The controversial redistricting plan involving PS 58 and Ps/IS 49—the latter which faces serious overcrowding issues—looks like it may be heading back to the drawing board.
Members of the Community Education Council 24 told parents at the Oct. 27th Juniper Park Civic Association meeting that they have decided to tell the Department of Education’s Office of Portfolio Management to scrap their proposal to redirect students in the northern and southern borders of PS/IS 49 and come up with a new proposal.
“After speaking intensely with the superintendent and our members, we decided to tell OPM that we’re not going to approve this plan, we decided to tell them to go back to the drawing board and to come up with another plan,” CEC President Nick Comaianni told residents during last week’s meeting at Our Lady of Hope School in Middle Village .
Their decision comes after more than a month of discussing the proposed redistrict plan which aims to reduce overcrowding in Ps/IS 49 by sending some students to PS 58 in Maspeth, which is currently under capacity.
This means the OPM has until December to create and present a new plan to solve the overcrowding issues at PS/IS 49. Department of Education officials could not be reached immediately for comment on whether OPM had initiated a new plan to remedy the situation.
The DOE pitched the idea in September to shift the northern and southern section of PS/IS 49 ‘s enrollment zone to other schools. Under the rejected plan, children in the northern area bounded by 81st Street and 58th Avenue from 79th Street to the Queens Midtown Expressway would go to PS 58, and children living in the southern area bounded by Furmanville Avenue and Juniper Valley Road from
74th Street to 79th Street would report to PS/IS 87 in Middle Village.
Since that time, parents from both districts have heatedly debated the proposal. Some parents with children in the PS/IS 49 district have argued that the school desperately needs to alleviate overcrowding while other parents from both schools—some of whom intentionally bought their homes close to neighboring schools—have railed against the plan.
Linda Schirling, a former teacher who lives in the PS/IS 49 zone, has been outspoken in recent meetings about her opposition to the redistricting plan. She argued at the Oct. 27 meeting that the real problem causing the overcrowding was too many parents falsifying addresses when applying to schools in order for their children to attend classes at those districts.
“At my old district, in one of my classes, half of the class said they didn’t know their own address,” she said during the meeting.
On that subject, District Superintendent Madeline Taub-Chan said that she had recently spoken with Andrew Lombardi, principal of PS/IS 49, and was informed that some of the kids at school were there because of the No Child Left Behind policy—which allows for students in underachieving schools to transfer to another school.
“A lot of (the children) came from underachieving schools… and that had nothing to do with zoning—they received variances from the principal to be there,” Taub-Chan said.
While acknowledging that PS/IS 49 has serious overcrowding problems that need to be addressed, Comaianni said that his board had also taken into account the complaints of parents opposing the plan.
However, Comaianni reiterated to parents, this was an issue that parents ultimately have to take up with the school administration.
“This is above us; this is an administration problem. We have pushed the administration to tighten up on those guidelines, to do a better investigation, to follow up with these people,” said Comaianni. “But this is not something where we can help. All we can do is suggest it to the city, and we have…but this is not our decision. This is Dictator Bloomberg’s decision, not ours.”
By Jean-Paul Salamanca
