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Uproar Is Political and Parental in Paterson School Shutdown
By Nate Schweber and Anne Barnard
PATERSON, N.J., Sept. 7 — All 52 of the schools in this run-down city’s troubled district were shuttered Friday on short notice, locking out 28,000 students. The shutdown set off a political brawl between the mayor and district officials after city inspectors found what they said were scores of dangerous fire-code violations at half of the schools.
Students in Paterson lost a day in class as the mayor and the district blamed each other.
Working parents frantically searched for baby sitters they said they could ill afford. They wondered why city officials allowed the schools to open on Thursday despite the violations, which included faulty alarm systems and missing ceiling tiles — and why school administrators had failed to fix problems that in some cases dated to 2006.
And football players and fans alike lamented the last-minute cancellation of Saturday’s season opener against rival Clifton High School.
A spokeswoman for the school district, New Jersey’s third largest, accused Mayor José Torres of creating the crisis in order to divert attention from political pressure he faces over property tax assessments, which culminated in a rally outside City Hall on Friday.
The mayor accused the school district, which has been under state control for years, of hiring a maintenance contractor who filed reports falsely claiming to have repaired fire violations. Although he declined to name the contractor, he said he had referred the matter to Passaic County prosecutors.
Friday evening, after fire and school officials spent all day addressing the problems, Mayor Torres said all of the school buildings would reopen Monday, and that the district would have 30 days to fix violations at the 26 schools with the worst problems. State officials said crews would work all weekend to remedy the violations.
But the one-day crisis comes amid controversies that in recent months have strained a community already struggling with poverty, crime and a school system so dysfunctional that it has been under state control since 1991.
In July, the State Department of Education announced that it was returning partial local control to two other troubled districts, Jersey City and Newark, but that Paterson would remain state-run because it had not made as much progress. In an August letter, the state informed Paterson’s superintendent, Michael E. Glascoe, that it would not renew his contract next year unless he made significant improvements during the school year.
Meanwhile, many residents are simmering over a property-value reassessment two years ago that they say led to unfairly higher tax bills.
On Friday, the school district spokeswoman, Laura Constable, called the abrupt school closings “productive” for Mayor Torres because they “deflected a lot of the attention away from his whole situation with property taxes.”
The closings came the very day of the march outside City Hall, which angry residents had scheduled long ago to protest their higher tax bills.
Veronica Callegari-Valentin, 34, who led several dozen people in the demonstration, said the mayor “had the whole summer to make sure your schools are in order,” and accused him of creating the crisis “to make sure they weren’t in this building to face us.”
Mayor Torres said he acted only to protect schoolchildren.
“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they say this is political,” he said in an interview. “If you can wake up in the morning with two inches of ice and close the schools, how could I not do it when the fire official said there are more than 200 violations?”
Failure to act, he said, would be “a violation on our part.”
On Thursday evening, after the first day of school, the mayor notified the district that 26 of 52 schools would be shut down because they were “imminent hazards.”
School officials then decided to close all 52 schools, Ms. Constable said, because opening half of them would have created problems with school bus routes and the academic calendar.
Mayor Torres said school officials were notified of all the problems in August, but Ms. Constable said the district learned of 49 of the 267 violations only on Thursday night.
She cited School No. 1, an elementary, where the violations included five unsafe extension cords and missing ceiling tiles, accusing the mayor of keeping the school’s “400 students out of classes for something that could have been rectified in an hour.”
But inspectors also cited missing sprinkler heads at the school. At other schools they noted missing smoke alarms or emergency lights; at nine other schools they found what they called “Fire alarm in trouble.”
Ms. Constable said she wasn’t aware of the contractor the mayor said filed false reports, but she acknowledged that there may have been “miscommunication” between the district and its own maintenance department about which repairs had been done.
Some students and parents received automated voice messages Thursday night saying school would be closed; others showed up Friday morning to find a notice pinned to the school doors: “This premises is unsafe due to violations of the Uniform Fire Code.”
Kimberly Freeman’s two oldest daughters, Amanee, 6, and Jasmine, 7, were supposed to be in first and second grade; instead Ms. Freeman, 27, took them and their four younger siblings to buy ice cream.
“I was mad, because they had since August to fix these problems,” she said. “Now our kids got to miss school because they didn’t want to fix the problems.”
Elvis Reyes, 36, who works two jobs, driving a truck and running a car wash, had to find a baby sitter for his daughter, Chrisvel, 5, a kindergartner at Dale Avenue School.
“We don’t have money to pay for baby sitters; we’re counting on the school,” he said. “We have to do our job. This Board of Education isn’t doing its job.”
Nate Schweber reported from Paterson and Anne Barnard from New York.
— Nate Schweber and Anne Barnard
New York Times
2007-09-08
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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