PS41 Crocheron Kindergartners Will Temporarily Move To New School

BAYSIDE, QUEENS — A Department of Education panel this week unanimously approved a proposal to temporarily relocate P.S. 41 Crocheron's kindergarteners to a new school, which would make way for the city to build an addition to the overcrowded Bayside elementary school.

The Panel for Educational Policy, whose 13 members are appointed by the mayor and the five borough presidents, voted in a public meeting Wednesday to approve the plan.

Under the proposal, P.S. 41 Crocheron's kindergarteners will leave their classroom trailers for a new elementary school building scheduled to open this fall in the former home of the St. Robert Bellarmine School, just under two miles away.

That new school, which will be known as P.S. 390Q, will house 292 elementary school seats and will include pre-K classes.

The city's School Construction Authority will then start building an addition to the Crocheron school on the site of those trailers, a process that officials say will take three years.

"We've kind of maxed out what we can do to make this place the greatest it can be," P.S. 41 Crocheron principal Joe Ferrara said during a hearing earlier this month.

Once workers finish the Crocheron addition, the proposal says, its kindergartners would leave the new elementary school and move back to their former home — this time, not in trailers.

The proposal may come as a surprise to some Bayside parents, who said during the Jan. 7 hearing that they'd heard little about the project up until then.