I did not, when we chose P.S. 307, go into this with naïveté. I understood exactly what we would face, could cite studies and statistics by heart. But when I wrote my essay, we were in the propitious years, with Najya just a kindergartner with two caring and astute co-teachers.
The district had placed one of its new universal pre-K programs at Najya’s school, and it had attracted other well-off families who enrolled their children the year we did, and many had stayed for kindergarten. Najya adored school and seemed to be reading and doing math on grade level. She was also developing a strong sense of herself as a Black girl in a classroom that, unlike the rest of the school, was multicultural and economically diverse, a reflection of the city and the world. At the start of each year, the students created self-portraits, and I chuckled with my husband when our light-skinned child chose to draw herself with the chestnut-colored crayon and not the beige one because that is how she saw herself.
But this did not, I suppose could not, last. The dynamic, exceptional principal who headed the school when we enrolled Najya into pre-K, a woman who had herself grown up in the public housing across the street and had turned this high-poverty school into a vibrant learning community, retired at the end of the year. It was soon clear that the new principal was not up to the task of sustaining the work of the veteran educator she had replaced.
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”