Three years ago, PS 77 at 3177 Webster Ave. opened with the hopes of easing overcrowding within the school district.

Three years later, the school is overcrowded, according to Marvin Shelton, president of the Community Education Council for School District 10.

“I talked to the principal and she said, ‘yeah, we’re capping Kindergarten already,’” Shelton said, recalling a meeting he had at the school recently. “They’re a Pre-K to 5 and they’re only Pre-K to 3, and they’ve already filled up the building. It just shows how backed up the district is in terms of making new capacity.”

And as the de Blasio Administration proposes funding for more than 38,000 seats into schools in his proposed Fiscal Year 2018 $85 billion budget, it appears to simply place a Band-Aid onto a real solution, according to Community Board 7: an actual new school.

“We need, like, three new buildings…now,” Shelton said, arguing the overarching issue of crowded schools is the inability to navigate the school easily or even have fast access to basic amenities, such as a bathroom. Among the more prevailing concerns is whether large classes can impede a child’s ability to learn.

Creating more seats stands as a proposal supported by Community Board 7, whose boundaries mostly overlap with School District 10, one of the more heavily crowded school districts in the city. The congestion is one reason why the Board placed the need for a new school as the number one priority in the Register of Community Board Budget Requests, a report that lists community needs in order of importance. The request was one of 20 appeals the Board made to the city.

“Currently, 11 out of our 14 grade schools are operating over capacity, with several of these schools severely over capacity. Our community is experiencing a large increase in residential development with hundreds of planned housing units across the district,” read the report. “As a result of these new developments, school overcrowding will continue to become a larger issue unless new grade schools are built immediately.”

Community Board 7 chair Adaline Walker-Santiago presented the needs at a Borough Board meeting on Jan. 26. She told the Norwood News the need for a school is great.

“Ideally, we always want more schools and more seats,” Walker-Santiago said. “Now with all the development that’s coming in, we’re going to need more.”

Residential development in Norwood and Bedford Park has crept up gradually over the last few years following the rezoning of Webster Avenue, where at least four buildings, two of which intend to house families, are currently under construction. With the de Blasio Administration prioritizing the building of 80,000 units of housing under the Housing New York plan, finding empty space for the building of a school will remain a struggle over the next few years.

“Which means, if you had a playground, you’re not gonna have a playground,” Shelton said.

New seats appear to be the city’s preferred route, though it does not completely fix the issue. A 2016 capital projects report by the School Construction Authority (SCA), the construction entity tasked to build seats, stated 5,692 seats are needed to fix the overcrowding issue within School District 10. So far, the SCA can only fund the building of 3,016 seats over the next five years, costing a total $285 million, while leaving 2,676, or 47 percent of the total seats not funded at the moment. Most of the needed seats, 3,384, are in Kingsbridge Heights/Norwood/Bedford Park.

“They’re playing catchup, but they’re getting further and further behind,” Shelton said.

While funding comes from the city and added to the capital budget, New York City Council Members can earmark their capital monies toward new seats. Councilman Andrew Cohen, whose 14th Council District overlaps with the beleaguered School District 10, is among those who’ve set aside funds, but he told the Norwood News there’s simply no room for these new seats.

“Even though [SCA has] money for 3,000 seats they don’t identify locations,” Cohen said. Funds for his project could therefore sit in escrow for a while.

Still, seats are better than nothing, according to parents picking up their kids at PS 56, a Norwood school that recently opened a state-of-the-art annex that added some 500 seats to the elementary school. But they would rather see a new school, which could take years to build.

For Pilar, the parent of a student, a school is the better route. After all, there are 30 kids to her son’s first grade class, which she feels is too much (according to contract agreed upon by the United Federation of Teachers, 32 kids to a class is an acceptable number).  “The problem would be where [to build] because there’s no space here in this neighborhood,” she said. “We don’t have empty space.”

A resident who went by Marcia S. would like to see a new school building, but prefers a charter school. “It’s less kids and more fun to learn,” she said.

The New York City Council is expected to hold hearings on the budget in the next few of months.