New York City, February 12—Students, parents and teachers united at a Brooklyn high school to call out the racist Department of Education (DoE) after they tried to cover up a dangerously slow response to a gas leak. For over an hour, gas leaked from a pipe in the stairwell before DOE officials evacuated the mainly Black school. Many could have died, and this dangerous fact showed the school community that the racist, capitalist education bosses really don’t care about our lives!
School administrators listened to the advice of one of the DOE’s higher-ups, to not evacuate, believing that it might be the custodians refueling snow plowers. Despite common sense and known protocol to evacuate and then investigate when there is a strong gas smell, staff and students were held inside classrooms and told to open windows when staff and students reported feeling ill.
Workers’ instincts vs reliance on the bosses
Our school community followed orders, erroneously putting faith in the racist school bosses instead of following our instinct to protect each other and evacuating immediately. Many agree that the lesson to be drawn is to not trust the bosses by blindly following orders. Staff promised that next time, they would evacuate their students regardless of what the bosses say. This racist attack, as many students and parents correctly noted, would not have occurred if the students were non  working class and non-white.
To add insult to injury, when we were finally evacuated, school safety (run by the NYPD) told us not to cross the street or evacuate to a nearby school, putting us once again in harm’s way. Fortunately this time, staff smartened up and decided to take matters into their own hands. Many staff started blocking traffic themselves so that our population of approximately 1,500 students could cross to safety. One staff member was bumped by a car as he tried to stop oncoming traffic. It became very clear that workers’ instinct to protect our kids, not reliance on the bosses’ expertise was what was going to keep students safe.Despite this extremely dangerous situation, there was no sign of NYPD at the evacuation scene. One parent later pointed out how a few months ago, 11 cop cars and vans had rushed to the school to intimidate a group of about 100 parents and students peacefully protesting the removal of three respected and loved football coaches, but were nowhere to be seen when they were needed to protect our students. This was another lesson for the school community. The primary role of the police is to protect this racist, unequal system, not to protect the working class.
When the building was finally deemed safe by the fire department, the DOE stooges once again managed to turn re-entering the school into another dangerous situation. Instead of following usual protocol to reenter the building using three separate entrances to expedite the process, only one entrance was used; keeping these young people, some without coats, outside in the snow for almost an extra hour.
In keeping with a long-standing and damaging racist culture of over-policing and scanning Black youth, hundreds of students waited on the slippery steps in the snow and hail to be scanned. Two students were taken by Emergency Medical Services due to asthma/panic attacks as the situation unfolded.
Parent-student-worker unity
Students, staff, and parents outraged at the handling of this situation, organized to demand answers. The three staff union chapters met to discuss next steps, including how to act in a future situation and organizing a political response. An angry letter calling out the DOE’s racism and lack of care for students and staff was drafted, approved, and sent to the mayor and the school’s chancellor.
This was the first time in almost a decade that all three union chapters met together, which was a step towards fighting the alienation between staff that has been created with the small schools movement. There was some struggle over fighting backward anti-parent and anti-student ideas amongst campus staff. Some teachers felt parents and students would not be willing to or even capable of organizing a response. Yet these teachers were proven wrong when several parents wrote scathing letters, came up to school to question why their children’s lives were not taken seriously, and boldly spoke up at a “safety” meeting organized by the school administration.
When DOE representatives tried to blame staff’s lack of training in emergency situations for what happened, parents and teachers openly called out the DOE for trying to cover up their racist disregard for students’ safety. An alliance between parents, students, and staff is essential to defeating the racist bosses. The bosses intentionally try to divide us and when we unite, it strikes fear in the bosses.
The lesson of the day was that students, staff, and parents need to rely on each other and not the bosses to ensure our survival. We don’t need the bosses, and trusting them could prove deadly.