Salem Schools Looking For a Home—and Accessibility

As reported by the Salem News, the new charter school, Salem Community Charter School is looking for space.  Museum Place is one possibility they’re looking at;  the former Saint Joseph’s Rectory is another.

As well, the Saltonstall School is being renovated and Salem is scrambling to find space for their students, and for a special-needs program at the Collins.

The rectory will need a year’s worth of work before it is useable as a school.  The Boston diocese did not offer their other properties such as St. John’s School and one official has speculated it is due to ADA issues.

A regular member of the commentariat at the Salem News weighed in on both stories with a refrain I am too familiar with as a member of the disability community in Salem.  To paraphrase:  “Why do we have to serve a small minority of students.  Forget that touchy-feely stuff of [disabled kids].  It’s an emergency—use the parochial schools!”

(It’s an emergency;  does that mean emergency no-bid contracting?  The member of the commentariat is a Tea Partier and I presume for less government and taxation and against the charming “emergency” measures that have often concealed thefts of the public purse.  I’m getting off the point here.)

Here’s a scenario the hardest-bitten conservative can relate to:

John Jones is a decorated veteran.  A wounded veteran who came home from Afghanistan or perhaps Iraq.  There’s no way he’s gonna get up and down stairs unless he rolls.  Downhill, possibly not under his own control.

He has kids.  He has a daughter, a true daddy’s girl that goes to the Saltonstall, or perhaps the new charter school or the Academy charter school.

His girl isn’t one of these special-needs snowflakes;  she’s a normal active girl.  Except that she’s an athlete and a ball player and there was that unseen posthole in the outfield one day when she was running out a grounder.

She’ll be hopping around for some time.

Now, Dad is deciding on schools, perhaps his family’s moved to Salem or his girl is making a change.  Remember choice?  That’s what the charter schools were supposed to be about.  Choice, choice, choice!

You will tell Dad the vet, wounded for our sins (“freedom isn’t free”, mind?), that he and his daughter cannot participate as parent and child in their own school system?

Good luck with that.

While many people use patriotism to worship respect our soldiers, few of them realize something I’ve thought of.

If you count all the veterans still living from all wars, and those that are wounded and disabled, I suspect they don’t make up a large number.

In Salem, I have heard estimates that 20% of Salemmites have a disability.  Not all of them are of school age, of course.

I am certain that the 20% is not all made up of veterans.

Yet if I suggested that  veterans should not get help because their numbers are so few, I’m certain I would be assaulted in an alleyway.  (Freedom isn’t free…)

I have no animosity towards veterans—I’m too young to have ever spat upon a Vietnam veteran, and have never said a word of disrespect to them (perhaps, I have done this to the politicians who task them, but…)   Salem’s veteran groups are natural allies of the Commission on Disabilities and always will be.

I have to wonder why the diocese of Boston is not aggressive with its surplus properties.  Despite what Rand Paul would have you believe, in Massachusetts, any given building does not have to be made ADA accessible to current codes merely as if the authorities waved a pixie wand and made it so.

The requirement to make a building ADA compliant per current code very much depends on the use of the building, the age of the building and the intended use of the building.  There were several revisions to Massachusetts building codes for handicapped access and by the current law, a building constructed say, in 1978, only has to meet accessibility requirements for 1978.  I have several large (and large-print) binders with all the laws to date.

If a building is used for general business purposes, it may or may not need to be brought up to ADA access.  Often in Salem, buildings have been repurposed and have never been made accessible because there were very few if any renovations performed.

A benchmark the Commission often discusses is the “one-third rule” or “30% rule” or “hitting 30%”.  That refers  to the current value of the building.  If any proposed renovations exceed 30% of this value, the building must be brought fully up to ADA and Massachusetts code.

Even then, developers and architects have considerable wiggle room.  The law does not say absolute accommodations, merely reasonable accommodations.  The Mass. Architectural Access Board (MAAB) will grant variances if the regulations are burdensome or do not benefit.

A few years ago, the state renovated a home in North Salem to use as a group home.  By the letter of the law it would have needed an expensive elevator.  The developer convinced the MAAB that the only space that the public would access was the ground floor.  The ground floor of the building was brought up to code with HP parking and no steps, but there didn’t need to be an elevator.  

I’ve been in St. John’s School before, and is not so much a charming old fashioned parochial school as it is a dump, no disrespect to Catholics meant.  There are stairs everywhere.  It could be impossible to get variances for this or any of the other school buildings involved.

Don’t forget, too, that the staff and teachers have to use the space as well.  People get old and infirm, or have a negative encounter with an icy front step.  If you think there’s controversy over accommodating students, just wait until it’s a teacher with a grievance!

I have to wonder if the diocese fears that the values of their properties have fallen so much that any renovations at all to them would require them to be fully up to code.  After all, it isn’t only handicapped access at stake but also electrical, plumbing, fire safety and communications cabling that need to be upgraded as well.

Whatever the case, this is something you can’t blame on the special-needs snowflakes, “those people” or the ADA activists.  Salem schools are indeed in a pickle.  But they would be anyway even if you deported all the disabled to Lynn.

