Elementary schools in Long Island City
The 6 NYC public and charter elementary schools in LIC proper (zip 11101 and 11109) — where they are, how full they are, and which enrollment process actually applies to each one. Private and special-education schools are listed further down and can be switched on in the map.
DOE public Charter Shared building Opening this year Private Square = special education Under construction School zone –71 = seats short, District Planning, Feb 2026 Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors
Seat, enrollment and pre-K figures come from the School Construction Authority’s Enrollment Capacity & Utilization report (the “Blue Book”), as of 2023-01-04 — the most recent edition the city publishes. They cover 5 of the 6 schools here: charter schools in private space are not in the Blue Book at all, so the totals above are not “every seat in LIC.”
DOE public schools
P.S. 111 Jacob Blackwell
Pre-K–837-15 13 STREET, 11101 · District 30 · 30Q111
District Planning put this school at -15 seats as of 2026-02-09 — newer than the utilization above, and pointing the other way.
P.S. 112 Dutch Kills
K–525-05 37 AVENUE, 11101 · District 30 · 30Q112
District Planning put this school at -53 seats as of 2026-02-09 — newer than the utilization above, and pointing the other way.
P.S. 384 Hunters Point Elementary School
K–51-35 57 AVENUE, 11101 · District 30 · 30Q384
District Planning put this school at -49 seats as of 2026-02-09 — newer than the utilization above, and pointing the other way.
P.S./I.S. 78Q
Pre-K–548-09 CENTER BOULEVARD, 11109 · District 30 · 30Q078
District Planning put this school at -71 seats as of 2026-02-09 — newer than the utilization above, and pointing the other way.
Charter schools
Charters are tuition-free and public, but they do not use MySchools and they have no zone — a separate application and lottery, described below.
Growing Up Green Charter School
K–539-27 28 STREET, 11101 · 84Q321
VOICE Charter School (Annex)
K–837-15 13 STREET, 11101 · 84Q304
Is there a seat shortage?
Short answer: the city says yes, and the 73% above understates it. That figure counts 678 spare seats across LIC, but P.S. 384 Hunters Point Elementary School alone holds 410 of them — it was a new school still phasing in grades when these figures were taken, not under-subscribed. Set it aside and the established schools were at 86%.
An average across a neighbourhood is also not what a family runs into. Elementary seats are zoned, so spare capacity at one school does not help someone zoned to another — and 3 of these schools were at or above 90%: VOICE Charter School (Annex) 121%, P.S. 112 Dutch Kills 100%, P.S./I.S. 78Q 94%.
What NYC Public Schools says
“Due to space limitations, we anticipate having to decrease the number of Kindergarten seats at P.S. 384 for the 2026-27 school year, increasing the elementary school need.”
The city expects to cut kindergarten seats at one of these very schools, and describes that as increasing need.
“We are proceeding with opening and incubating a new school at least with Kindergarten beginning in the 2026-27 school year.”
"Incubating" means opening a school in temporary space before its building is ready — a step taken when seats are needed sooner than construction can deliver them.
“There remains significant concern about there being enough seats in the I.S. 78 zone, especially into the future.”
The pressure is concentrated in the Hunters Point / I.S. 78 zone and Court Square rather than spread across LIC.
The other side of it: “As of 5/27/25, only 5 students zoned to P.S./I.S. 78 had not yet received an offer to either P.S./I.S. 78 or P.S. 384 (or a more preferred option) for Fall 2025.” As of May 2025 the shortfall had not yet shown up as unplaced children. This is a forward-looking squeeze driven by new housing, not a present crisis of placement.
Source: NYC Public Schools, Office of District Planning — CEC 30 Long Island City Planning Presentation, 9 June 2025. That presentation also contains a per-school seat-need table, but it is a slide image rather than text and its figures could not be read, so none are quoted here.
The numbers on this page are older than the ones the city plans with. NYC Public Schools plans against the 2023-24 Blue Book and the 2024-25 audited register. Neither is published as open data, so the figures above are older than the ones the city itself uses. The 2023-01-04 edition used here also falls in the pandemic enrollment dip, so it is likely to read low.
