Old, familiar faces

In 2008, Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School closed.

It is 2011 and the same dignitaries from what is now called the Department of Education arrived at my current school's graduation. They said the same words at this graduation as they said at BCNHS' graduations. This graduating class has "heart." For, at least, twelve years, BCNHS' June ceremony was one dignitary's "favorite graduation," because of how hard our students had fought to get to that moment. I sat there, and for the first time in years, I felt completely out of place.

There stood an individual who had voted to close my school. I wasn't angry. I was stunned. For years, we had received similar support. The same words, the same...except now we were all a little older and thicker in the waist.

I was very honored by my colleagues' work, by the true emotions of the students and the principal. But the ghosts were there. I felt like a ghost, as well.I felt as if I should leave the building. My world had been torn asunder by the same people staring down at my former students now. Now an alternate universe existed in which it was all happening again, but if it does exist, how can I also be part of it. One dignitary looked at me and then spoke to another person in hushed tones. I was, once more, an alien. In my heart it hit me that it would be nearly impossible for me to be accepted in my old district. I would have to look somewhere else, someplace where we were not all "old, familiar faces" to each other, and I did not know that the platitudes are spoken without true grace and in which I could be offered no grace to return, to try to become part of something new, to participate in the rituals of growth. Not here. Not in the old, familiar places. Not with the old, familiar faces.

What's ironic, of course, is Brooklyn Comprehensive was a small school before there was the first round of "New Small Schools" in the 1990's. So, what does this say about the current batch -- are these dignitaries going grant them the 19 years we had?

I suppose this is how people handle being involved in "Re-org's" in business, etc. But, like O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, the same person was the director of the new system as was the old. There isn't even the gesture of the glasses as a false comfort.