I’ve got Thomas Jefferson on my mind. This time, it’s not the man or what he represents.
I’m thinking of Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School, known to some as TJ, others as Jeff. This school was built in the 1920’s along Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania Avenue, in East New York. It’s a school building from that era, that in and of itself is like a time capsules: you walk through their doors and are instantly delighted by the real wood trim, wood lockers in the rooms, the beautiful tile floors, and the generous dimensions of its classrooms and hallways. Schools are not built like this anymore.
The school entrance includes a grand lobby, with a large statue of Thomas Jefferson himself. This adorned space is graced with column after column of gold plated plaques with names of students- “best of this” and “most likely that.” Yet this space feels like a monument to the school’s past, and most certainly, not to its present, even though the school remains open. That is, although that building still stands there, there is no Thomas Jefferson High School anymore. The NYC Dept of Education closed that school in 2007, one of many high schools that was shuttered because of “poor performance.”
The story of East New York, Brooklyn is a rich one, and not at all mine to tell. From what I have learned, multiple iterations of bank scandals and city disinvestment has left this part of Brooklyn vastly under-resourced. As part of the cycles of disinvestment, East New York gradually became home to African American people, becoming more and more under-resourced each decade. I’ve read histories by Walter Thabit, there’s a fascinating oral history here, podcasts about ongoing gentrification in ENY. And no doubt, when you type in East New York Brooklyn into google, the first suggested question reads: Is East New York safe? How bad is East New York? These days, you can drive through East New York and notice that one of the shiniest, newest buildings there is none other than some kind of Juvenile Detention Center. The police stop-and-frisk numbers are highest there city-wide. In fact, I think East New York might be the epicenter of that particular epidemic.
In something like 2013, I spent a year teaching Calculus at East New York Family Academy, another secondary public school in the neighborhood. This school is focused around community, from its name and outwards, and notably is led by African American administrators, who have held long tenure there. That school does not have metal detectors and really seems to be a counterpoint to Jeff. I remain in touch with some of the remarkable young people I taught there. But back to Jeff, where school metrics were notoriously low, as part of most things that we measure being down and being kept down. The NYPD, or maybe the NYPost, dubbed it something like the “killing fields,” and that can’t have done much for the school or for nearby real estate values.
So in 2007, the NYC Dept of Education closed Jefferson High School and opened up a collection of smaller schools, housing them inside that building. The rationale was to support principals to work with smaller numbers of students. Yet the Jefferson building itself still stands, regardless of the school status. It is one of the school buildings in NYC in which people would whisper to me, “Teachers have been shot in here.” Or “It is because of what happened here in this school that they have metal detectors now.”
To enter Thomas Jefferson High School, one must pass through metal detectors, which are manned by NYPD personnel, in uniform. Kids need to get to school early, line up rain or shine, and pass through one by one. They must take off their shoes and belts as they go through, as if they are passing through flight security. Except there is no flight. What awaits students each day is 1st period. When you get through all of that, and your math teacher wants to know why you haven’t done your homework, it’s easy to understand why you might rest your head onto a desk in total despair.
When I was teaching a class at Jefferson High School as part of a partnership with Brooklyn College CUNY, at first, I stood on that line with the students. The officers would flag me to come out of the line, as if I had the special TSAA pass, motioning to me that I could just walk in.
Wait a second — what are the metal detectors for? Whom are they protecting and from what? Safety and security — for who?
I felt like I wanted, no needed, to bear witness to this daily spectacle and stand there in that line. I watched in horror how these youth had to start their day, every day, in this interaction with the police, or “school safety officers” in the local parlance.
On one visit, I paid closer attention to the lobby. I took in the statue of Thomas J., behind velvet ropes, as well as the names of the outstanding students on the wall. Yes, some famous people studied there: two favorites of mine are Howard Zinn and Ezra Jack Keats. That’s when I noticed — those names stopped at something like the late 1940’s, exactly at the turning point for East New York, when red-lining processes did their thing to the city and especially shaped this neighborhood.
But how is it possible that in that Thomas Jefferson building, after all a SCHOOL, youth begin every day by being criminalized through the daily process of being scanned by police officers? They then face the lobby walls with the names of the honored alumni but must notice that those names stop with the year that this became a school for Black children?
Once, inside that building, I was a visitor in a geometry class. The teacher was a new teacher and had trouble getting the kids interested in the topic of the day. The kids were kids, funny, energetic, full of smiles, as kids tend to be. At one point, when the rookie teacher made a rookie mistake and had his back to the class for too long, one boy took a clementine out of his bag and tossed it to a friend across the room. There were plenty of snickers. The tossing of the clementine continued, back and forth, every time the teacher went back to write on the board. I’d say I was as amused as everyone else, certainly more so by this back and forth clementine than the dry, out of context geometry proof being scribed on the board slowly by the teacher.
Eventually, OOPS, the clementine went astray and hit the teacher in the back. You know, just like “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” it was “it’s all fun and games until you hit the teacher.”
The teen was sent to the principal, and then later taken by uniformed police, under the charge of assaulting a teacher. In this case, the teacher and the principal were African American as well, but they too are part of this messed up system.
I bore witness to the reality in that school building. I tried to speak out in my own way, but I definitely did not do enough. Not enough, not by a mile. Writing this isn’t enough, either. On those days, I would leave East New York and sometimes cry in my car. How ridiculous, right? After all, I was only visiting there there once a week for a few hours at a time.
Most of my friends in NYC have never been to Jefferson, or even to East New York. They might pride themselves on living in such a “diverse city,” but are oblivious to how segregated the schools are. Schools with many or most of its students African American is not inherently problematic, of course. What’s problematic is how youth — children — in these schools are criminalized. When white children are present, then children are, of course, not treated this way. Because, really, why would we treat children as if they are criminals?
Could we claim some of the wall space in the Jefferson lobby to make clear that Black Lives Matter? Maybe this has already been done? I’d love to see it. Schools are no place for police officers, no place for metal detectors, unless, of course, its students are considered already to be criminals. Shame on NYC for doing this to its youth of color in low-income neighborhoods. And shame on those of us (myself included), for standing by and doing not enough to stop it.