Opening soon
P.S. 439Q Academy of Cultural Excellence
Opens 2026-2711-11 40 Avenue, 11101 · Dutch Kills · 3-K, Pre-K, K · 30Q439
A brand-new school opening for the 2026-27 school year. It starts at a temporary site and moves to 23-10 43 Avenue for 2028-29, the Court Square building listed below. It has no capacity figure yet: it is not in the Blue Book, and the seats it will eventually occupy are already counted in that building.
NYC Public Schools — Academy of Cultural Excellence · Academy of Cultural Excellence
Two further school buildings are under construction in LIC, adding 1,094 seats between them. They are not counted in any figure above — a forecast seat count is not a measured one, and neither building has enrollment, a utilization figure, or an admissions process yet.
P.S. 341Q (Hunters Point South)
Under construction1-55 54 Avenue, 11101 · Hunters Point · K–5 · site location approximate
- Fri, September 3, 2027 Construction scheduled to finish — targeting the 2027-28 school year
547 planned seats
Capacity: QNS — SCA groundbreaking (press coverage — this school has no seat count in an open dataset yet) · Schedule: SCA Capital Project Schedules, building Q341
P.S. 508Q (Court Square)
Under construction23-10 43 Avenue, 11101 · Court Square · Pre-K–5
P.S. 439Q Academy of Cultural Excellence moves in here.
- Sun, September 3, 2028 Construction scheduled to finish — targeting the 2028-29 school year
547 planned seats
Capacity: SCA Capacity Projects by School · Schedule: SCA Capital Project Schedules, building Q508
Capital project dates slip. These are the currently scheduled construction end dates, not announced first days — treat the school year as a target. Neither school has zoning, a principal, or an application yet; those are set closer to opening.
Will the new schools fix it?
On the published numbers, comfortably — and then the city's own behaviour argues otherwise. Both halves are below.
District 30's K–5 enrollment is projected to fall, from 15,659 in 2024-25 to a trough of 13,133 in 2030-31, recovering to 13,718 by 2034-35. That matters more than it first appears: The SCA states its demographic projections take into account birth, enrollment and migration trends, and that the enrollment projection is then combined with projected housing growth to derive total projected enrollment. The decline is already net of new construction.
Why that is not the whole answer
The deficit is local; the projection is district-wide
District 30 runs from Hunters Point to Jackson Heights. A district-wide decline can sit alongside an acute LIC shortage, and the SCA’s own seat-need table places all of District 30’s identified need in the Long Island City / Ravenswood sub-district. A spare seat in Astoria does not serve a Hunters Point family.
Not all of those seats are new capacity for new children
P.S. 384 is proposed to become a K–8 and split-site into Parcel C, so part of that building absorbs existing P.S. 384 students and new middle-school grades rather than adding elementary places. District Planning has separately said it expects to reduce kindergarten seats at P.S. 384 for 2026-27 for want of space. How much of the new capacity is genuinely additional is not published.
The city does not behave as though two buildings are enough
This is the strongest counter-argument and it is not a number. If the two buildings closed the gap, the OneLIC plan would not have committed at least 1,300 further seats, and the School Construction Authority would not have spent 2026 acquiring three more sites. The people who own the projection model are still buying land.
The relief and the housing do not arrive together
The two buildings open in September 2027 and September 2028. OneLIC’s homes arrive over a decade and more, and its three replacement sites are still pending City Council approval before design and construction even begin. A period where the shortage eases and then housing catches up is entirely consistent with all of this.
The one nearby surplus, P.S. 76 William Hallet at +215 seats, is in Astoria and outside both scope ZIPs — it is counted in none of the figures above. What is not known: The projection was published in November 2025, the same month the OneLIC rezoning passed, and nothing published says whether it accounts for it. The seat balances are a February 2026 snapshot; nothing newer is public.
Enrollment projection: SCA — Demographic Enrollment Projection (Section 1, FY2025-2029 Capital Plan). Seat balances: . Building seat splits: CEC 30 minutes, 9 February 2026.
District planning news
Community Education Council 30 minutes its monthly meetings, and the Office of District Planning presents to it. Those minutes are the most current public account of LIC school capacity anywhere — more current than any dataset the city publishes. Each item below is dated and links to the minutes it came from.
