The following is by Tony Kelso, a parent and a member of Community Education Council in District 6, Upper Manhattan.
So this is the way education works under mayoral control.
At what was billed as a public hearing to determine the
fate of P.S. 132, an elementary school in New York City’s Washington Heights,
speaker after speaker rose up and passionately voiced opposition to the
Department of Education (DOE)’s plan to force the school to share its building
with another school that would be created from scratch and opened in the fall.
Not a single teacher, community leader, or parent who took the microphone was
in favor of the proposal. But it won’t matter. Indeed, there was nobody even there
to listen to and address the crowd’s concerns because the DOE had not bothered
to send a representative to stand before the assembly and run the meeting.
Instead, seated in the first row of the auditorium with their backs to the
audience, two young women—one wearing a shiny silver skirt, as though she would
be heading to a dance club after the meeting, the other slumped in the seat
beside her, looking as if she would rather be sitting through a two-hour plane
delay than endure the agony of paying attention to active citizens defending a
cherished school—were the only people the DOE charged with attending the
hearing.
The club kid, Meera Jain, an Associate Director of Planning for
N. Manhattan schools from the DOE’s Division of Portfolio Planning, took
notes on her laptop, while her bored-to-death assistant limply timed speakers
to ensure they didn’t exceed their allotted two minutes each. The two employees
actually never publicly identified themselves as members of the DOE until
somebody asked who they were and what they were doing there. Despite the fact
that many, if not most of the people gathered could not fluently communicate in
English, neither employee was able to speak in nor understand Spanish, except
through the assistance of two translators, which occasionally involved bringing
the proceedings to a halt while Ms. Jain privately conferred with one of them before
typing in English two-minute speeches delivered in Spanish. In the end, the
message of the farcical proceedings was clear—come March 20, Mayor Bloomberg’s hand-picked
stooges on the Board of Education will apply their rubber stamp by voting to
approve the co-location plan as written.
A Pillar of the Community
Rooted in a neighborhood whose population consists mostly
of Dominicans by birth or ancestry, P.S. 132 is better known as Juan Pablo
Duarte , appropriately named after the commonly recognized Founding Father
of the Dominican Republic. The school, housed in a nearly 110-year-old
building, is the oldest one in Northern Manhattan and a second home for many
residents, having served the Dominican community for generations. No school in
its district has more of what are termed “English Language Learners” (ELLs)
than Duarte—over half of the students who first enter the school speak Spanish
as their primary language. No doubt, educating such a concentration of ELLs
poses a challenge to teachers and administrators alike. Yet through the years Duarte
has continuously prepared children for promotion to middle school. Recently the
front office secured grants that enabled the school to install two
state-of-the-art computer labs. The leadership has also worked to maintain a
partnership with Music and the Brain , a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing music instruction and
instruments to students—in a public education system that makes it increasingly
difficult to keep enrichment programs alive, Duarte boasts not one but two
rooms equipped with keyboards which could be lost because of the co-location .
Moreover, even as recently as 2010, P.S. 132 earned a “B” on the DOE’s annual
“report card.”
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| Class sizes in K-3 at Duarte |
But in the past few years, the city has starved the
school of resources, draining over $1.5 million from its operating budget.
Class sizes have soared, with the majority of the classrooms containing over 30
students. Not surprisingly, then, student performance has suffered. Two
academic years ago, the DOE dropped Duarte to a “D” on its report card, a mark
that was replicated the following year. Regarding two successive years of bad
grades as unacceptable (even though the school had missed a “C” the previous
year by just .02 points), the DOE was ready to take action.
