A kindergarten crisis grows in Brooklyn Heights.
The Department of Education has notified 50 families in the upscale neighborhood that there’s no room for their tykes at highly rated PS 8 come September.
Officials said those families could send their kids to PS 307 in Vinegar Hill — a 20-minute walk past two highways — if they ultimately didn’t make it off the wait list.
Parents were furious.
“It’s incredibly unfair,” fumed Brooklyn Heights parent Sarah Oster Shasha. “There are people who live across the street from PS 307 that get to come to my school and my kids don’t get to go there.
“I think the main frustration as a parent and a taxpayer is that this is a school that my house is designated for; it implies in the rest of the United States that that’s the school you’re going to get into,” she added.
Another parent, Felix Shipkevich, said he moved his family to Brooklyn Heights largely for PS 8 and won’t send his son to PS 307.
“We bought a home here and one of the main reasons was because it was known that kindergarten admissions were pretty much guaranteed,” he said.
But northwest Brooklyn’s population has exploded over the past decade, putting space pressure on all the public schools in the area.
PS 8 officials even removed pre-K instruction in 2014 to make room for students in higher grades.
But the officials told parents a kindergarten class was also being eliminated starting in September, reducing the number of available K seats from 150 to 125.
The move infuriated local politicians — state Sen. Daniel Squadron, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon and City Councilman Steve Levin — who fired off a statement calling the action “very troubling.”
DOE spokesman Harry Hartfield did not address how the city would handle tensions at PS 8 but said every family who applied to kindergarten received an offer at some school.
Citywide, 1,239 kids are on kindergarten wait lists at 51 schools.
PS 8 parent Huseyin Yuce, 45, said he’s thankful his twins, Sarah and Jon, made the cut for kindergarten last year so he doesn’t have to send them two neighborhoods away to PS 307.
“I would be concerned about safety,” he said. “Even though [PS 307’s] neighborhood is improving, it’s still shady. I don’t hear good things about that school.”