A Queens mom blasted Chancellor Richard Carranza as a coward for failing to meet with parents before deciding to revamp a decaying Queens school for special-needs kids.

“He’s a chicken,” said Tricia Gaudio, whose 9-year-old daughter Ava Marie attended PS 9, Walter Reed, in Maspeth.

Gaudio criticized Carranza’s plan to spend another $16 million — in addition to $14 million so far — to fix up the 116-year-old building in an industrial area choked with truck fumes and dust.

“It’s an enormous waste of taxpayer money,” she told The Post. “There’s only warehouses and construction and trucks going in and out. It looks like a war zone.”

Carranza released a letter sent Friday to Queens City Councilman Robert Holden, outlining new plans to improve the building over the next five years.

“I treat the safety and comfort of all of our students with the utmost seriousness,” Carranza wrote.

The letter followed a series of reports in The Post on the decrepit building, which seats close to 200 students — all with disabilities such as autism and Downs Syndrome.

After the Department of Education admitted that at least one classroom for young children had crumbling lead paint — a serious health risk — Carranza promised, “There will be no chipping or peeling paint on the first day of school.”

The school will get a “new changing table” to replace the frayed bench next to open urinals used to change diapers. A separate changing room will be added in the fall, the letter says.

The DOE will spend $1 million to provide music, sensory and computer rooms by January, plus $80,000 on new furniture.

A $5 million project to upgrade the basement cafeteria — which takes up half of the gym — won’t be complete until September 2021.

An elevator and other additions to make the building handicap-accessible will cost $7 to $10 million and take three to five years.

But the $14 million exterior facelift won’t be done until the summer of 2020, so the dark and ugly scaffolding won’t come down until then.

Despite the expenditures, Carranza’s decision was a slap at Holden, who has urged the DOE to build a new home for the school — like the $78 million state-of-the-art complex it will build for the disabled kids in Staten Island.

“They’re going to put our kids through endless construction,” Holden said “But when the dust clears, all they’ll have is a sub-par facility in a heavily industrial, polluted area not fit for any children.”

Carranza said he visited PS 9 last week with DOE officials, but canceled a meeting with Holden after refusing to tour the school with him.

“Is it because you knew you couldn’t defend the school in its horrific conditions and in an industrial area not fit for any children?” Holden tweeted Saturday.