New year, new digs

After waiting for two years, two District 20 schools are starting the 2012-2013 school year in their newly designed buildings.

The Bay Ridge Elementary School for the Arts, P.S. 264, which houses kindergarten through fifth grade, has been operating out of the Community Education Council District 20 offices on 89th Street since 2010. This year the school – which was planned to help ease overcrowding at P.S. 104 at 92nd Street and Fourth Avenue — will move into the brand-new building at Fourth Avenue and 89th Street.

P.S. 310, which also houses kindergarten through fifth grade, has been overcrowded and incubating in a building at 62nd Street and Fourth Avenue. Students and staff will finally move into their new, spacious school building at 62nd Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway. P.S. 310 was designed to help reduce overcrowding at P.S. 69, at Ninth Avenue and 63rd Street, a relatively new school that was already over capacity by the time its doors opened.

“I am thrilled and excited that these buildings are opening. It’s been a long time in the making,” said Laurie Windsor, president of District 20’s Community Education Council. “P.S. 264 was a car wash. It’s a big thrill when the property was acquired and now the buildings are finally open. They are both beautiful buildings and have beautiful designs on both.”

The schools were both proposed in the Department of Education’s 2005-2009 $13 billion capital plan, which allocated a whopping 5,119 new seats to District 20, which oversees elementary and intermediate schools in Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Boro Park, Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Kensington.

Still in the pipeline is the so-called “Green Church School,” at the site of the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, Fourth and Ovington Avenues, which will house I.S. 30 – now located in makeshift quarters in an old apartment building – as well as a new elementary school, and a District 75 (special education) program when it opens in September, 2013. Eventually, the youngest elementary school students (kindergarten through second grade) will attend class in I.S. 30’s old digs, at 415 Ovington Avenue.

DOE had not responded to a request for comment as this paper went to press.

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