FISCAL DISASTER IN PUERTO RICO CLAIMS NEW CASUALTY: SCHOOLS
Closures yet another indicator of emergency gripping the island which has sent hundreds of thousands of people packing in the past decade
Natalia Hernandez stood before dawn with a bullhorn in her hand in front of the mountainside elementary school in Puerto Rico that four generations of her family attended, rattling off its academic accomplishments. More than half the pupils are on the honour roll. There are tutors, a social worker and even a speech therapist, she said. But there has been an exodus of families from Puerto Rico in the face of its economic collapse, so little Luis Santaella School has a big problem: Only 146 children are enrolled compared with about 250 in the past.
And so, like 178 other schools across the island, it is set to close after the last day of the school term this week, in part to help Puerto Rico battle debt and pension obligations of US$123 billion. The school, perched alongside a winding twolane road, will join the many casualties of a fiscal crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy last week and sent hundreds of thousands of people packing in the past decade.
The school will join the shuttered businesses and abandoned homes as yet another indicator of the emergency gripping Puerto Rico and the desperate efforts to stop the haemorrhaging.
For some, the closings represent not just another chip at Puerto Rico’s national budget, but also an opportunity to transform a struggling education system in which some schools are infested with termites, enrolment has dropped by nearly a third since 2010, and just 10% of eighth graders passed the standardised maths test.
But for parents like Hernandez, the cuts feel both catastrophic and capricious.
“She closed this school without visiting it!” Hernandez said, explaining the parents’ decision to park themselves at the school’s front gates to prevent teachers, students or the principal from going inside. Her son, Javian, 10, missed class all week.
By “she”, Hernandez was referring to Julia Keleher, the Washington-based consultant who was recently named secretary of education in Puerto Rico. Keleher took control of the school system in January, a few months after Puerto Rico’s affairs were taken over by a governing board in New York.
The oversight board has warned that the government must save up to $40 million a month, suggesting that about 300 schools close and that teachers be furloughed two days a month.
As a former federal education official with experience in Detroit and Washington, Keleher said, the concept of receivership is not foreign to her.
“We have to close schools,” Keleher said in an interview on Monday. “We are going to close schools.”
The plan Keleher announced is less draconian than the one the fiscal board had suggested. She insists that the consolidation is not just about saving money, but improving student performance and empowering local officials to be accountable for what happens at their schools.
She has covered her office’s long conference room table with spread sheets. She whipped out a tablet with pie charts and bus routes as she laid out the possibilities she said would be opened when waste is eliminated.
She said schools built for 800 students had just 300 enrolled. The district was still paying for water and power for abandoned school buildings. There are teacher shortages in some schools and surpluses in others. School facilities are rotting and infested with rats.
If two $1 million schools merge, she said, the new $2 million school can afford computer labs that twice as many students could use.
“This is not about closing schools,” she said. “This is about creating these kinds of opportunities with this savings in budget.”
Aida Díaz, the president of a teachers’ union, says that while everyone recognises some schools are in deplorable condition and others are underutilised, Keleher’s data-driven approach fails to consider nuances.
Looking at the list of closings, she noted that two schools whose communities were longtime rivals were being merged. Another school populated mostly by children who live in public housing was being merged with a school 10 minutes away by highway — but it is unlikely that their parents have cars.
Keleher said some schools did remain open for reasons just like those, including avoiding long commutes for children in rural areas. The list of closings dropped by five just since Friday.
“There is no sense in getting mad: Schools will have to close,” Díaz said.
Emilio Nieves Torres, who heads a different teachers’ union, said government officials were misleading the public about the cuts.
Although Keleher has vowed “not to fire anybody,” at least 5,000 teachers work on year-to-year contracts, and in order for the consolidation to result in real savings, thousands of contracts will not be renewed, he said.