City exiles disabled students to ‘dilapidated’ school building in Queens
NYC education officials condemn disabled students to a decrepit Queens building that looks less like a school than a haunted house.
Ominous on the outside, the 116-year-old Maspeth building housing PS 9, the Walter Reed School, has been cloaked in black tarp and web-like scaffolding for nearly two years.
Inside, kids with physical and mental impairments are surrounded by cracked plaster, peeling paint and windows streaked with grime. The 18-wheelers that idle or zoom through the industrial zone kick up dust that coats classrooms and leave an odor of diesel fumes.
“The inside is gross,” said Tricia Gaudio, whose 9-year-old daughter Ava Marie attends summer school at PS 9. “It’s an old, rundown building. It’s dirty.”
PS 9 illustrates how the city Department of Education warehouses and neglects many of the most vulnerable children — special-needs kids.
When Councilman Robert Holden, a Democrat whose district includes the school, first visited the building, “I was heartbroken,” he told The Post.
At a City Council Education Committee hearing last year, Holden brought up PS 9 to Chancellor Richard Carranza, saying, “We’re hiding these kids and treating them like second-class students.”
Carranza replied, “We treat everyone the same,” Holden said.
Holden wrote a letter, dated May 1, 2018, to Carranza, saying the hard-working staff and cheerful children deserve better than “dark and dilapidated” surroundings.
“The classrooms are falling apart, there aren’t enough bathrooms, and the cafeteria and kitchen are partitioned off in the deplorable excuse for a gymnasium,” Holden wrote.
And that’s after DOE said it spent $14 million on repairs.
In more than a year, Carranza never replied to the lawmaker. On Friday night, after The Post asked about the letter, City Hall officials called Holden to say the chancellor wants to meet next week to discuss the school.
Walter Reed houses 188 kids in grades K-8 during the school year and summer.
It is a District 75 school — one in a citywide network for students with severe disabilities. Every child copes with challenges such as emotional disturbances, autism, and language disorders.
No one uses wheelchairs because the ancient building is inaccessible.
Some kids live in homeless shelters or foster homes.
“They go from one depressing environment to another,” Holden said.
The three-story building has one rest room on each floor.
“When I was there, the boys were using it and the girls waited outside,” Holden said.
In one rest room, a bench with a frayed vinyl top is used to change diapers — including for kids in their teenage years — next to open urinals.
Principal Robert Wojnarowski took Holden into a first-floor classroom, adjacent to truck-heavy 57th Street.
“It’s dusty,” one teacher says in a videotape of Holden’s visit. “We can taste it. We have to wipe off the tables and the books.” The windows were shut.
Wojnarowski did not return messages from The Post. Members of Community Education Council 24, a DOE parent advisory group, ignored repeated requests for comment.
Among other horrors, Holden said he saw kids sensitive to loud sounds “walking around holding their ears because of the noise.”
In the basement, a partition separates the gym — with a hole cut in the ceiling to make room for a basketball hoop — and a “miserable kitchen” and lunch tables.
The building has no elevators.
“I saw a kid with Down Syndrome going sideways up the stairs. They have to hold on with two hands on the banister, taking one step at a time,” Holden said.
It would cost $5 million to install an elevator for just one floor, so the idea was dropped.
“Special-needs students need better facilities because of the daily challenges they face,” said Holden, who has identified a lot in residential Glendale where a new, state-of-the-art school can be built.
“To give them a less-than-acceptable school environment is criminal.”
A DOE spokeswoman said the building has no asbestos or excessive lead in the water faucets, but would not say whether the paint has been tested for lead.
Gaudio is also concerned about street safety, saying there are no visible signs indicating 57th Street is a school zone, something a Department of Transportation spokeswoman vowed to address.
“Special-needs kids are extremely unpredictable. My biggest fear is that a child will run out into the street and get hit by a truck,” the mom said.
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