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Schools In Windowless Basement Urge DOE To Never Send Them Back Underground
By
Cindy Rodriguez
Published Oct 6, 2020
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Beyond My Ken / Creative Commons
By
Cindy Rodriguez
Published Oct 6, 2020
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While the Upper West Side's Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus, deemed unfit for reopening last week because of air ventilation issues, remains closed, its 2,000-plus students attend school at alternative sites around the city—and at least some of them say they prefer not to return.
Two of the schools have severe issues—water leaks, poor air ventilation, rodent infestations—that were problems well before Covid-19 forced them shut. Staff at the Special Music School, in the sub-basement, and the Urban Assembly School for Media Studies, in the basement, told Gothamist/WNYC they hoped the pandemic forces the Department of Education to take notice, and permanently relocate them.
English teacher Noah Gordon, who helped start the Special Music School (SMS) in 2013, said he’s always been concerned about spending long hours in a “vile,” window-less space.
“It was kind of beyond belief that that was where they were going to put kids,” Gordon said, adding “The ceilings are leaking water. There are cockroaches and often mice like, literally, they're living in the doors and running around.”
Seven years later, in the midst of a global health crisis, the issue has taken on new significance. Gordon, along with other school members, are demanding not to return to the building near Lincoln Center.
The local City Councilmember, Helen Rosenthal, confirmed that teachers and the SMS principal have been asking for help with the ventilation system since she took office in 2014.
“I was incredulous that the school would have ever been put there in the first place,” she said.
Listen to reporter Cindy Rodriguez's radio story for WNYC:
One floor above SMS, but also in the basement, is the Urban Assembly School for Media. It also has no windows, no natural light, rooms where temperatures have reached 90 degrees, and lots of water leaks, according to a 14-year employee who declined to share his name for fear of reprisal.
“We’ve had rooms that leak, they’ve had water leaking since I’ve been there,” he said.
An SMS teacher named Kellen Atkinson told DOE officials at a recent meeting that the ventilation system at SMS was unfixable.
“The air quality is very poor and it's been that way for years,” she said, noting that their temporary site, in a charter school nearby, was not good enough.
“Because inevitably Success Academy will say they want their space back and inevitably I believe that you will say that it’s safe to return to MLK but I don’t think it will be, ever,” she said.
Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark said the DOE would not send students and staff back to any room deemed unsafe. She also acknowledged that it’s possible they may disagree on the definition of what’s safe.
“I understand that it is a big conversation,” she said. “But it is one that I think is going to be essentially a reasonable one in a sense that we’re inspecting each and every room in the DOE with the same standard.”
At another meeting Goldmark told parents that in the absence of a national standard, the DOE would ensure all ventilation systems performed as they were designed to. SMS staff want the city to measure air flow in every classroom and set a standard for how often the air in a room should be replaced by fresh air from the outside based on the number of people occupying the room. So far, no standard has been set.
SMS is an outlier at MLK campus in a few ways:, it’s smaller than the other schools, and 48% of the students are white, a much higher percentage than at the other schools in the building.
At UAM, the employee who asked to remain anonymous said he’s been told that there was never a complete room-by-room check of the HVAC system until August of this year, weeks before school was scheduled to begin.
“Which is scary when you think about it,” he said. “That they wouldn’t have done that immediately in the spring time or at the beginning of the summer. The first time they came into the building to start checking it was at the end of August.”
At a meeting with the school's superintendent, an 11th grader who identified herself as Ilinca said, "I'd actually like to advocate for a new permanent home for SMS".
"The basement was never meant for classrooms. It was originally a storage facility," she went on to say.
Artemie, an SMS sophomore, added, "We definitely do need natural light and like fresh air so I just wanted to ask how can we know these problems are going to be solved by a specific time?”
The superintendent told them she wasn’t prepared to discuss a new location for the school, noting that their priority was to get them into their new location safely.
The DOE said a team was working day and night to evaluate the MLK campus and take feedback from the school community. So far, they haven’t responded to calls for a new permanent location and all six schools, including the two in the basements, are slated to reopen this winter.
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