Government facility repairs are in itself a bureaucratic process, when it comes to this school. However, it is a bureaucratic nightmare. Sometimes it may even take decades to replace something as basic as the wall windows. The school is not even responsible for funding these renovations, they have to file a request to the city government for the resources.
The question of school accessibility is facilitated by the Department of Education (DOE) administrations. According to the NYC DOE website, the School Construction Authority for example specifically oversees DOE incentives concerning building projects such as school modernization and school construction- all of which John Dewey High School doesn’t oversee or control. As the Assistant Principal, Mr Messinger, puts it, “things like our school improvements, we do not use school funds for, we get separate grants or fundings to those,” and continued, saying “That’s (renovation) not money the school is going to put in for, that’s money that we’re asking the city to pay for.”
This is the only way the government can make sure that the school abides by its incentive. However, the problem here is that the system can be so mismanaged to the point where it may take years and even the passing of school generations as well for schools to even file for renovations which also includes window replacement.
He continues by saying “We (administrators) fill out once a year about wish-lists about what we want and what we expect . . . for the last twelve years I put the windows on the list.”
If it took Mr. Messinger twelve years to get the windows replaced, imagine how long it would take for the school to modernize its infrastructure to suit future generations.
This prospect gets even gets even bleaker when he mentions how our “auditorium was requested to be done (renovated) for the past twenty years,” and that his “predecessor was doing it”.
With how long it takes to get something added to the school and for it to get modernized, John Dewey may not have the chance to catch up over something it cannot control.
Due to the slow bureaucratic process of the school, many John Dewey commuters have been dissatisfied by this revelation. John Dewey High senior Leon Gladyshev expresses his discontent with the bureaucracy, addressing how the auditorium was treated specifically, saying “The fact that we weren’t able to use the auditorium for a few years does bug me.”
Gladyshev is one of the thousands of students here in John Dewey that have been affected in some way by the long process of government approval for this school. He, like many, has been denied a chance to experience and learn something that is conventional for other high schools.
If the attempts to improve our school takes such a process, requiring decades to even make the most basic of renovations, then it may expose a mismanaged bureaucracy at hand. This could absolutely mean that we aren’t pushing our government to do a better job at improving our school, and by extension our lives as well.
If anything, if we are going to improve our lives, we have to be more representative of ourselves, including expressing our discontent towards our officials and policy makers alike.