PS 20 JOHN BOWNE

PS 20 JOHN BOWNE, a well-populated elementary-level community in FLUSHING, New York, one of the schools within NEW YORK CITY GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICT #25, educates 995 students, covering grades pre-K through 5. That puts it 125% bigger than the typical public school in New York, which averages around 443 students.

PS 20 JOHN BOWNE is one of 46 schools operated by NEW YORK CITY GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICT #25, a district that instructs 33,704 students overall.

On demographics, PS 20 JOHN BOWNE logs that the largest single group is Asian, at 67% of enrollment. The remainder comes out to 24% Hispanic, 3% White, 3% Black. That is meaningfully more Asian than the county at large, where the share is closer to 26%.

On the resource side, PS 20 JOHN BOWNE logs 72 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 13.8:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 12.8:1 average. Around 87% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Queens County runs at roughly 77%, so the school's eligibility rate is above the surrounding baseline.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), PS 20 JOHN BOWNE performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 42.9%, the actual is 55.0%, a residual of +12.1 points.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Queens County) logs that the typical household earns roughly $86,136 per year, about 36% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and the poverty rate sits near 10%. Across Queens County's 392 public schools (combined enrollment of about 268,205 students), PS 20 JOHN BOWNE is one campus in the mix.

ACTIVE LEARNING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (THE) is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.3 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. Among the 9 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), PS 20 JOHN BOWNE ranks 6th on composite proficiency, below the local average of 61.9%.

PS 20 JOHN BOWNE operates from a city-core location.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 24%: 1,311 students in 2018 compared to 995 in 2025. Asian enrollment moved from 73% to 67% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio tightened from 15.4:1 in 2018 to 13.8:1 today.

In the discussion threads here, members of the PS 20 JOHN BOWNE community share and discuss pickup logistics, teacher feedback, and after-school programs. The community welcomes input from current and former families.