We Won!! (one more year!)

Now almost every student can graduate before we close.


That's what we were fighting for. Several teachers and at least one guidance counselor, who is also our union representative, worked creatively and poured much effort into this goal. Students wrote essays that are prominently placed on the homepage of the website www.bcnhs.org, and some spoke to the press. Almost every outreach had to be done under the radar.


That's because -- imagine this -- our principal and our local superintendent told us there was absolutely no chance to stay open. What kind of role models were they setting? One of active, involved citizenry? Our principal actually said aloud that we must not allow the students to express territoriality, as if the students are animals who might mark up the place, or worse. But a few ordinary people over a few weeks worked a miracle for the sake of the students. You have no idea how much resistance there was at the Department of Education. But the press was horrified, and THE PRINCIPAL REFUSED TO SPEAK TO AT LEAST 2 REPORTERS FROM DIFFERENT MEDIA.


I guess the principal didn't want to be recorded answering these questions:

1) When did you learn the school might close? What actions did you take to save it?
2) When you submitted a proposal to the Office of New Schools for a separate daytime transfer high school to be built in this building, did you know BCNHS was likely to close? Did you think of connecting the daytime transfer school to BCNHS so that both schools could possibly exist?
3) You are widely quoted as having said that you were ready to close up and leave in June, that you were not thrilled about the addition of the extra year added on. Would you comment please?


It was an outrage that administrative types at Tweed -- standing firmly on the sturdy shoulders of the local level administrators I know personally -- were exploiting our students by closing our "last chance" school a year earlier than promised, leaving over 100 students to transfer to yet ANOTHER high school, after they had settled into a place they were successful, BCNHS. (For some students, we are their 5th high school.)


Also, we are the last high school that allows students to graduate with under 40 credits, because we were chartered with a special dispensation allowing us forgo the gym requirement, which was holding back a lot of students at the time we were founded. Transferring to a school requiring more credits would make some of our students too old to graduate if the rules are enforced by traditional interpretation, so the Department of Education did not look too concerned about education when it insisted on closing us a year too early.


But, we won, meaning that the students won. Now we need to decide whether to decide something else. Should we use this year to design and propose a BCNHS 2.0?