when she attended as a student, and Woodside Intermediate School 125, about three avenues south of the site of the new school, had been overcrowded since she was first elected in 1984.
“Western Queens has been overcrowded all our lives,” she said. She noted that there were concerns about traffic in the area due to the new school, but it was nevertheless “a great thing for our community.”
Van Bramer said Mayor Bill de Blasio had allocated $225 million in the previous year’s executive budget for the construction of four schools within his council district, and the money for the new school would be coming from that allocation. He said the new school would be one of 10 new schools in the council district that had been either built, funded or sited.
A spokesman for the SCA said the school would go through a community engagement process that would involve meetings with the local Community Education Council, the local community board and the City Council.
After that process is completed, he estimated it would take about one year to design the new school and two to three years to construct it. He said the vacant building currently standing at the location would likely be demolished entirely to make way for new construction.
Ian McGowan, a parent from the area, said after the new school opens, one benefit would be that children in the immediate area might no longer have to cross Queens or Northern Boulevard to get to their school. The two streets run parallel to the school to its north and south, and often have heavy traffic.
“People will walk down their residential streets to get to their schools,” he said.
Reach reporter Patrick Donachie by e-mail at pdona