Educational classism and our broken state colleges

Deval Patrick is looking for $2 billion to renovate state college campuses:

[Corrected figure--Thanks, Henry!]

At Fitchburg State College, decades-old lead pipes in the science center mean students can't drink the water. Bunker Hill Community College hasn't added a building since it opened in 1973, forcing it to hold overflow classes late at night and on weekends. Salem State College has closed its 38-year-old library indefinitely because of fears its foundation is failing.

"When students and parents see Jersey barriers around the library, that's hard to explain," said Patricia Maguire Meservey, president of Salem State College. Newcomers to the college's science facilities, she said, feel as though "they are stepping back in time."

I'm a graduate of Salem State (class of '87) and I can confirm both these points. I had a work-study job at the library for the five years I was there. Even then, there were serious problems with the building. One year, the elevators had to be taken out of service: The roof over the elevator shaft leaked and seriously rusted one of the elevator cabs, at the top where the cables are attached.

The physics lab I had classes in had barely changed since Meier Hall was built in the '60's. The second-semester physics lab, which covered electromagnetic theory, used 30-year old voltohmmeters. They were in good shape, but I had newer tools at home as an electronics enthusiast. I and my lab supervisor probably would have preferred newer Fluke meters that are safer and less prone to being blown up or broken by clumsy students.

You'd think we'd want a good state college system with enough money to let those students on the wrong end of the economic scale (as I was then) have the same opportunities as Harvard-educated students, but that's not so.

Earlier this year, State Rep Doug Petersen (D-Marblehead), was speaking at a Swampscott School Committee earlier this year about school aid.

Quote via Pazdziernik:

When answering a question dealing with state aid and the disparity of aid between Swampscott and Lynn, Petersen said, “At no point has anyone from Swampscott ever called me, nor will they ever call me to get their child into a Lynn school,” Petersen said. He continued to say, a lot of Swampscott kids are going to be captains of industry someday and you want those Lynn kids to be educated because they are your future employees.

“The way I used the analogy was wrong and if I could take it back and do it again I certainly would,” Petersen said.

“I certainly wish I could have phrased it in a different way,” Petersen said. (State Rep. Petersen backpedals on insults to Lynn students by Henry J. Collins, The Daily Item)

Translation: He wishes that he hadn't spoken from his heart. There are things that no elected official can ever say out loud and this is one of them. But I have no doubt that, to a person, most if not all state elected officials have this same thought in mind.

(Rep. Petersen's Youtube appearance.)

In the early '90's, a few years after I graduated from Salem State, the Boston Globe wrote an editorial I was very upset with. The editorial--unfortunately locked up behind the paywall of Lexis--expressed gratitude that Massachusetts had both a concentration of prestigious private schools (Harvard, MIT, etc.) and a state college system, and that the graduates of these private schools had a state college system to turn out workers for them. In other words as best I remember: We have private schools to turn out entrepreneurs and public schools to turn out the little folk who work for these bigshots.

There wasn't a lot of outrage over that editorial, perhaps a letter or two. No doubt that Globe editorial spoke for a lot of people.

Another quote from LaborStandard.org:

That question leaps to the heart of the matter, and the answer is a not-so-simple: “No, of course not, but… yes.” No, the upper-class kids are not inherently better than their working class peers. The indignation of the Lynn parent is based on the democratic ideal that all Americans are created equal. Confronted by demeaning words, this parent demands respect for all the children of Lynn. It is an expression of stubborn pride and rebellion, not at all encouraged in America, at least not in the working class, and it deserves to be applauded.

Yet the reality is that while the Swampscott kids are no better, they will, in fact, lead better lives. They will, on the average, attend better schools with better-qualified teachers, will obtain better jobs, will have better access to quality health care and medical insurance, and will live longer—all of which adds up to a better life. The economic, legal, and political system of America, on every level, will better accommodate their interests and will guarantee that this better treatment will be passed on to their children.

This is outright classism: Education is the great equalizer amongst all classes. I am offended that we would let our college system decay just because "those people", those lower-class people, "the little people", the "drones", want to work for the same opportunities that someone in private school has taken for granted. I'll never forget, nor forgive, the gibe that Marblehead high-school students use on one another to this day: "You could end up at Salem State!"

Consider our governor, Deval Patrick: He got his start at Milton Academy after being fortunate enough, as an inner-city youth, to be accepted into A Better Chance, the program that develops gifted African-American youths. Good for him.

But how much better for us would it have been to have our next governor be a graduate of our state system, of Roxbury Community College or Bunker Hill Community College, for example! Imagine if those institutions were so good that they could feed good, proud, graduates into our 4 year colleges, or even our private schools! Imagine if we had a public law school (Massachusetts doesn't) in a state where a law degree is a de facto prerequisite to higher office. Imagine higher officials who actually love the state and want to live and stay here! (Most of us state college alumni don't go anywhere.)

Our own Mayor Driscoll, of course, is a proud graduate of Salem State, but there is an educational glass ceiling between her and those in state government with real power, most of whom went to private schools, some of them all the way from high school (see "Triple Eagles".)

Those people really do believe the good go to private schools and the drones go to public schools. The state colleges won't get anything as long as this philosophy doesn't change.

I don't expect it to.