A school at the Flushing Airport? It could fly, city says
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A dormant airport in Flushing could one day host a school. Public domain photo via PxHere.
By Phineas Rueckert
A dormant airfield in Flushing could eventually become the site of a new school, officials from the School Construction Authority said at a public meeting Monday.
The meeting at City Hall was convened by the School Siting Task Force, which was formed in September 2018 to identify potential school sites in publicly-owned buildings amidst a citywide space crunch.
The Department of Education has identified a shortfall of more than 57,000 school seats to fill over the next five years, the Daily News reported. Task Force representatives said Monday that they analyzed more than 7,000 city-owned sites, but identified just two that fit the criteria for “further investigation,” including the old airport in Flushing and another in Gravesend, Brooklyn.
“We’ve already looked at the site on multiple occasions,” SCA Senior Director and Council Gayle Mandaro told the Eagle after the meeting of the Flushing Airport site. “We’re just doing due diligence. It’s always worth looking again in an area of funded seat-need.”
The meeting — the Task Force’s second, and the first open to the public — featured a number of tense exchanges as parents, education advocates and Community Education Council representatives questioned the SCA over their plans to reduce overcrowding and build new schools across the city.
“There is a real serious deficit of school seats for every level,” said Lisa Goren, a spokesperson for the LIC Coalition, a local advocacy group that fought to prevent Amazon from locating its second headquarters in Queens.
Goren and other members of the coalition urged the Task Force to “take a look at” a DOE-owned building located on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, which advocates have said they would like to see converted into a community space that includes a school.
School overcrowding is a particularly serious problem in Queens. Three Queens school districts were all at or above 115 percent capacity in 2014-2015, and two others were over 100 percent capacity, according to a 2018 City Council report on overcrowding. The SCA has said that it is on track to reach its targets of creating 83,000 new school seats citywide by the end of 2020, including more than 17,000 in Queens.
A new school in Flushing could help address overcrowding, representatives said Monday. Still, concerns remain.
The airfield, which was closed by then-Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s, sits on marshland and could pose construction concerns, Mandaro said. Various development plans for the site, The Guardian reported in 2015, have failed to get off the ground in the past.
The Task Force said that it will now look into the possibility of locating schools on 1,328 privately-owned properties, SCA representatives said at the meeting. The Task Force submitted its report to the City Council on Wednesday.