A rezoning is being considered, but nothing is decided
District Planning told the council that no rezoning decisions have been finalised, that any proposal would involve extensive community engagement first, and that the earliest a rezoning could take effect is the 2027–28 school year. Current students would not be displaced, and sibling priority would be retained.
Parents are raising kindergarten overcrowding directly
A Long Island City parent addressed kindergarten overcrowding and the shortage of neighbourhood seats, describing difficulties in the admissions process and asking for more transparency on waitlists and sibling priority. Overcrowding was raised again at the May and April meetings.
Most LIC elementary schools are in seat deficit
The Office of District Planning presented a capacity analysis for Long Island City. Most K–5 schools have seat deficits: P.S./I.S. 78 at −71 seats, P.S. 112 at −53, Hunters Point Elementary at −49 and P.S. 111 at −15. P.S. 76, in Astoria, has a surplus of 215.
The two new buildings are 451 general-education seats each, not 547
Parcel C (Q341) opens September 2027 with 451 general-education seats and 96 District 75 seats; Court Square (Q508) opens September 2028 with the same capacity. The 547 figure in the capital-plan datasets is the two added together.
P.S. 384 is proposed to become a K–8
The plan proposes expanding P.S. 384 to a K–8 school and moving its pre-K–3 grades to Parcel C when that building opens. P.S. 439Q would launch in an unused pre-K centre for 2026–27 and relocate to Court Square for 2028–29. The Panel for Educational Policy was scheduled to vote on 25 February 2026; CEC minutes in May 2026 still described the Court Square move as pending approval.
The community chose where this school would go, and was followed
NYCPS and CEC 30 ran a 42-day survey (11 August – 22 September 2025) that drew 789 completed responses, 99% from District 30 residents and 96% from parents of children aged 0–10. Pre-K Center #1 at 11-11 40th Avenue was the preferred temporary site at 57%, and 58% rated it easy or neutral to travel to, against 35% and 30% for the two alternatives. For the long-term home, 54% chose Court Square over Parcel C, the most cited reason being the lack of any school in the Court Square area. Both choices are what is now happening.
ODP — LIC New School Building Planning: Survey Results, 6 October 2025
Parents asked for seats sooner, ahead of the buildings
The top write-in response to the survey was a request for more seats in the area as soon as possible, even ahead of the new buildings opening. On the middle-school question, the top response was a desire for a middle school close to home with sufficient capacity.
P.S. 384 would be split across two buildings, not just expanded
The plan under exploration is to expand P.S. 384 from K–5 to K–8 and split-site it across its current building and Parcel C from 2027–28, with the feasibility of adding 6th grade as early as 2026–27 under discussion. The stated aim is robust enrolment across P.S. 384, P.S./I.S. 78 and Parcel C, which are three school buildings very close together.
Later updated: By February 2026 this had firmed up: the proposal put to the Panel for Educational Policy was to move P.S. 384’s pre-K–3 grades to Parcel C specifically. Treat the February account as the current one.
How to see it coming, and when to object
Re-siting or reconfiguring a school is governed by Chancellor’s Regulation A-190. ODP must publish an Educational Impact Statement at least six months before implementation and at least 45 days before the Panel for Educational Policy votes; convene a Joint Public Hearing with the CEC 30 to 45 days after that statement; and publish a Public Comment Analysis the evening before the vote. A rezoning is a different process under a different rule — Chancellor’s Regulation A-185, which District Planning walked the council through in May 2026. Either way a family gets a documented public hearing before the change takes effect.
Scraped from CEC 30 — meeting documents.
Proposed: the OneLIC plan
The City Council approved the OneLIC Neighborhood Plan on 2025-11-12 (New York City Council, unanimously). A rezoning of more than 50 blocks of Long Island City, projected to create roughly 14,700 new homes, about 4,300 of them permanently affordable. At least 1,300 new school seats were secured as part of the plan, so that capacity keeps pace with the housing. Council Member Julie Won described the seat commitments as “iron-clad”, part of $1.97 billion in commitments secured from the city in late negotiations.
“Families living in Long Island City have watched their children sit on waitlists for neighborhood schools year after year while new housing kept going up around them.”
