With construction underway at various places in southwestern Brooklyn, the Department of Education (DOE) is still looking at sites to fulfill its commitment to add more than 5,000 seats to School District 20 as part of its current capital plan.
To that end, the agency is currently exploring the possibility of putting up a school on the site of a vacant car wash and car stereo store, at Fourth Avenue and 88th Street, according to Laurie Windsor, the president of the District 20 Community Education Council.
In addition, said Windsor, the agency is also looking at the site of Tilden Brakes, at 60th Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway.
If these sites are developed as schools, it would go a long way toward meeting the goal set by DOE in its 2005-2009 $13 billion capital plan. That plan had proposed a total of eight new elementary and intermediate schools, with 5,119 seats (the most seats of any district in the city), at a cost of $360 million.
They are badly needed, said Windsor. Having a school at Fourth and 88th, she explained, would help relieve pressure on Public School 104, 9115 Fifth Avenue, which already sends students to the annex in the district office building, at 89th Street and Fourth Avenue.
The issue for P.S. 104, said Windsor, is the increase in the number of students zoned for the school from the Fort Hamilton Army Base, where the new construction has meant many new families. “P.S. 104 gets the brunt of that,” Windsor stressed.
The car wash site is one that City Councilmember Vincent Gentile has urged the DOE to consider. “I’ve been advocating they look at it. It’s been vacant, and it is extensive enough to put something there and, because it’s Fourth Avenue, they can get some height,” he explained.
The site at 60th Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway, should it come to fruition, would help Public School 69, at Ninth Avenue and 63rd Street, Windsor noted.
That school, she stressed, “Is bursting at the seams. It has overflow classes at different schools. That vicinity is really feeling the pressure. Eighth Avenue is Little Chinatown. It’s where a lot of the population is coming in.”
Already under construction are extensions at several schools – McKinley Intermediate School, I.S. 259, at 7305 Fort Hamilton Parkway; Public School 163, at 1664 Benson Avenue; and Public School 229, 1400 Benson Avenue – as well as a new kindergarten-through-grade-eight school at Avenue P and Stillwell Avenue, on the site of the old Magen David Yeshiva.
The new school at the site of Magen David is expected to open by September, 2009, and the McKinley annex and the annex to P.S. 163 are supposed to open in September, 2010, Windsor said.
“It’s exciting to have such a huge, beautiful building in the district,” she added. “It’s sweet, since it was a hole in the ground for so long.”
The annex to P.S. 229 is expected to open in January, 2010, at which time, according to Windsor, students will move over to that building, to allow the School Construction Authority (SCA) to refurbish the old school building, which would reopen in September, 2010.
