New York education officials will remove Pre-K and kindergarten students from a contaminated basement at a Brooklyn elementary school near the Gowanus Canal — after mounting pressure from outraged parents and The Post’s reporting on the issue.
The students, who take classes in the basement of PS 372’s annex, will be relocated to other floors and to the school’s main building while state officials install additional ventilation systems to try to filter out toxic air, according to a Friday letter from District 75 Superintendent Dr. Keisha McCoy.
McCoy wrote that the students will be “temporarily” relocated so state officials can install additional ventilation systems to try to filter the toxic air out of the building.
But parents and experts said the superintendent’s move was too little, too late.
“This is an admission that the kids should not have been in the basement the last two and a half years. This just blows up the entire assertion that there’s no problem,” Walter Hang, the president of Environmental Health Research Group, told The Post.
Parents only found out this summer that mitigation efforts that began in 2024 at the annex, located at 219 First St., were unsuccessful.
All of the school’s roughly 450 students have classes in the building. Along with housing the pre-k and kindergarten classrooms, specialty classes like art and gym take place there as well.
Many students at PS 372 are provided services and specialized plans to meet developmental, learning, physical and emotional disabilities. The school itself uses a unique model that integrates general education and special needs students in each classroom.
School and state officials are maintaining that the levels of dangerous chemicals, including carcinogens benzene and xylene, don’t present an increased health risk to staff and students.
“No level of benzene is safe,” said Michelle Tsai, who started a petition criticizing Gov. Kathy Hochul over the state Health Department’s and Department of Environmental Conservation’s handling of the vapor intrusion.
She described the removal of some of the school’s youngest children from the basement — where the toxic air has been seeping into the school — as “a step in the right direction,” but said parents will fight against children returning to the space until the pollution is remediated.
Julia Finegan, a parent and member of a group called Clean Air for PS 372, said the “last-minute decision” to move the kids “speaks volumes about New York State’s complete failure to protect our children and the teachers and staff” for more than two years.
The petition calling for Hochul to resign over the failed efforts to remove the potentially-dangerous compounds from the school’s air has garnered more than 850 signatures.
“If you cannot protect the children, faculty and staff of PS 372, you do not deserve to be Governor of New York State,” the PTA wrote.
The state-installed filtration systems have been criticized as “band-aids” for the much larger issue of soil and air pollution in the Gowanus area.
Parents have also expressed frustration with the school’s principal, Rosa Amato, after she admitted she was sometimes “too busy” to relay critical health information to families during a damning town hall.
“I was offended by Principal Rosa saying she was too busy to communicate properly and sometimes misses things. We’ve had two years of mitigation failure and it has been RIDICULOUS,” one parent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, previously wrote to The Post.
Hochul’s office and the DOE did not return requests for comment.
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