“This is the end,” said longtime teacher James Eterno, a 28-year veteran of the school, while choking up. “It’s bittersweet. It’s a celebration, but it feels like a funeral.”
James has the story at the ICE blog, along with a lot of good family news:
We said goodbye to Jamaica High School the other night and it was quite a farewell for about 25 graduates, their families, many alumni, along with current and former faculty members. Full coverage is at the ICEUFT blog and in the press.
http://iceuftblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/jamaica-graduates- go-out-with-bang.html
Have a great summer and as many of you already know, my wife Camille and I will be very busy with our newborn son Matthew John Eterno who was born on June 15, 2014.
Congrats to James and Camille. James is now an ATR due to the school's closing. Let's hope he finds a job.
Afterburn
I don't get it. Jamaica HS is practically a shell - what would it have taken for Farina to allow a freshman class to register if they so wished and actually make the school function again? Her allowing it to close is an admission of failure on her part - failure to come up with ideas to fix schools that have been branded, often unfairly, as failures -- broken maybe, but not failures. So may schools have had awful supervisors which again exposes the DOE to its own inability to figure out methods other than shutdowns and turnarounds which do not work for many of the kids. Claims that merely by making schools smaller is the answer have proven false. What is really behind closings is the dumping of staff, often senior teachers and replacing them with young, inexperienced teachers in the new schools. Of course these untenured people will jump when told and put in enormous hours of free labor while senior teachers might balk -- so from the corporate view, economic factors are operating -- trade experienced, high price labor for a higher volume of people. A business, not an educational model.
Well, maybe I do get it.
2 comments:
The closure of Jamaica HS is absolutely outrageous!
Why wasn't this appealed to the Commissioner of Education pursuant to Education Law §310 within thirty days of the announcement of the decision to close?
www.counsel.nysed.gov/appeals
If the Commissioner of Education didn't grant the appeal, then such decision would have been appealable to the NYS Supreme Court in Albany County pursuant to Article 78 of the Civil Practice Laws and Rules.
The city can close schools. The decision to close Jamaica and others was taken to court by UFT in 2011. They basically abandoned the case. Ask them why.
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