US News

WAIT OF THE WORLD FOR KINDERGARTEN PARENTS

NO vacancy.

Hundreds of Manhattan parents whose kids have been shut out of popular neighborhood schools are up in arms because their kids are on wait lists — for public-school kindergarten.

Sacha Penn, who went to PS 3 in Greenwich Village and whose father painted murals inside the school in the 1970s, said she never even conceived that her 4-year-old daughter, Murphy, wouldn’t get to follow in her footsteps.

“It was devastating to get wait-list letters,” said Penn, who for years has pointed PS 3 out to Murphy as her future school.

“I just hoped that we would of course send our kid to a neighborhood school, because that’s why we’re staying here. That’s what makes this neighborhood so special,” she added.

Parents at several of the affected Manhattan neighborhoods — including the Upper East and Upper West sides — said they had been warning the Department of Education for years that the baby boom and lack of school construction would lead to a kindergarten crunch.

More than 270 students at seven schools in Manhattan’s District 2 and 3 have been relegated to wait lists — the first year that the Department of Education required all schools to keep track of enrollment this way.

“We’ve seen this coming for years,” said Ann Kjellberg, whose daughter is in second grade at PS 41 in Greenwich Village. “I think it was perfectly apparent to anybody living in these neighborhoods that development was on the rise and the DOE needed to make accommodations.”

Department of Education officials — who released the wait list figures for Manhattan yesterday in advance of a massive rally planned by parents for today — said they were confident that many students would get spots once “gifted and talented” placements were finalized next month.

A DOE spokesman said officials are also in discussions with PS 3 and PS 41 in Greenwich Village to see if pre-kindergarten classes can be moved nearby in order to open up more kindergarten spots.

“We’re looking at other things we can do to help the schools take more of the zoned students,” he said.

yoav.gonen@nypost.com