Rebecca Kates stood on the corner of 61st Street underneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway holding a sign, “I am 9 years old and I don’t want to die at this intersection.”
Kates, a student at P.S. 229 in Maspeth, and her mother, Michelle, are unwilling to walk through an intersection at 61st Street and Laurell Hill Boulevard that has six entrances including two from Brooklyn-Queens Expressway off ramps for a total of nine lanes.
Because the Department of Education will not provide bus service from this area to P.S. 229 despite repeated requests, the 9-year-old and her nearby classmates have only one other option to walk to school—along Queens Boulevard, which has earned the nickname “the Boulevard of Death” because of pedestrian fatalities.
About 25 parents, students and members of Community Education Council (CEC) 24 gathered Monday evening to protest the DOE’s repeated denial of waivers that would acknowledge the hazard and provide bus service for these students.
“Don’t forget us; we need a bus,” they chanted.
For five years, most of the students who live near the intersection haven’t had bus service because of cost cutting by the DOE.
They walk less than a mile to school, but parents say the intersection is deserving of a hazard variance the DOE issues to allow bus service when there’s no safe route to walk.
Thirty-nine times, requests by parents for a variance have been denied, said Nick Comaianni, president of CEC 24,which covers Maspeth, Middle Village, Woodside and other surrounding areas.
Adding to parents’ frustrations is the fact that there’s a bus stop just outside their doors. The stop at 60th Street and 47th Avenue picks up about 12 kids, leaving room for the 30 or so that are forced to walk or be driven now, parents said.
“They just took the kids off,” said Comaianni.
According to Comaianni and his CEC, this intersection is part of a larger issue that cuts across all of Queens.
He and the rest of CEC 24 voted last week to support an initiative headed to the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) in February that aims to put control closer to parents.
The demonstration and the vote are part of a plan to put pressure on Chancellor Dennis Walcott and the PEP to put in place an independent review board in each district to decide on hazard waivers.
Each board would be comprised of parents, the district’s superintendent and appointees instead of unilateral decisions by the DOE that parents at the rally said are the dark side of centralized control in schools.
“I wish Mayor Bloomberg would stop thinking about money for just a minute and put the lives of our children first,” Michelle Kates said.
By Jeremiah Dobruck
Forum Newsgroup photo by Luis Gronda