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| Sink in Duarte bathroom |
The school has faced other burdens as well. Despite its
historical charm, Duarte’s building is in need of major refurbishment. For
years, the school’s principal has pleaded for money to simply upgrade its
bathrooms. It’s easy to see why—a trip to the rest rooms reveals rust-stained
sinks, stall doors that do not lock, and toilets that are so difficult to flush
that many young children simply leave their deposits behind, inadvertently
adding to the stench in what can only be described as a demoralizing
environment. Yet at a recent capital plan hearing, in a candid moment, the
DOE’s representative stated that regardless of how run down the facilities are
no improvement would be forthcoming because, after all, “the toilets still
work.” It went without saying that nothing would be done to enhance any other
part of the building as well, including the cleaning of the ceiling and walls
throughout the structure to remove their growing patches of mold, whose
particles over 750 four- to eleven-year-old students breathe in five days a
week.
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| Toilet in Duarte bathroom |
Imposing its Will on the Community
a co-location would
benefit Duarte because it “will help address the school’s performance struggles
as it will be able to focus on a smaller student population.” It appears,
however, that shoving a new school, to be identified as 06M103, into a
dilapidated facility with P.S. 132, is the DOE’s way of offering a concession.
Only weeks earlier, the DOE had threatened the school with closure altogether.
But after an outcry
from the community , the DOE backed
down and removed Duarte from its list of “failing” schools that needed to be tossed
into its educational dustbin. Shortly afterward, though, after a
behind-closed-door meeting, it issued Plan B. With the co-location, “06M103
will open during the 2013-2014 school year, when it will serve approximately
70-80 students in kindergarten. 06M103 will gradually phase in by adding one
grade per year. The school is expected to reach full scale in 2018-2019 and
will serve approximately 420-480 students,” after “P.S. 132 has completed its
enrollment reduction of over 425 children. In other words, Juan Pablo Duarte is
now being offered death drip by drip rather than a sudden demise.
There is no evidence to suggest that housing another
school—especially one with no track record—in Duarte’s facility will boost
student performance. 06M103 is expected to nearly duplicate P.S. 132’s
programming and accommodate the very same children it siphons off. The model of
breaking up a large school into smaller ones has already been attempted in Duarte’s
district, resulting in no appreciable increase in standardized test scores for either
the host or infiltrating schools. In fact, it is far likelier that co-location
will only further tighten the leash around a school already gasping for air.
Co-locations generally lead to a loss of space for the original school, which
means that not only will classes probably remain overcrowded, but rooms used
for enrichment programs, such as art studios and science labs, will also
evaporate.
Duarte’s current scant resources are bound to further
diminish. Instead of fostering a harmonious environment, co-locations typically
give rise to one school pitted against another one, with parents fighting other
parents for adequate space and equipment such as auditorium sound systems and
even libraries. Storage rooms become classrooms. Echoing hallways become the
sites for speech therapy and tutoring. Ultimately, P.S. 132 might be forced to also
bid adieu to its high-end computer labs and keyboards.
What is truly appalling about the DOE’s rush to destroy
public schools in mostly low-income areas is its utter disregard for the
educators, parents, and students whose lives will be thrown into turmoil by its
mean-spirited bullying. In the case of Juan Pablo Duarte, the plan for either
closure or co-location was never discussed with the local Community Education
Council, the only elected body—consisting of volunteers with children in neighborhood
schools—assigned the responsibility of representing the parents in the school’s
district. Nor did the DOE ever consult with the community at large. In a
heartless gesture designed to pay lip service to the idea that it has in truth
invited response from the public, the department had earlier distributed
information about the proposal to the predominantly Spanish-speaking parents of
the school. Yet every document was printed only in English.
Maybe, in the end, the real plan of the Bloomberg administration
is not to actually help children learn but to expand the coffers of the
high-rollers the mayor associates with. Given the DOE’s co-location proposal,
there will inevitably be one more—make that two more—public schools bled of
their capacity to nurture and properly educate their students. That’s two more
opportunities to send in the corporate managers to “fix” the problem. And another
step along the path to school privatization, as Bill Gates and his cohort of
investors and hedge fund supervisors eagerly continue to push “reform” in their
quest to fully exploit the education “market.” Meanwhile the underserved
Dominican-Americans near P.S. 132 will most likely watch their supposed
benefactors rub out a name that evokes ethnic pride throughout Washington
Heights. Juan Pablo Duarte will be no more.
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