Council Member Julie Won, July 2026
A OneLIC Oversight Task Force was established to track the city’s commitments. Its first meeting, in June 2026, produced what Won called the first concrete progress report since the rezoning passed — the site acquisitions below.
Three sites have since been reported, totalling 1,900 seats. These are less certain than anything above. All three site selections are expected to go before the City Council later in 2026. Until they do, none of this is settled.
5-46 46th Avenue
Proposed600 seats · Elementary, K–8 or middle — not yet decided · Announced as the “Vernon Boulevard” school.
Agreement reached with the site owner, Plaxall; the existing building has to be demolished first.
43-58 11th Street
Proposed650 seats · Grade levels not yet reported
Initial agreement with the private owner.
22-09 Queens Plaza North
Proposed650 seats · Grade levels not yet reported
SCA still in negotiations.
Also being acquired: 47-51 33rd Street. A new facility for the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, a grades 7–12 school. Outside this page’s elementary scope, and no seat count was announced, so it is named rather than counted. SCA in the final stages of acquisition.
Where this comes from. None of these three sites appears in the SCA capital-plan datasets yet, which still list only the Court Square elementary school and a middle school at 44-59 45th Avenue. Everything here comes from Council statements and news coverage. Sources: NYC Council — OneLIC approval, 12 November 2025 · QNS — SCA acquires sites for three LIC schools, July 2026 · QNS — Vernon Boulevard school announcement
Also in the capital plan: I.S. at 44-59 45th Avenue, 599 seats, construction starting January 2029 and completing May 2032. A middle school, so outside this page’s elementary scope. It is in the SCA capital plan, unlike the OneLIC sites above. SCA Capacity Projects by School. District Planning's own decks disagree on its building code — Q638 (ODP, June 2025) vs Q368 (ODP, October 2025) — so neither is used here as its identifier.
Possibly the same school as one listed above. This may be the same project as the OneLIC site at 5-46 46th Avenue: both are referred to as the Vernon Boulevard school and their seat counts are 599 and 600. The 44-59 45th Avenue project remains in the SCA capacity dataset with a May 2032 completion, while the SCA agreed separately in 2026 to acquire 5-46 46th Avenue. No public document resolves whether the site moved or these are two schools, so they are not added together anywhere on this page. As of the April 2026 CEC 30 meeting the middle school was still described as “long-promised” and outstanding.
How to enroll
DOE public school
Apply through MySchools. Every five-year-old NYC resident is guaranteed a kindergarten seat, and most addresses have a zoned school that gives priority to children living in its zone.
Priority order
- Students who live in the zone and have a sibling at the school
- Other students who live in the zone
If space allows, students living outside the zone may also be admitted:
- Students with a sibling at the school who live in the district
- Students with a sibling at the school who live outside the district
- Students who live in the district and are currently enrolled at the school for pre-K
- Students who live outside the district and are currently enrolled at the school for pre-K
- Other students who live in the district
- Other students who live outside the district
Source: NYC DOE — Kindergarten
Charter school
Apply directly to the school, not through MySchools. Charters must admit students of all kinds, and if applications exceed seats they run a random lottery. Many use the NYC Charter School Center’s Common Application.
Priority order
- Returning students
- Siblings of enrolled students
- Students living in the same community school district
Source: NYC DOE — Charter enrollment
Key dates
Every NYC resident who turns five in a calendar year is guaranteed a kindergarten seat that September. For fall 2027, that means children born in 2022.
- Wed, December 9, 2026 Kindergarten application opens
- Fri, January 22, 2027 Kindergarten application closes
- Tue, March 30, 2027 Kindergarten offers released
- No earlier than Thu, April 1, 2027 Earliest a charter application can close
Charter deadlines are set by each school and cannot fall before April 1 — contact the school for its actual date. DOE dates are subject to change; verified against schools.nyc.gov on 2026-08-16.
After school care
COMPASS NYC — free
Free. Kindergarten through 5th grade (the COMPASS Elementary model). 3 hours a day, 5 days a week during the school year, including 13 school holidays, with summer programming as well.
Run in schools, community centers, religious institutions, public housing and recreation facilities — not only in school buildings.
