About 17 hours before the opening bell of the new school year, the schools chancellor asked thousands of Brooklyn churchgoers to pray for him as he tries to turn around the city’s public school system.

“I look forward to a time when New York City’s public school system will be the envy of the nation – when we don’t graduate one in two kids, when we graduate all the children who come to our system,” he told the 3,500-plus members of the Christian Cultural Center. “So here today, as we get ready to open tomorrow, I ask you to get involved, stay involved.”

But he said getting involved isn’t sufficient to fix the system, which he acknowledged has problems with graduation rates and violence despite new programs he’s implemented.

“I ask you to pray for our teachers, our principals, and our guidance counselors, and our aides, and our staff, pray that they find the strength and the courage and the wisdom to transform this system for our children, and yes, pray for me,” he said. “God has given me a remarkable challenge. I need your prayers, I need your love, and I need your support.”

That, he said, would help “create a public school system that has over 1,300 schools and every one of them will be a school that you and you and you and I would be proud to send our children to.”

Although the chancellor was resorting to prayers in the hours before the city’s 1.1 million children report to their schools, he told reporters after the service that he is expecting a “wonderful year and a great opening day.”

“I’m very excited about the fact that 91 new schools, most of them at the secondary-school level – high schools and middle schools, where we need it most -those parents who are looking for more opportunities, we’re creating it for them as we speak,” he said.

“This is going to be a terrific year in New York City public education. We’ve already had last year a good transition year to build on. This year we’re really going to bring it up to a new level.”

Children at the service said they, too, were expecting a good year.

Kayla Gittens, 9, who’s starting the fourth grade at P.S. 244 today, said, “I can’t wait to go back to school. I miss school.”

Last year, Kayla got the top score, 4, on both her math and her reading exams. She said she’s prepared to study hard this year, and her mother, Doris Gittens, said she’s prepared to help her daughter succeed.

Jade Scott, 15, who’s entering her junior year at Boys and Girls High School, said she plans to “ace it” so she can start her senior year. She said she’s looking into colleges, and has no concerns for the coming year.

Although the Christian Cultural Center was brimming with optimism yesterday, everything won’t be divine today as the new school year starts.

A dean at Washington Irving High School, which last year was designated as one of the city’s most dangerous schools, said the new high school registration centers that the city launched this summer didn’t help alleviate the overcrowding problem that led to some of the safety problems last year.

On Friday, the dean, Gregg Lundahl, said 3,475 students were signed up to attend the school. That’s up from 3,450 last year, when “kids were fighting over where they were going to sit or if they were going to sit” and waiting in long lines to get through the school’s single metal detector in the morning.

“To have that many kids walking through these halls really creates a safety hazard in the building. That’s a major concern,” he said. “With the best intentions of the staff, the best attitude of the staff here, we feel like we’re being sabotaged again. We believe that most of the violence that occurred last year and the disruption…that contributed to us being an impact school is going to lead to this happening again, even though we have security under wraps.”

Yesterday, Mr. Klein said the new enrollment centers, which handled high school students who were new to the system, did “alleviate” the overcrowding problem.

“If you go to the enrollment centers, and talk to the parents, and I’ve gotten a lot of reports on this, they will tell you that these enrollment centers have been very helpful, and the usual chaos that ensues at the beginning of the school year did not happen this year because we were able to put the kids into schools,” he said.

But, he said, “there’s no question that we have schools that are overcrowded. We have a $6.5 billion capital plan, another $6.5 billion we’re receiving from Albany. We need to build new schools, new capacity get the funding from the fiscal equity lawsuit so we can do a better job for our students.”

The teachers’ union president, Randi Weingarten, said the centers seem to have helped some traditionally overcrowded high schools like Columbus and Stevenson, but not others.

“There’s been some confusion, there’s been a lot of long lines,” she said. But she said no one would really be able to judge until the schools open: “We’ll see what happens.”