Dept. of Education yanks kids from school

By Kate Pastor

Local children are officially on the move to schools outside of their zones - from classrooms, teachers and students they have now come to know.

"Any way you look at it it's not fair to the students and certainly not fair to the families. But we really have no choice," said PS 81 principal Melodie Mashel. Last week, three or four children who began the year at her school started attending the Ampark Neighborhood School, PS 344, in Van Cortlandt Village, she added.

That option, according to the Department of Education, was rejected by another six or seven PS 81 families who have children marking time in classrooms they will soon have to leave.

"Now to pick up and move to another school, start all over again, take another bus. It's awful," said Ms. Mashel.

PS 24 third-graders also face uncertainty. In the spring, the school requested capping in the third grade - meaning no new children would have been able to register - but the DOE has not been able to find a school with enough seats for the spillover.

Unjoo Trebach, who has a child in the third grade at PS 24 and is one of the vice presidents of the school's parents association, said, "The last I heard they were going to remain in our school."

She said that the children who registered most recently would have been the first to go, but they live well within the zone, so the school had thought better of sending them away. Instead it has worked out a contingency plan to have extra teachers help out in over-limit classrooms. Philip Scharper, the school's principal, did not return calls for comment by press time.

Even as work-arounds are being cobbled together, families, teachers and principals are concerned that they will have to do it all over again next year.

According to Ms. Trebach, parents at PS 24 have expressed a multitude of concerns, including that the school's gifted and talented program is expected to expand to third grade next year as second-grade gifted and talented students move up, and that might worsen the space squeeze.

Ms. Mashel says all of the emotional trauma being visited on children and their families now, could have been avoided if the DOE simply listened to her when she told them last spring that her school would need to be capped. But she also agreed that it is unfair for teachers, students and schools to be overcrowded, especially in grades three and four, where test scores largely contribute to a school's progress report grade.

Raising concerns

At a recent parents association meeting at PS 24, Ms. Trebach said parents raised concerns not only about the third-grade classes, which have up to 31 children in them, but also that two of the four classes do not have a student-teacher in them. She said that while teachers are doing a great job of managing the strain, "this is not an ideal situation. We're all very unhappy about it."

She said that while parents got a letter from Mr. Scharper over the summer notifying them that there would be one fewer third-grade class - down from six to five - and that the class may be capped, "when you're seeing the children come out en masse it's a different feeling than reading it in a letter."

She said her son does notice the larger class size (there were 22 children in his class last year and there are now 30), and that, "going forward I think parents need to be more involved from the very beginning and have a forum to voice their opinions."

Parents at local schools are not alone in getting up in arms about overcrowding. On Oct. 3, about 100 people attended a press conference outside of City Hall to demand a better plan to address school overcrowding before a meeting of the City Council's Education Committee.

They called on the DOE to pay more attention to local, rather than districtwide needs in shaping schools, something parents of children who tested into gifted and talented programs have also long been saying.

City Councilman Oliver Koppell, a member of the council's Education Committee, said he expressed concern about overcrowding in the district, making mention of both PS 24 and PS 81.

Suburban flight

He worries that overcrowded Riverdale schools could send families fleeing to the suburbs and pointed out that capacity at PS 24 is 650 students, but the school is housing 761. He once again called for the Whitehall annex - space leased from an apartment building and currently housing Bronx Early College Academy (BECA) - to be used as an annex for PS 24 beginning in the fall of 2009.

Mr. Koppell also criticized the DOE for the difficulty people are having obtaining up-to-date information about registers in district schools, citing the inability of Marvin Shelton, the District 10 Community Education Council president, to get answers about the current registers in District 10 schools, as well as the number of students who are being bused out of their zoned schools because of overcrowding.

Mr. Shelton said he has since obtained a copy of the 2008 register report.

Speaking after the meeting, he said that the DOE had basically agreed to "start looking at neighborhoods and communities." Planning on a purely districtwide level, the thinking goes, has led to pockets of overcrowding and others of relative underutilization, instead of creating seats where they are most needed.

While District 10 does not exactly fit that description, according to Mr. Shelton, with no real pockets of schools that are under capacity, he believes the district should look at how to use feeder school structures and zoning to address capacity here.

In District 10, he said, "there are some [schools] that are severely overcrowded, those are the schools where there are no seats for the children who should be in those schools, and then you have the tight situations," he said, like PS 24.

A spokesman for the DOE, Will Havemann, said the department is listening and will consider communities more in future plans.

This is part of the October 9, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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