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On a Friday night in May, seventh grader Kaara Vasquez played guitar and sang “Give light and people will find a way,” for parents and teachers at Manhattan’s Ella Baker School on East 68 th Street. She sang in the public school’s beautifully columned auditorium for the younger students who stood behind her, wide eyed, following her lead. And she sang in protest, during a student performance that called attention to the city’s plans to raze the school she loves to the ground. “They say they can replace our school building, but they can’t replace our memories,” said Kaara, 12, who has been a student at Ella Baker, a kindergarten through eighth-grade school, since first grade. “It just upsets me because they have no regard for us. Why do they want to tear it down?” Everyone at Ella Baker is asking the same question. Hunter College, nearby at 68th Street, is after the land under the Julia Richman Education Complex (JREC), which houses Ella Baker and six other schools. The college wants to build new science labs on the site. Because Hunter is a city agency, the deal will be a simple and legal land swap. And there’s little the JREC schools and their 1,800 students can do to stop it. The plan has been discussed at the Department of Education for two years, but the schools just learned about it last fall, thanks to a concerned official, said Ann Cook, co-director of Urban Academy high school, a founding school in the Julia Richman complex. Hunter issued a proposal for expressions of interest from builders, but all other conversations about the takeover have taken place behind closed doors, without input from the schools themselves. Hunter says it will create a new, state-of-the-art building for JREC on its property at First Avenue and 25th Street. But Julia Richman teachers and students say the move will uproot everything that has made them models of educational success. Julia Richman, a large, comprehensive high school that began its descent into failure in the 1970s, was closed by the city in 1995. Six small schools took over the enormous building, including Ella Baker, an international high school, a performing arts high school, a junior high school for autistic children and a high school for older students who need extra time and help to graduate. Over 10 years, the schools have tweaked their shared space into a well-calibrated, collaborative environment. The schools use inquiry-based learning methods and progressive techniques like performance-based assessment. Department of Education officials regularly call Ann Cook to ask if educators visiting from schools across the country can take a tour of JREC. She says sure, and reminds the officials that they’re planning to tear it all down. “Why are they destroying places where schools are thriving?” asked Dani Gonzalez, an office assistant at Urban Academy in JREC with a daughter at Ella Baker. “Why tamper with what’s not broken?” The Department of Education has told JREC educators that a new building would be better than their old one. But the East 67th Street complex just underwent a $30 million renovation. It is now, Cook said, as state-of-the-art as anything Hunter College could build. It has a swimming pool, a beautiful auditorium, a large library and historic architectural features such as Carnegie steel beams and marble floors that hearken back to the time it was first built in 1923. The building is also better served by public transportation than the new site. Instead of taking an easy commute, JREC students would have a hard time getting to school at the new site safely. Plus, moving the complex would take away four of the area’s six high schools, all of which are already overcrowded, and would be a hardship on parents, many of whom work in the neighborhood. So just what does the Department of Education stand to gain by tearing down six of its best schools against the will of parents, teachers, principals and students? Money will certainly change hands when Hunter’s downtown property is sold to a developer, but the only other benefit seems to be for Hunter’s science students, who will get a shorter walk to class. Perhaps Kaara was right, and the city simply has no regard for schools like Ella Baker. If the Department of Education is willing to throw out all the work, all the heart and all the taxpayer money that has gone into creating JREC, and it is willing to risk destroying successful schools by uprooting so many students, then it must have no respect for how difficult it is to create and maintain a good school. It’s difficult to get an at-risk community of students to achieve, to get parents involved and to keep teachers who care, but JREC has struck that delicate balance. The Department of Education hasn’t asked for input or feedback from the schools, despite several rallies organized by JREC parents. It seems department officials care more about property than about the children they serve. Kaara sang her heart out at the show, for which the art teacher, Ilan Weissman, combined music, dance and multimedia art with a link to the work of civil rights activist and school namesake Ella Baker. Students sang and played activist songs from the 1960s and marched past parents and friends, carrying signs that read, “Don’t Wreck JREC.” This Tuesday, they will protest again at yet another rally and demonstration outside their school. They are hoping, maybe this time, the city will listen. |
