Walking down the sidewalk past bags of garbage outside the back of I.S. 192 in Hollis, Queens, on a recent windy afternoon, Dianne Payne shakes her head.

“It’s unacceptable that this is what the children look at from the cafeteria,” she said motioning toward a Dumpster overflowing with broken chairs, crushed boxes, and black garbage bags.

“My children are entitled to just as good an education as a child who lives in Orange County,” she said.

Rather than moving up the Hudson or even two miles over to Nassau County, Ms. Payne, 49, is demanding that the state provide her children with vouchers to attend private schools. Today, she is expected to step up her legal battle by filing a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Ms. Payne, a tall black woman with long braids she wears pulled back in a white headscarf, is a retired city Department of Correction employee and the adoptive mother of five foster children. She lives in a white clapboard house with pink trim and black shingles on a quiet street in Hollis – a neighborhood better known for producing famous rap stars than fine schools.

That is a sore point for Ms. Payne.

Growing up in East Harlem, her mother, who worked as a housekeeper, made one thing clear – she expected her children to achieve more than she had. And they would do so by getting an education.

“I was brought up with the notion that each generation should do better than the last,” Ms. Payne said. She and all three of her sisters went off to college, and one is now an assistant principal at a public school not far from the East River housing projects where they grew up.

Ms. Payne knows that if she moved her family to the suburbs, she could enroll her children in schools with smaller classes, science labs, and computer equipment – but that is unlikely to happen.

“I don’t want to run from the problem,” she said, standing in a pale pink parka and white wool scarf outside I.S. 192, where her daughter Daquasia attends seventh grade. “I want to fix the problem.”

That’s why when she met Manhattan attorney Eric Grannis at a breakfast organized by a Queens politician late last year, she volunteered for action.

Mr. Grannis said he was willing to represent a parent interested in being the “Rosa Parks of Education.” He was looking for a parent willing to make a stand.

After breakfast, Ms. Payne walked up and extended her hand.

Mr. Grannis, a commercial litigator with an office on Fifth Avenue, spends a good deal of time focused on education issues. He helped start two charter schools including Bronx Preparatory, one of the first charter schools in the city. He is married to the executive director of the Harlem Success Charter School, Eva Moskowitz, who until January served as the chairwoman of City Council’s Committee on Education.

Mr. Grannis made headlines last month when he filed court papers on behalf of Ms. Payne asking the state to pay private school tuition for her two youngest children, claiming the public school system was not doing its job.

He was trying to intervene in a landmark court case in which Justice Leland DeGrasse ruled last year that the city needs an additional $5.6 billion a year to provide children the “sound basic education” the judge found is guaranteed under the state constitution.

Governor Pataki has appealed that ruling by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse. The case, filed more than 12 years ago by a group known as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, is now in the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Until Albany reaches into its pockets, Ms. Payne wants the $13,000 a year the state spends to educate each child so that she can put her children into private school. What she wants is essentially a school voucher.

That motion was shot down last week by Judge DeGrasse, who refused to hear Ms. Payne’s case. Undeterred, she is expected to file a lawsuit today in Manhattan.

Ms. Payne, whose children range in age from 11 to 16, pays roughly $12,000 a year to send her two oldest children to Christ the King, a parochial school in Queens.

She is not asking for vouchers for them because she wants to steer clear of the separation of church and state issue that would likely arise. The funds she wants are for the two youngest children to go to a private nonsectarian school.

There are currently voucher programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., as well as other cities. The Florida State Supreme Court struck down the Sunshine State’s voucher program last month, ruling that it violated the state constitution.

Ms. Payne’s case comes just as Governor Pataki is pushing for other controversial school choice issues like more charter schools and a $500 education tax credit for poor and middleclass families that could be used toward the cost of private school tuition.

The three-story house in Hollis where Ms. Payne lives with her five children and her father is next door to a large house festooned with colorful plastic flowers. Other homes along the street are decorated with white fences and evenly spaced squares of green lawn.

Since the end of World War II, the area has been primarily home to black middle-class families. The neighborhood has been a hotbed of rap talent, including Run DMC and LL Cool J. Other famous residents have included Governor Cuomo, Secretary of State Powell, and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

Every Sunday, Ms. Payne and the kids pack into their blue Dodge Caravan and head off to St. Alban the Martyr Church, where the children also attend Sunday school. Their weekdays are spent shuttling between school and basketball practice and doing homework.

Growing up in the East River projects on 104th Street and First Avenue, Ms. Payne became so bored by school that she stopped going. Instead, she and her friends wandered around Central Park.

When a letter went home one day explaining that she was teetering on the brink of failing because she had too many absences – although she maintained an 85 average – her mother, a housekeeper, decided to take action.

She went to her employer, a Park Avenue stockbroker, who sent his two children to the elite Trinity School on the Upper West Side. With his help, Ms. Payne went off to Trinity, where she excelled. It was 1971, the first year girls were accepted at the school, and Ms. Payne stuck out among the mostly male, white student body. But she was elated to be there.

“It introduced me to a side of life I didn’t know existed,” she said.

In addition to making friends who had maids to serve them snacks and clear their dishes, Ms. Payne couldn’t believe her French teacher was actually from France and her English teacher had worked for a publishing company.

For the first time, she felt engaged with school and class. Instead of dropping out, she went on to graduate with honors from Purdue University in Illinois with a degree in English literature.

That Ms. Payne graduated from college came as little surprise to her aunt, Mabel Alston, a retired nurse who lives in Elmont, Long Island.

“Her mother used to say, ‘They can take anything away from you, but get as much education as you can because they can’t take your brain,'” Ms. Alston, 73, said.

But it did come as quite a shock to her family when Ms. Payne started taking in foster children.

