Jill Bloomberg, principal of the Secondary School for Research (SSR) responds to news that Millenium 2 will be joining the other three schools at the John Jay High School Complex. She refers to news that the arrival of the new school will mean that scanning (i.e. metal detection) may be removed from that building. Click on read more to read the text of Bloomberg’s article.
Even though there is no shortage of HS seats in Brooklyn (see EIS), the DOE is responding to demands from parents in Brooklyn who want another choice in addition to the 35 schools mentioned above including the three schools currently housed in the John Jay building.
Resources within the DOE are limited and our school, The Secondary School for Research, has been fighting for equitable funding for at least seven years. The DOE policy — Fair Student Funding — was supposed to equalize the financial resources across schools, but our school has never received the funds that schools with similar populations are receiving. Furthermore, the DOE has cut the budgets of all schools across the city in order to balance its budget that includes over $2 billion dollars a year in interest payments to banks. In spite of these cutbacks every year more of our students graduate and go on to success in college.
Our school building is old and in terrible disrepair. Many classrooms have no more than one electrical outlet. The heat is either unbearably strong in some rooms or seemingly nonexistent in others. The water fountains never have cold water and the plumbing in the bathrooms often fails. But in spite of these conditions, students and teachers proudly display work on classroom and hallway bulletin boards.
Every morning students must line up, remove their belts and jewelry and pass through metal detectors before we allow you to learn. I have always opposed metal detectors in our school because I find them insulting to you.
I believe that the students in our school and in the other schools in our building deserve the very best. You deserve to be treated with dignity and respect; you deserve to learn in classrooms equipped to meet your needs and with clean and adequate facilities.
Rather than devote its limited resources to the students in our schools, the DOE is investing in new schools all over the city. These new schools all receive additional funds that existing schools do not receive. Millennium II will bring needed funds to our building but it won’t be enough to remedy all the disrepair and it won’t make up for the years of neglect.
Millennium II may bring about the removal of scanning from our building. I will celebrate. But removing it now after seven years of refusing to do so only highlights the fact the DOE doesn’t view the students currently in the building with the same respect and expectations as it does the students expected to attend M2.
You can read of the rest of Bloomberg’s article at Spirit Gazette, the school’s online newspaper.