Metro

Principal gets wheelchair lift, freed from school basement

How’s that for a lift?

Just three weeks after The Post revealed that a disabled Queens principal had been relegated to her school’s basement — because the building didn’t have a wheelchair lift — a temporary device is now in place to hoist her to her first-floor office.

“She’s out of her cave!” one administrator at PS 94 in Littleneck said of Joann Barbeosch, who had been working out of a cramped, unventilated space since becoming wheelchair-dependent due to back problems at the end of the last school year.

“She’s over the moon, and this is clearly because The Post did a story,” added parent Matthew Saliba.

Barbeosch is now using a portable, $12,000 “Stair Trac” to carry her up and down the school’s interior front stairs until a more permanent lift can be installed in the coming months.

“She was so thrilled when she got to the top,” Doug Boydston, president of the Carlstadt, NJ-based Handi-Lift company, recalled of installing the lift last week.

In the coming weeks, Boydston will also install the permanent lift at the behest of the city Department of Education’s School Construction Authority, he said.

“Everyone was hugging and kissing her,” he remembered of the principal’s triumphant return to her office on the school’s main floor, where she wass beloved for welcoming parents with even the smallest issues and handing out lollipops on kids’ birthdays.

“They were all shouting, ‘You’re back! You’re back!’”

The DOE, which had previously told Barbeosch that she wouldn’t get a wheelchair lift until sometime next year, did not immediately comment when asked why the installation date had been moved up.