Rising above East 211th Street on the grounds of PS 94 in Norwood, the iron skeleton of a new school building takes shape. As it progresses, the three-story edifice holds the promise of accommodating 490 new school seats.

But it remains unclear which students will occupy those seats and how much the new building will help alleviate overcrowding in District 10.

Set to open in September 2010, the structure at PS 94 will include 22 classrooms and three special education classrooms.

According to Department of Education spokesperson Will Havemann, the construction will be an Early Childhood Education Center and remain under the jurisdiction of the school’s current principal, Diane Daprocida, who declined to speculate on her future role with the new building. “We’ll have to wait,” she said.

That wait comes as no surprise to Eleanor Edelstein, the education liaison for local Councilman Oliver Koppell, who claimed the DOE has yet to decide how they will appropriate the new space.

“[DOE officials] don’t know yet,” she said. “Originally it was going to be an Early Childhood Education Center, but now there’s been some discussion otherwise. It’s all still up in the air right now.”

Uncertain future aside, the new building replaces two transitional structures that used to occupy a chunk of PS 94’s playground. Those structures held 13 temporary classroom units (TCUs) and accommodated 325 of the more than 1,000 students that attend the K-5 school.

Daprocida said no students were displaced during the construction. Through increased class size and squeezing in more classrooms at the school’s main building, PS 94 retained all those students who attended class in the TCUs last year. “We were able to keep our kids,” Daprocida said.

Incoming kindergartners and first graders zoned for the Norwood school, however, are now being bused to PS 23 in Tremont, and, unlike in past years, the school was unable to accommodate overflow from chronically overcrowded PS 56.

When completed, the additional seats in the new structure “should help to relieve overcrowding in PS 8 (in Bedford Park) and PS 56, as well as at PS 94 itself,” Havemann said in an e-mail.

In the same vein, Daprocida sees the new building as a tool to help alleviate the burden of overcrowding in District 10, the third most crowded district in the entire city.

“With the new building we should be able to accommodate more students and give relief to other schools in the area,” she said. “The DOE really has been receptive to our needs in the community. I am 100 percent satisfied with the progress made so far.”

The DOE counts the new structure as 490 new seats. But when including the loss of TCUs, the total number of additional seats created by construction at PS 94 amounts to a net gain of only 165 additional seats.

In an email, Havemann said the DOE doesn’t differentiate between replacement seats and additional seats.

For Marvin Shelton, president of Community Education Council 10, the project at the Norwood elementary school “looks pretty much like a wash [in terms of additional seats].”

The Department of Education’s (DOE) current Five-Year Capital Plan (FY 2005-09) and the newly proposed plan for the years 2010 to 2014, call for the creation of around 2,900 seats at five locations throughout the district. Three of those projects are either finished or in the process of being completed. The DOE locations for the other two projects (for a total of 1,154 new seats), have yet to be determined.