Although this is a sports blog, I'd like to take time out to address an important non-sports issue that's been plaguing my hometown for quite some time now, and that his finally been "solved."
Recently the Huntington School Board voted 4-3 to make all of the elementary schools in the district grades K - 4 instead of K - 3, and to move all of the students that are going into fifth grade and sixth grade at Jack Abrams School to Woodhull Intermediate School. Jack Abrams School, will most likely be used for adult education classes and tutoring, as well as an alternative high school in the future.
Originally - following a sharp rise in violence in the surrounding area of Jack Abrams School (especially a shooting that took place when kids were about to be put onto their buses on March 11) - the School Board had voted to move all fourth and fifth graders to Woodhull and only send sixth graders to Jack Abrams, but after the recent shooting of a 16 year old girl at a party near the school, it was decided that the school wasn't suitable for sixth graders either.
As many of you know, I went to Jack Abrams School back when it was known as Huntington Intermediate School. During that time, Lowndes Avenue, the street which the school was and is located on, was one of the worst streets in the neighborhood. It was gang-ridden, drug-ridden and every single adult and child in the district knew it. But nevertheless, during my three years there I never once felt threatened. The security guards - Ms. Gloria especially - were amazing and always made sure that every single student in the school felt as safe as possible. Ms. Gloria got around that school so fast, that to this day I still believe she can either teleport or that there was some secret shortcut that only she knew about.
During my sixth grade year, an event took place that changed the district forever. A shooting occurred during the school day on Tower Street, which borders the parking lot and the side of the building in which the administrative offices and sixth grade classrooms are located. I was in one of those sixth grade classrooms. The school was put on lock-down and over the PA system we were told to hide in the closets. Thankfully, the school was never put into any extra danger. Even after that day, I always felt safe going to school, a feeling that many adults also still shared.
Since then, I'm sad to say that the town surrounding the school has only gotten worse. Lock-downs have taken place repeatedly since the one I had back in sixth grade. I have numerous friends from the area, many of them who are outstanding, kind, caring people, but the number of bad apples and the magnitude of the violence in the area has only grown.
Originally, I was against moving any of the students from Jack Abrams Intermediate. I figured that I had been fine going there, so why couldn't these kids; it was one of those moments that grandparents have with their grandchildren, where they talk about how easy kids have it these days. I figured it was just a bunch of parents who didn't know the whole story, and were picturing the situation as worse than it actually was (I still feel a lot of parents dramatize the situation in the area more than they should). I mean it couldn't have gotten much worse than when I was there. Then I read about all the recent violence. The six shootings shootings that have taken place in the school's vicinity since March, and the increase in the magnitude of the gang violence there. I understood why more and more parents were deciding not to send their kids to school there.
Do I personally believe that the school is too dangerous for fourth, fifth and sixth grade students to attend? No. I believe that with a little additional security that the school would be safe enough to stay open. But I also feel that you'd have to be naive and overly optimistic to feel that the chance of a child being harmed, injured or even killed because of a gunfight or some type of violence isn't relatively high. Even if the chance of a child being injured or murdered was .001%, the school district would have the responsibility to protect its students.
Can you imagine the horror and awful misfortune of an innocent child dying during an episode of violence when all along, the district knew how poor of an area the school was in? What about if the kids were on the playground, and a gun went off on a bordering street. Can you believe the madness that would ensue even if no one was hurt. The district would never be the same and would receive terrible publicity for its lack of caution and responsibility. Numerous parents would immediately transfer their kids to private schools, and even move out of the district. No new families would want to move into Huntington for at least another decade with such a terrible mishap. Would you want your kids in a district where another child had just been shot or even harmed in any way. It's obvious that the district and town would go into a major rut.
The agony and misery that would spread across the town would be too much for anyone to handle, but on top of the emotional pain a death, injury or even harmful situation like that would cause, imagine what else would come out of it. It'd be one helluva lawsuit against the school district, and one lawsuit the district wouldn't be able to win. Where do you think the money for the loss in that lawsuit will come from? Have fun with that taxpayers.
The one problem that many say with moving all of the kids to one school is the concern about a possible increase in class sizes throughout the school district. With all of the moves taking place, the average class size for grades 1-6 would probably be around 30 kids, an extremely high number, especially with such young children. If classes bloated to that size, many parents would take their children out of the district and put them in private schools with smaller class sizes. Although the district would still be losing students, that number would be smaller than had the board voted to keep sixth graders at Jack Abrams. Bigger class sizes are also a small price to pay for the safety of students in the district.
People suggest the most positive solution to the problem: improve the neighborhood. People have been calling on town leaders to improve Huntington Station for years now, but now more than ever, people are pleading with the town to do something about the increasing violence.
It's a great solution for everyone; the school stays open, and the town gets the help it needs to root out violence. What's better than that? But although it certainly would be the best way out, it's also the most idealistic and therefore most unlikely solution. Although I think of myself as an optimist, I'm also a realist, and one of the main things the town would need to improve Huntington Station is time, and lots of it. Well guess what? That's exactly what the town doesn't have. The school year starts in just over a month, and based on the lack of improvement or help that Huntington Station has received over the past five years, it's tough to believe that the town and/or county would be able to snap their fingers and fix everything. Town and county leaders have done an awful job in Huntington Station in the past, and it's naive for anyone to think that they'd start taking the hands on approach that the town needs immediately.
There's nothing I'd like more than to see Huntington Station's streets become safe, to see gang violence disappear, to see gang members put in jail, and to see my old school that I love so dearly to be saved; but all of that change is far away. For now however, the parents of Huntington have to be reassured that their children can learn in a safe environment. With numerous threats from parents to pull their children out of the school system either temporarily or permanently, the school board needed to take action, if not to save themselves, then to save the school district and the town of Huntington itself. The school board waited as long as they could to make this change, and hopefully when Town Hall decides to take more action and clean up the streets of Huntington Station, then and only then, will Jack Abrams School once again be rightfully known as Jack Abrams Intermediate School.
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