Follow Up: Kindergarten Cuts Taking A Toll in Bronx

Back in April, we reported on the Bloomberg administration's decision to cut kindergarten classrooms from city-funded daycare centers, starting this school year. Parents, advocates and staff at centers in teh Bronx worried the cuts would mean more 5-year-olds in overcrowded public school kindergartens, parents left without afterschool care, and layoffs or closings at centers struggling to make up the budget difference.

Now, two months into the new school year, there’s been a slew of reporting on the impact of the cuts, and it looks like some of those fears have come to pass.

Last week, Leslie Minora at the Columbia Journalism School visited some of the same day care centers in the Bronx that we wrote about in April. She reports that PS 21 on E. 225th Street and White Plains Road, has increased kindergarten class sizes to accommodate the larger enrollment and may have to bus some kindergartens to other schools. Meanwhile, at the Williamsbridge NAACP day care center in the same neighborhood, where many of those kindergarteners would have gone in years past, staff are coping with the fallout from empty seats.

The Daily News reports that the cuts have meant some Bronx parents have had to cut back work hours to pick up kids from school. Public schools typically close much earlier than the daycare centers, and afterschool programs for kindergarteners are scarce.

And some kids have simply been turned away from kindergarten, the Daily News reported. At the end of September, the News checked in with Charlene Harry, who told us in April that she was praying the cuts to her daughters’ daycare center in Williamsbridge wouldn’t materialize. Her kids were initially turned down from three Bronx schools, and then accepted at separate schools, miles apart, neither with afterschool space.

“The person who did this makes no sense,” Harry told the Daily News. “They don’t know regular people’s lives.”

New from the Norwood News

The latest edition of the Norwood News is out on streets and online now. Here's a quick preview of our stories and features.

Top Story: The Related Companies, the designated developer for the Kingsbridge Armory revamp project, say they will not guarantee living wage jobs ($10 an hour, plus benefits) at retail stores that will eventually occupy the Shops at the Armory. Living wage jobs were something the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance has been pushing to be included in a Community Benefits Agreement since the project became a reality more than two years ago.

Proposed kindergarten cuts by the city's Administration for Children's Services will lead to some serious hardship at several Bronx daycare centers.

With the economy struggling, parents at PS 94 turned to job training help at the school.

Local kids pot plants for Earth Day.

A new Bronx playground is already closed for repairs.

A new school is on its way in District 10, but will it alleviate all the overcrowding problems in schools nearby?

Plus: we asked readers about gun violence in the Bronx . . . find out what's happening in the local arts scene in our Out & About section . . . and see our extended Neighborhood Notes listing of programs, services and events.