Campaign For School $ Kicks Off At Bd. 4
BY RICHARD GENTILVISO

Following up on a promise to intensify the fight to get more state funding for education, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has enlisted the support of a 15-member team of distinguished local leaders, including former Mayor Ed Koch, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and salsa musician Willie Colon. They will urge local planning boards in the 21 communities slated to lose school construction projects to join the effort. Dr. Guillermo Linares kicked off the campaign at the March meeting of Community Board 4 in Corona.

Linares, Bloomberg's Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, said progress made over the last four years to reform New York City's public school system was in jeopardy. Linares reminded the board that of the 21 school construction projects to be cut, two are in Community Board 4. Art Leather H.S. and St. Bartholomew School, both in Elmhurst, would be lost to students in the local school district, one of the most overcrowded in the city.

St. Bartholomew is currently in the Brooklyn-Queens Catholic Diocese system but will be closed due to low enrollment while Art & Leather H.S. is a new school to be built on the site of an old warehouse and factory building. "St. Bartholomews would provide relief for nearby P.S. 89 and P.S. 12 and Art & Leather will help relieve overcrowding at Newtown H.S.," Linares said.

City Councilmember Hiram Monserrate said he fully supported Mayor Bloomberg. "These two schools will give us close to 2,000 seats in this community," he said. St. Bartholomew would provide 250 seats and Art & Leather H.S. 1,650 seats. "All are on the chopping block, unless we get this money," Monserrate said. Cuts to school projects in Queens represent a loss of nine new schools and more than 8,000 seats.

When the city passed a five-year, $13.1-billion capital construction plan late in 2003, it was dependent on half its cost from the state as a "down payment" to comply with a court ordered $9 billion for school construction money. But the state is still appealing the case and has refused to give the city the $1.8 billion needed to go forward with school construction this year.

Monserrate said citizens should protest the delay. "We should call on all our state legislators to oppose any [state] budget until we get this money," he said. The state budget, by law, is due April 1, but it usually late. Last year it was delivered on time for the first time in 20 years.

The School Construction Authority (SCA) did have some good news. P.S./I.S. 260, a new school now under construction at Roosevelt Avenue between 99th and 100th Streets, is on schedule. The school will be a kindergarten through Grade 8 facility, said Mary Leas, SCA Queens support project manager.

"The school will have a full size auditorium, gym, and cafeteria as well as special lab/science classrooms," she said. The main entrance will be on 100th Street. Construction has been ongoing for six months and the opening is scheduled for September 2008. "I think you're going to be very proud of this school," Leas said.