By MELISSA KISSOON

Melissa Kissoon is an 18-year-old graduate of Brooklyn’s Franklin K. Lane High School, which will close this year. The school began to “phase-out” to make way for new small schools while she was a junior. She is a youth leader with Future of Tomorrow and the Urban Youth Collaborative. This blog post was adapted from the [EdVox.org website.]

I was victim of a high school phase out.  Do you know what it’s like to have four new schools come into your school building?

The first year after the Department of Education announced that my school, Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, would be closed, we weren’t allowed to set foot on the fourth floor anymore. The next year, the DOE split the rest of the floors in halves. So, if your classroom was around the corner, you could no longer just walk over to your room. You’d have to go upstairs and around and back down stairs to make it to your class. As a result of this, many students were late for their classes. Students missed class time and got in trouble because our school was chopped up and our building was divided!

The great teachers we once loved either switched to the other schools in the building or left. There is no longer a library in the building, because Lane doesn’t have enough money for a library and the other four schools have small budgets. Students with essays due and no printer or computer can’t print—then they struggle to figure out how to pass their class.<!--more-->

Almost all the after school activities belong to the other schools, including the sports and the ROTC. Two of my friends are in their last year at Lane. One of them is only taking one academic class. He scored well on his SAT and is applying to Brown University but there are no Advanced Placement classes for him to take and he is done with school every day at noon. My other friend was told last year that he had enough credits to graduate. He was 16, a junior and not ready for college. There is a difference between having enough credits to graduate, getting a rigorous education, and being prepared for college.

The phase out has failed us all, hundreds of us in Brooklyn and thousands of us in New York City. I was a cheerleader, so school pride was important to me. There is no longer school pride, there is no encouragement, there are no familiar teachers, there are no resources to help us pass. All that remains is a push, a push out of the school by any means possible.

I graduated and I’m in college now, at City Tech. But I look back at the last four years of my life and I feel robbed of my high school experience. My school was no longer MY school; I was basically being kicked out of a school that made a promise to support me and give me all I need to pass. If the Department of Education is truly committed to students, they must include us in decisions about OUR education.