Queen’s District 26 School Board Unanimously Resolves to Establish Special High School in Jamaica

The New York City’s Queens District 26 School Board (CEC 26) unanimously passed a resolution on March 20, officially calling on the city’s Department of Education to designate the newly constructed high school building in the Jamaica area as a specialized high school. This decision aims to alleviate the long-standing shortage of resources for specialized high school education in Queens District.

According to the resolution, currently, Queens District only has one specialized high school, Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, with a student population of only 511, making it the smallest in the city. In comparison, the total quota for all specialized high schools in New York City is 15,732, with this school only accounting for 3.2%.

Citing data from the New York State Education Department (NYSED), the resolution points out that despite Queens District accounting for 28% of the 8th-grade student population in New York City, the allocated specialized high school seats are less than 4% of the city’s total.

The resolution emphasizes that due to significant resource inadequacies, approximately 4,000 Queens District students have to commute to the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Manhattan to attend specialized high schools, with commute times of up to two hours.

The proposed new school building by District 26 School Board, with the code 28Q497, is located at 165-15 88th Ave in Jamaica and is expected to be completed by September 2026, accommodating around 800 students.

In the resolution, the committee explicitly requests that Dr. Josephine Van-Ess, the District Superintendent of High Schools in South Queens, consider designating the new school site as a specialized high school with an entrance examination system. Additionally, CEC 26 calls on the Department of Education to include increasing the number of seats in Queens District specialized high schools in long-term planning and report progress annually to several education boards and the city-wide high school committee.

Mayor Adams publicly expressed support in 2022 for expanding the number of specialized high schools in the five boroughs to promote geographic equity in educational resources. This proposal by CEC 26 aligns with the mayor’s long-term goal, but whether it will receive support from the Department of Education and relevant agencies remains to be seen.

Currently, New York City has eight schools designated as specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science High School, and Brooklyn Tech High School, all of which use the specialized high school admissions test (SHSAT) as the admission criterion.

If the city government or Department of Education accepts this proposal, it will be the first new specialized high school established in Queens District in 20 years.