Overcrowding At P.S. 176 Prompts DOE To Lease New Building, Rezone

Severe overcrowding at Bensonhurst schools has prompted the Department of Education (DOE) to lease a new building on 15th Avenue for the coming school year.

A new school, called P.S. 768, will be located at 7301 15th Avenue and will create 256 new seats for the district.  The building will be leased from the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and is the former site of Our Lady of Guadalupe School (which will instead operate out of a building on 73rd Street).

The new space will house the younger grades of P.S. 112, located down the block at 7115 15th Ave, according Laurie Windsor, president of the District 20 Community Education Council (CEC).

The DOE also plans to rezone the district for September 2015, moving students from the notoriously overcrowded P.S. 176, located at 1225 Bay Ridge Ave – which is currently at 175 percent capacity – to the newly vacant classrooms at P.S. 112.

Windsor says the new seats will create some relief for P.S. 176, but not nearly as much as the elementary school needs.

“Every single class room is filled to the maximum and it creates havoc in terms of lunch hour,” says Windsor. “They also lose a lot of the cluster space, like art rooms, science rooms, computer rooms, and other things that children should have for their education.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of seats that would be added to the district with the creation of P.S. 768.