The city plans to rezone four District 22 elementary schools for the 2018 school year, because each of them has enrolled more kids than it has available desks, said the district superintendent on March 30.
“The necessity is that we have these four schools over-capacity — absolutely no room to have any kind of extra services — and they truly deserve it. Why shouldn’t your kids also have room to have music and art and science labs, and have speech in a real classroom instead of a closet?” said superintendent Julia Bove. “All things that your kids truly, truly deserve.”
The Department of Education’s Office of District Planning will draw up new lines based on students’ home addresses to determine where they will receive priority admission into the four schools — PS 197 in Midwood, PS 255 in Madison, and PS 206 and PS 254, both in Sheepshead Bay. But the rezoning will only affect incoming pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, or new students coming into the system, according to information from the department.
And the district will have an abundance of open space in PS 197 next year, because in December a Department of Education panel voted to move the 300 sixth-through-eighth-graders attending co-located IS 381 to move from PS 197’s Midwood campus to the Andries Hudde school to make room for more kindergartners, despite parents’ pleas against it.
The Department of Education will present the proposed lines by September 2017, and within 45 days, District 22’s Community Education Council will vote on it. But until then, officials are eager to hear parents’ feedback, said council president Dorothy Crawford.
“We’re encouraging all parents involved in those four schools to come out and voice their opinion,” she said. “Once they come back us to us next time, they will have a proposal.”
Contact the Department of Education with questions, concerns, or feedback at Brook
