WOODSIDE — New school P.S. 361 opened its door for the first time on Wednesday — welcoming its own students and hundreds of students from another overcrowded school nearby.
P.S. 361, The Woodside Community School, opened at the corner of 57th Street and 39th Avenue for the first day of public school. It will serve pre-k and kindergarten students this year, and expand with another grade each year after up until fifth grade, when it's expected to serve around 500 kids total, according to the school's website.
While there's room, the new building is also serving more than 200 students from nearby P.S. 11, another elementary school on Skillman Avenue and 55th Street where the city is adding an annex to replace its longtime portable trailer classrooms, according to the Department of Education.
Fifth and sixth graders from P.S. 11 will be housed at P.S. 361 this year while the addition at their school is being built. The move has gotten mixed reactions from parents, with some who said the switch was an inconvenience, while others are happy their kids will get to use the brand-new building.
"She's very excited for the new school," Maria Piqueras said of her 10-year-old daughter Melissa, a P.S. 11 student who was starting sixth grade at the new P.S. 361 building on Wednesday. "This is a new school, new experience, new everything."
But other families with more than one child enrolled in P.S. 11 are now juggling the logistics of dropping kids off at two different buildings each morning.
"This year is going to be hard," said Rehena Parvin, who had a relative bring her fifth grader to the P.S. 361 building Wednesday while she dropped off her second grader at the regular P.S. 11 building on Skillman Avenue.
While the two sites are less than half a mile away from one another, Parvin and other parents worried that the extra commute will become more of a hassle once the cold winter weather kicks in.
Still, Parvin said she thought the new building is "beautiful" and that it was worth it to have her daughter in a new spacious classroom. Last year, she shared a class at P.S. 11 with roughly 20 to 35 kids, Parvin said.
Parents have long complained of overcrowding at P.S. 11; officials said the school was operating at 120 percent capacity when plans for its expansion were announced in 2013.
"P.S. 11 was in dire straights-need of this construction," said mom Karla Jacome, who said she's trying to figure out the most efficient way to get her second grader to P.S. 11 each morning while also bringing her sixth grade daughter to class at the new school building.
She said she didn't find out that her older daughter was being sent to the P.S. 361 site until June, and that she may have made other plans for this school year had she known sooner.
Jacome called P.S. 11 a "great little school" and said the inconvenience of having kids in two different buildings was "miniscule" compared to what some parents dealt with last year, when the DOE bused P.S. 11's kindergarten students to another school in Astoria three miles away.
"We'll make do," Jacome said.
P.S. 11 is expected to once again be able to fit all of its students in its original building when construction of the addition there wraps up in 2017, creating an extra 856 seats at the school.