“She was young and working, but then she took in more than one. … three and then four. I was thinking to myself, I would never do that. I don’t have the time for that, but it didn’t bother her because she was happy to do it. I don’t want to get too religious, but it was like God put her here for this because I don’t think a lot of people would have done that,” Ms. Alston said.

Until this year, Ms. Payne’s two youngest children, Rayshawn, 11, and Daquasia, 12, attended Holy Trinity Community School. But the financial burden proved too great to keep four children in private school on a fixed income.

She is satisfied with the education Daquasia is receiving at P.S. 192, but is fearful about sending her to the local Andrew Jackson High School where students line up outside to pass through metal detectors.

She also worried about her son, Rayshawn, who is in the fifth grade at P.S. 134, where only one-third of the students in fourth grade were reading at grade level or above in 2004.

“When I put Daquasia and Rayshawn into public school, I retired so that I could be a lot more active in the schools,” she said.

As the president of the Parent Teacher Association at P.S. 134, Ms. Payne is careful not to speak too harshly about the school. Admittedly, she is frustrated that scaffolding around the building has put an end to outdoor recess. She wants smaller classes, more supplies, and more individual attention.

Still, when Ms. Payne walked into P.S. 134 to pick up Rayshawn on Monday afternoon, the affable security guard waved hello as she directed the flow of parents seeking out their children in the post dismissal confusion caused by a new after-school session.

Rayshawn’s teacher greeted Ms. Payne and told her that her son needed three composition notebooks; one each for after school, class notes and homework. She congratulated him on an essay he wrote.

Outside school, Rayshawn pulled a hat down tight over his head and looked down at the sidewalk. Before winding up in the care of Ms. Payne, Rayshawn had been neglected in his crib by his birth parents. When Ms. Payne took him in at age 2, he couldn’t sit up or hold a bottle.

Asked about the subject of his essay, he said, “Thurgood Marshall, he was the first black judge. He fought for equality.”

At 11 years old Rayshawn is in the fifth grade, but operates two years behind. In school he receives one hour of special tutoring a day.

Ms. Payne has not requested an impartial hearing at the Department of Education, which would allow her to argue that her son was not receiving the special needs services he required. If Ms. Payne is successful, the city would pay for part or all of Rayshawn’s tuition at a private school.

The city’s Department of Education paid for 8,275 special needs students to attend private school in the 2004-2005 school year.

“How does that help the rest of the children in the school?” Ms. Payne said when asked why she had not put in the request. “I don’t want the other children to be stuck.”

She recognizes that asking for the hearing is no different than asking for a voucher in that both would mean taking Rayshawn out of the public school system.

“But it puts people on notice that if you’re supposed to give the students this money and you haven’t given it to them and you have no intention of giving it to them, then the parents need to become real consumers and start to shop around,” she said.

She said that school vouchers would force public schools to “step up to the game.”

The city’s Department of Education has said the lawsuit “has no merit” and called it “obvious grandstanding.” The lead lawyer for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Michael Rebell, said Ms. Payne’s lawsuit highlighted the need for billions of additional dollars but said that legally it would be difficult to win.

After graduating college Ms. Payne moved back to New York and took an array of jobs – from working as a buyer at Gimbels department store to finding jobs for young people at the Episcopal Mission Society.

But it was when she took a position at the city’s Department of Corrections that her life really started taking shape. She was assigned to the Adolescent Detention Reception Center that deals with 16- to 18-year-olds at Rikers Island.

“After two years in the jails, I said, ‘No, I cannot help here, you have to get to them when they are younger. And that’s when I decided to become a foster parent,'” Ms. Payne recalled.

She was living in Harlem at the time and headed over to the Harlem Dowling Center where she was told her apartment was too small to take in children. So she moved to Queens and tried again.

A receptionist from the center called to say they had a brother and sister who needed a home. When Ms. Payne saw them she said they looked just like her; she could see it in their eyes, their noses.

Helena, 3, had been beaten so severely that she was bruised from head to toe. Her little brother Demetrius wasn’t in much better shape.

Two years later, Ms. Payne went to court to adopt the children officially.

She later took in Jordan who is now 16, and then Rayshawn and Daquasia.

They now all live together with Ms. Payne’s 80-year-old father, Nathaniel, a retired sign painter, and a white Husky puppy and brown Rottweiler.

Mr. Payne said the only time the house is quiet is when the children are sleeping. Despite her generally managing to keep things running smoothly, times are not always happy at the Payne household. Helena attended Jamaica High School, where seven girls continually bullied her and beat her up, according to the affidavit Ms. Payne filed with the courts.

Frightened and unhappy, she started skipping school and eventually tried to commit suicide. She was admitted to the Hillside Hospital Psychiatric center. After she got out she was granted a safety transfer to the High School for Law Enforcement and Public Safety.

These days, Ms. Payne spends a great deal of time at school and sits down with her family every night for dinner at 5:30 p.m. While making a pot of pea soup one night this week, she fielded calls on the home phone and her cell phone and helped Rayshawn with his reading homework.

The television blasted the 5 p.m news, which Daquasia was watching for her current events homework.

This week Mr. Grannis said he is realistic about the chances of actually winning the voucher case.

“Although I’m hopeful about getting the relief, the most important goal of the lawsuit is to get people to think,” Mr. Grannis said in a telephone interview. His wife recently hired Ms. Payne to help with parent outreach at her school in Harlem, a job she is expected to start soon.

In the meantime, Ms. Payne doesn’t plan on sitting around waiting for either the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money or the vouchers.

While P.S. 134 is unlikely to appear in any guidebooks to the city’s best public schools, it does have an important asset – hip-hop mogul and the founder of Def Jam Records, Russell Simmons is a former student.

Ms. Payne recently added one more item to her growing to-do list: “Call Mr. Simmons.”