Oyster Bay school uses bond funds to add classrooms for student services, expand pre-K program

Throughout last year, teachers at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School made due with the space they had — holding services like occupational therapy on the auditorium stage and reading and speech classes in a modified custodial closet.

But a two-story roughly $12 million expansion of the building completed last summer added eight new classrooms and four smaller rooms to the school, which serves 313 students. Those classrooms now hold two full-day pre-K classes, two first grade classes and four second-grade classes. The smaller rooms house support services and an office, school officials said. 

It was paid for using a $30 million school district bond that was passed by voters in 2021, said Francesco Ianni, superintendent of the Oyster Bay-East Norwich School District.

The expansion enabled the school to expand its pre-K program, Ianni said. 

"This year, for the first time, we have full-day pre-K classes," Ianni said. "For several years we’ve had half-day pre-K, and talking to community members, talking to parents who have been in the district, they felt there was a need."

That bond included upgrades to the district’s two other schools — Oyster Bay High School and James H. Vernon School, officials said.

New York State Education Department data shows 155,512 children attended pre-K across the state for the 2022-2023 school year, including 14,384 on Long Island. A total of 2,257 of those three and four-year olds attended half-day pre-K on Long Island.

At Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School, nearly one-third of the students were Hispanic or Latino in 2022, 16% had disabilities and 13% were English Language Learners.

The new rooms were outfitted with resources like building blocks, books and other staples in pre-K classrooms through the Statewide Universal Full-Day Prekindergarten (SUFDPK) Expansion Grant, which provided the school with $36,000, according to Devra Small, principal of the Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School.

Small said some reading and speech classes were previously held in repurposed custodial closets and other rooms that added a layer of difficulty for teachers.

"Our teachers made it work because that’s what teachers do ... they taught the kids as well as they could in those spaces," Small said. "But they weren’t designed to be instructional spaces, so it’s very exciting that the bond was passed and now we have these beautiful new spaces."

Small said the school's pre-K program selects students through a lottery system. 

Christopher Doss, a policy researcher at Rand, said the national expansion of pre-K has caused schools to confront the physical limitations of their buildings. The previous experience at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary "is not uncommon," he said.

"Pre-K classrooms need to be set up in certain ways to be accessible for kids who are three and four-years old," Doss said. "As schools generally break into pre-K or adopt pre-K into their districts, they’re going to often have to retrofit some of their classrooms and buildings to be appropriate."

He said full-time pre-K supports parents who are facing high costs for child care. It also has positive social and academic benefits for students, Doss said.

"The theory is that kid’s brains are developing so fast and so quickly at that age that these learning experiences have an indelible impact," he said.

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