Source: NYC DYCD — COMPASS
Which of these six schools has after-school, and at what cost, is not something this page can tell you. DYCD Program Sites confirms COMPASS Elementary programs (grades K–5) are funded in ZIP 11101. It does not say which building each one runs in — the dataset carries provider, program type and ZIP, but no site address or school name. No open dataset links an after-school programme to a school building, so any per-school list here would be guesswork.
How to find out:
- NYC Public Schools — After-School — Ask the school directly — the DOE's own guidance is to talk to your principal about after-school at that school.
- Discover DYCD — Search Discover DYCD for afterschool programs near an address.
- Call DYCD Community Connect on 800-246-4646, or email afterschool@schools.nyc.gov.
Many schools also have fee-based after-school run by a PTA, a YMCA or a private provider, and NYCEEC pre-K sites often charge for early drop-off or late pickup. Those prices are set per program and are not published in any central dataset — the school or provider is the only reliable source.
Questions parents ask
What is pre-K?
A year of school before kindergarten. In New York City children begin pre-K in the calendar year they turn four, and the city guarantees a pre-K seat for every four-year-old. It is play-based and full-day. Three-year-olds have a separate programme, 3-K, on its own timeline.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Pre-K · verified 2026-08-16
Is pre-K free?
Yes. A School Day seat is free, runs 6 hours 20 minutes a day from roughly September to June, is open to every NYC child, and is offered in all three pre-K settings. Two longer seat types also exist: Extended Day and Year seats are free or low cost and run 8–10 hours a day year-round with eligibility based on family income and needs, and City Transitional seats are free with 8–10 hours year-round. Both of those are offered by NYC Early Education Centers, and an Extended Day and Year offer has to be confirmed with a Child Care application on MyCity.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Pre-K seat types · verified 2026-08-16
My child’s daycare has pre-K. Is that the same thing?
It may well be exactly the same thing. One of the three official pre-K settings is the NYC Early Education Center, and NYCEECs can be private schools, daycares or other community organisations that partner with NYC Public Schools. They teach the same curriculum and offer the same free School Day seat, applied for through the same MySchools application. The distinction to check with your daycare is whether its pre-K is a DOE-funded seat — in which case it appears in MySchools and is free — or a private tuition programme, which is not. Worth asking separately: NYCEECs commonly charge a fee for early drop-off or late pickup even when the pre-K seat itself is free.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Pre-K settings · verified 2026-08-16
Which schools here have pre-K?
P.S. 111 Jacob Blackwell, P.S. 112 Dutch Kills, P.S. 384 Hunters Point Elementary School, P.S./I.S. 78Q have pre-K. Growing Up Green Charter School, VOICE Charter School (Annex) do not. Two sources disagree for P.S. 112 Dutch Kills, P.S. 384 Hunters Point Elementary School: the 2019-20 grade table does not list a pre-K grade, but the newer capacity report (as of 2023-01-04) counts 90 pre-K seats at P.S. 112 Dutch Kills and 72 pre-K seats at P.S. 384 Hunters Point Elementary School. The seat count is the newer and more specific figure, so it is taken as the answer here. Pre-K is also offered at NYC Early Education Centers and standalone Pre-K Centers, which are not elementary schools and so are not listed here. Both sources are old enough that a school can have added or dropped pre-K since, so confirm in MySchools.
Source: DOE School Locations (grade ranges) and SCA Enrollment Capacity & Utilization (pre-K seats)
Does a pre-K place at a school guarantee a kindergarten place there?
No — and whether it helps at all depends on where you live. A child in pre-K at a DOE public elementary school still has to apply to kindergarten, and gets an admissions priority at that school for having done so. But that priority is the fifth of eight tiers, and tiers three onward are only reached "if space allows" for students living outside the zone. So if the school is already your zoned school you are in tier two regardless, above every pre-K attendee, and the pre-K priority adds nothing. If it is not your zoned school, pre-K there moves you from tier seven to tier five — real, but still behind out-of-zone siblings, and worth nothing at a school that never admits beyond tier two.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Kindergarten priorities · verified 2026-08-16
Should I do pre-K at a school or at my daycare?
