The New York City Department of Education (DOE) is proposing a plan to create a Queens junior high and high school for recently immigrated students in the partially occupied school building that houses Ridgewood Middle School IS 77.
The proposal comes as the city tries to address widespread overcrowding as well as the influx of recently immigrated students to New York City. School District 24, where the school is located, is one of the most overcrowded in the city.
However, the project has met resistance from a group of IS 77 parents who are petitioning the public school system to expand the existing middle school to become a high school that serves neighborhood residents. Their bad experiences with the school’s previous high school co-location have bolstered their resistance.
For two years, Bushwick Leaders High School temporarily moved into the Ridgewood middle school building, creating an environment that parents say was disruptive and, at times, unsafe for their middle school students. That co-location caused a serious breach of trust between the DOE and the parents.
“We’re going to have the same problems with their kids and we’re going to tell the principals and nothing is going to happen. Our students are always going to get the short end of the stick and it’s not fair,” said Yadhira Franqui, president of the IS 77 parent-teacher association.
The DOE’s plan would create a new district secondary school, Queens International, for the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, which would accommodate the influx of recently immigrated students to New York. Queens International would be specifically tailored to the needs of students who have been living in the U.S. for four years or less and whose home language is not English. At first, the school would open for grades 6 and 9 and then phase in the other high school grades over multiple years.
The building that houses IS 77 has a capacity for 1,469 students but currently only has about 575 students from IS 77, leaving it with 894 excess seats. Queens International is designed to serve 60-70 students per grade, with a plan to serve 440-500 students by the 2028-2029 school year.
“This co-location is still in the proposal phase and, if approved, will allow for the school leaders to collaborate on the co-location plan from early stages, make decisions that prioritize the needs of both communities and continue to refine the plan over the coming years as the school enrollment changes,” said a DOE spokesperson.
The DOE added that there are over 80 buildings across the city that pair middle and high school students and that it has developed a strong set of best practices in these cases.
The school system has held two forums for parents and school leaders so far, but parents say that they haven’t felt heard by the school system.
“They just care about filling up the seats and the numbers,” said Franqui.
Yvonne Wang-Silonga is a former teacher and the mother of a sixth grader at IS 77 who enrolled just after Bushwick Leaders ended its co-location. She said she’s supportive of the DOE’s efforts to provide a healthy environment for immigrant students, but that it comes at an opportune time for the middle school, which, with the help of a new principal, Gina Pluviose, has just started to turn its academic performance around.
“I feel like we didn’t get a chance to shine. All the bad connotations that people have about this school — there’s no basis for it,” Wang-Silonga said.
She has been volunteering to help make the middle school more attractive to parents, provide additional language programs, and expand the school’s extracurriculars. She’s worried that the co-location will hurt those efforts.
Wang-Silonga and a group of other parents want to expand IS 77 into its own 6-12 school and give their new principal a chance to turn enrollment around. The parents have launched a petition to gather support for this plan.
The DOE’s published materials about the co-location have ruled out this type of expansion as an option, citing the school’s declining enrollment over the last five years as a reason.
The DOE is expected to convene another public hearing on the proposal on Dec. 3 to present details of the plan and elicit parent feedback. The fate of the school will ultimately be decided by the Panel for Educational Policy, the DOE’s governing body, which is expected to vote on the proposal at its January 22 meeting.
