Inside Colocation

Although I haven’t mentioned this yet, one discrepancy daily on our students’ minds is the difference in food supplied to the public schools and the charter school. The three public schools in the building share a kitchen and all food is supplied by School Food. The schools have no choice in this matter, and the food, though lovingly prepared by the cafeteria staff, is largely canned, frozen, and pre-packaged. In contrast, the charter school has its own small separate kitchen facility that serves meals delivered daily by Fresh Direct. This is yet another example of the “separate but unequal” services our students experience.

While controversy continues over inequitable improvements to the charter school, internal efforts have been made to build community among everyone in the building. Members from each of the four schools in the building coordinated an Ice Cream Mixer so that teachers and other employees could meet and chat. The event was positive and well-attended, and everyone was friendly and polite. One administrator made a brief speech emphasizing that we are all in this together, as we collectively service a building full of diverse students grades K through 12. With all the staffs together, appearances became hard to ignore. While the staffs of the three public schools are diverse in experience, age, ethnicity, and birthplace, the charter school staff was almost entirely made up of white recent college-graduates in their early twenties, from out of state, who moved to Brooklyn months ago when recruited through programs like Teach for America. The uniformity of the charter school staff stood in glaring contrast to the staffs of the other schools.

When there are nearly 1,000 children in a building, there will inevitably be discipline issues, as is the case in every school everywhere in the world. Normally, if a student breaks a rule, that student is held accountable and punished according to the existing guidelines, in this case, the chancellor’s regulations. Now, due to colocation, when a student breaks a rule, it is no longer a personal issue between administration, the student, and the student’s parents. That infraction becomes a situation that multiple inside and outside parties examine and potentially leverage to make cases for altering the ways space is shared. In other words, kids become pawns to make political moves. Our students are scrutinized by the charter school, who regularly complains about student behaviors. In turn, the charter school itself is scrutinized by the community for its discipline policies for students with special needs, as seen by the press release above. The situation is complex (far too complex for a single small paragraph to adequately address) and obviously troubling. And there is not, at this time, a sense that all the colocated schools are working together to create a supportive environment (though there are some efforts in the works by my school) where all the students in the building, grades K-12, can succeed together, where the success of one school ensures the success of others as well. Rather, there is a pervasive sense of unhealthy competition.

This is the first sign I have ever seen in our building that restricts student access to certain hallways/stairwells. The charter school has complained that students from other schools sometimes make their way into the basement, where the cafeteria and several bathrooms are also located. They evidently are making the effort to shut down these public halls.

Success Academy has a “zero noise tolerance” policy in their hallways, which they expect our students and staff to honor. They requested that the playground be locked after school hours so our students can’t play basketball and handball, which they claim disrupts their teachers’ planning time. Meanwhile, every day (weather permitting), Success Academy students congregate in the courtyard you see here and sing and loudly play. Their songs and shouts interrupt math and science classes in the many rooms that overlook the courtyard. Our middle and high school students regularly complain that it is extremely hard to focus with the noise from outside.

The charter school recently demanded a custodian to lock all of the basement exits after school, so that students from the other schools in the building would not go downstairs to exit. Students from the upstairs public schools were still at events on campus and to leave school they had to climb over a fence, causing an obvious problem. For safety reasons, you can’t have exits locked. At the building council meeting, Success Academy proposed to use the exits only for emergencies. This proposal was voted down. However, they went ahead and put up the signs you see above! And they continue to advocate for our exits being locked.

The lights in the back are the old fluorescents that most DOE schools were equipped with for years, and are deemed unsafe for prolonged exposure. As each strip dies out, it gets replaced with the new lights you see in the front. It’s typical to see classrooms with a combination of old and new lights. The weekend before school opened this September, the charter school laid out $400,000 for a haz-mat team to install all new lights in their classrooms. The lights installed in Success were all taken from storage where they were scheduled to be installed in other schools over the coming months.

AC update! When our high school was located in the basement, each room had one to two working ACs. We moved upstairs to rooms without ACs that were unbearably hot all through September. While most of the second floor is not properly wired for ACs, some rooms are wired and ready. So why weren’t our old ACs simply moved upstairs? When the charter school’s contractors removed the basement ACs, they let the units fall to the ground. Every AC but one is broken! To replace all of the broken ACs will cost $100,000, and SA is unwilling to pay up.

Success Academy, like our school, has carpeting at its entrance. These carpets get vacuumed by our custodial staff, who uses their equipment to clean all the schools housed in the building. However, the industrial vacuum that custodial uses is not functioning. SA purchased a new vacuum cleaner and a carpet shampooer which our custodians must use to regularly clean Success’ carpet. However, despite custodial’s request, SA will not allow the custodians to bring this vacuum upstairs. As a result, our school’s carpets are being swept each day with a broom. 

For weeks, several teachers in Global Studies and International Studies have been unable to connect to the internet. Two teachers said that the computer network repairman came by to address the problem and discovered that wires had been cut in the server room to make room for Success Academy, who needs to connect on a different SSID than the rest of the schools, as the Department of Education does not allow them to share the DOE internet connection. I haven’t been able to verify this one way or another. Another teacher pointed out that these holes were drilled through the gym to run Success Academy’s internet wires into our building’s server, which they were not supposed to connect to. The problems do seem to be resolved, but only after a litany of complaints against S.A.

This is a chart to help clarify the space issue in the building. Global Studies and International Studies are each public middle/high schools that have shared the building for many years. Star Academy is a District 75 Special Education school that has has its home in one small corridor. Success Academy is a charter school that has moved into the public building with a new kindergarten and plans to grow to a K-8 school.

This is a real-life actual overheard conversation on the second day of school:
Five-year-old: “Can you kick Global out too?”

Success’ Head of Operations: “We’re working on it.”

The above is an excerpt from a pro-Success Academy article/advertisement in the NY Post, along with a photo of the “dingy storage area” referred to, that was, in actuality, a fully functioning high school. The basement classrooms used to house about 300 high school students but were taken from us on the pretense of being “underutilized.” Now they house about 60 kindergarten students, with classrooms being left entirely empty for much of the day. The greenhouse mentioned was, by the way, a center of great activity for all of our students on Earth Day and many culinary students throughout the year.

Today was the first day of school. My room looked great and my students entered in good spirits. Unfortunately, my room was sweltering, as were several other relocated classrooms. While work orders for the charter school have gone through without hesitation, the work order to rewire the floor we moved to is sitting unfilled. Most of the ACs on the floor don’t work, or they blow out due to the lack of 220 power. Here you see the long-busted AC that came with my new room, as well as the fans that teachers have been purchasing with our own funds to create humane, albeit uncomfortable, conditions.

Here’s a small piece of context as to why charter schools are so aggressively spreading. Charter schools, in addition to “training” (a term Success prefers to “teaching”) students, are moving lots of money and lining lots of pockets, as “public” education is a promising new investment market. Success Academy, for example, has received millions of dollars from Rupert Murdoch. Above is a screenshot of one of many companies encouraging investment in “public” charter schools as means of developing individual and corporate financial portfolios.

Starting next week, our middle and high school students will daily witness the impact of a huge discrepancy in funds and resources. The charter school area is in perfect condition with new floors, walls, doors, lights, you name it. The rest of the building is in a standard state of DOE uneven repair. This is the first small report I’ve had of the impact of this colocation on students. I’ll know a lot more soon.