For admissions, the one real difference is that the kindergarten pre-K priority is written for pre-K "at a DOE public elementary school". A NYCEEC seat at a daycare is the same free DOE-funded seat with the same curriculum and the same application, but it does not carry that priority. Whether that matters depends on the school: if it is your zoned school the priority is redundant, because living in the zone already outranks it. If it is a school you want but are not zoned for, the priority is worth having — though a non-zoned pre-K seat is harder to get in the first place, since you would have district priority rather than zoned priority. The counterweight is hours: only NYCEECs offer Extended Day and Year seats, 8–10 hours year-round, against a school's 6 hours 20 minutes from September to June. In practice the trade is kindergarten priority against childcare hours.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Kindergarten priorities and NYC Public Schools — Pre-K settings and seat types · verified 2026-08-16
Does 3-K at a daycare hurt my chances of pre-K at a school?
No. The priorities that get a child into a school's pre-K are Zoned Priority and District Priority, and both are set by your home address, not by where the child did 3-K. Taking a 3-K seat at a daycare and then applying to pre-K at your zoned school costs you nothing on that application. What you give up is Current Student Priority, which would have kept the child at that same daycare for pre-K — not useful if you are leaving anyway. Note that 3-K, pre-K and kindergarten are three separate applications on three separate timelines; none of them rolls over, and a pre-K student still has to apply to kindergarten.
Source: NYC Public Schools — Pre-K admissions priorities · verified 2026-08-16
Private schools
This page is primarily about DOE options — the public and charter schools above, which is what most families in the neighbourhood are choosing between. For completeness, 4 non-public schools are also registered in these ZIPs, and they are not one kind of thing. No capacity, enrolment or admissions data is published for any of them, so none carries the utilization figures shown above — a number here would invite a comparison the data cannot support.
Independent
5-36 50 AVENUE, 11101
An independent private elementary school, formerly the Queens Paideia School. Tuition is not published; admission is by enquiry and visit.
Special education
These serve students with disabilities and are generally reached through an IEP rather than an ordinary application, so they are not alternatives to the schools above in the way an independent school is.
The Riverview School (277Q @ 78)
District 75 · public46-08 5 Street, 11101 — the P.S./I.S. 78Q annex · based at 50-15 44th Street, Woodside 11377
A District 75 citywide special-education school. It is based in Woodside and runs classroom programmes inside ten host buildings; this is its site in the P.S./I.S. 78Q annex. Placement is through an IEP, not an application.
NYC Public Schools — The Riverview School · The Riverview School — elementary sites
10-24 49 AVENUE, 11101 · Birch Family Services, Inc.
A non-profit serving children and adults with autism and developmental disabilities. NYSED records this as a satellite site for students with disabilities.
11-20 46 ROAD, 11101 · Gersh Academy-Aym
Part of the Gersh Autism Academy network, serving students on the autism spectrum. NYSED records the Long Island City site as a non-public elementary school.
Kids-Centric — Western Queens
10-26 41 AVENUE, 11101 · Kids-Centric, Inc.
NYSED records this as a satellite site for students with disabilities. The operator publishes no working website, so nothing further is claimed here.
Roster and classification from the NYC Facilities Database, which carries NYSED's registration type. Grades and descriptions verified against each school's own site on 2026-08-19.
What this page does not cover
Capacity for private schools. The 4 non-public schools are
listed above, but without capacity or utilization: no open dataset publishes those figures
for them, so there is nothing to compare against the DOE rows.
Schools just outside the zip. P.S. 150 Queens and P.S. 76 William Hallet serve
elementary grades a few blocks away, in 11104 and 11106. They are excluded
by the LIC-proper scope, not by an editorial judgment that they do not matter.
Your zone. A zoned school is assigned by home address, and zone lines do not follow
zip codes. Check yours at
DOE Find a School or by calling 311.
Sources
Roster and locations: NYC Facilities Database (DCP, built from DOE LCGMS). Grade ranges: DOE School Locations, school year 2019-20 — the most recent grade breakdown DOE publishes as a table. Capacity: Enrollment Capacity & Utilization, as of 2023-01-04. Enrollment process: NYC DOE Enrollment.