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Schools

PS 107's Pre-K Homeless Again, At Least for Now

In order to make room for the growing kindergarten class, PS 107's Pre-K must now find a new home.

After being briefly reinstalled in main building, the school’s Pre-K is without a home.  

At the beginning of April, the Board of Education announced that PS 107’s Pre-K would be relocated to make way for an additional class of kindergarten students.  At a community meeting on April 7, this intention was reiterated, with school officials indicating that they were still in the process of securing a suitable alternate location for the Pre-K.

According to Pat Mannino, PS 107’s Parent Coordinator, the school was then informed by the Board of Education on the afternoon of Friday April 15 — the last day before spring break — that the school would, in fact, have to find a way to accommodate the Pre-K, as well as the additional class of kindergarteners.

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In response, PS 107’s Principal Cynthia Holton sent a letter to parents informing them of the likely consequence: increased class size for the school’s upper grades.  

Parents at PS 107 — having already weathered much upheaval this year — were reportedly outraged by this turn of events and took up an e-mail and letter writing campaign.  Their efforts seem to have paid off, at least for now.

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“After further review we have decided that the Pre-K class will not remain at PS 107,” a Department of Education spokesman said.  “We are working to identify viable alternate locations to offer the Pre-K class elsewhere in the district for families.”

The DOE would not comment further about potential new locations for PS 107’s Pre-K nor would they speak to whether the class might be eliminated altogether if a suitable alternative could not be secured in time.  Pre-K applications were due on April 8.  Acceptance letters are scheduled to be sent out in June.

Notably, concerns about whether PS 107’s Pre-K could or should survive in light of the school’s continued growth, predated the unprecedented kindergarten waiting list.  In fact, Mannino says that it was more than a year ago that PS 107’s administration first requested that the Pre-K be eliminated in order to ease overcrowding, long before the school’s lengthy kindergarten waiting list was unearthed.

According to Mannino, the Board of Education repeatedly denied the school’s requests to eliminate its Pre-K.  It wasn’t until community uproar about the size of the kindergarten waiting list this April that the school was finally given permission to move its Pre-K.

On the upside, PS 107’s massive kindergarten waiting list is now down to only ten students.  And with gifted and talented acceptances still to be released in June, it is conceivable that many of those remaining on the list will still be accommodated. 

What remains unanswered, however, is where PS 107’s 18 Pre-K students will be attending class in four short months.

“The Board of Ed waits too long for these things,” said Mannino.  “Then they leave the schools holding the bag.”

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