BY ABBY FOX

Figuring a quick review of Cole Junior High was in order before the $52 million school bond vote on Nov. 4, the Pendulum got a good look at the 52-year-old building last week. Cole’s rehabilitation and transformation into a true middle school, for sixth, as well as seventh and eighth graders, is the biggest piece of the bond, definitely worth a final glance.

Teachers

With a dysfunctional heating system that cooks one part of the building while the other stays cold, and without screens for the windows, air quality and circulation is perhaps the most urgent problem for many classrooms.

Seventh grade science teacher Kelly Grennan showed her windows that are bolted shut. “It’s so hot and stuffy here; I don’t get enough ventilation,” she said. “I had a student taken away twice with breathing issues.” When the sun shines through in the afternoon and by the end of the school year, “it has gotten up into the 90s,” she said. Needless to say, there’s no air conditioning in the building.

“Put a child in a classroom that’s 95 degrees, they aren’t going to be as engaged, they aren’t going to want to produce” as they would in a more comfortable environment, Principal Mike Zajac said.

And in winter, Grennan and, the teachers around her may have windows open, while another teacher down the hall may want to keep a coat on.

This time of year is cooler, of course, but wet weather and the onset of winter brings other problems, like the “brown spots on my floor,” she said, from the seepage outside.

Grennan teaches in the front, left part of the building, the section that can get up into the 90s, while other teachers on the other side can be twenty degrees colder, with “their breath coming out of their mouth, it’s so cold,” as Zajac put it. “To heat the back, you have to cook the front.”

Cole “is just not a healthy building,” Grennan said. “When teachers are sick, constantly, it’s hard to teach.”

Despite being a science teacher, Grennan doesn’t have a sink, and thus no running water for lab work. So she carries water in from the bathroom, which takes away from teaching time. “We’re doing lab-based work in a non-lab classroom,” she said.

When the mold grew worse, recently, the ceiling insulation in Grennan’s classroom was taken out and now, “I can hear the mice running in the ceiling,” she said. “I didn’t hear them before, because of the insulation.”

To sum it up, “the building does not reflect the quality of education,” she said.

Donna Militello is another teacher who has to deal with mice. Despite a mousetrap, the little guys have dropped their droppings, urinated on, and eaten, her supplies. She showed chewed-up poster from her supply closet.

Then Militello pointed to a few ceiling tiles in the middle of the classroom. “The ceiling has fallen several times,” she said, because of water seepage from the rain. “It only happens, thank God, when kids aren’t in here.”

Another teacher who calls Cole a “sick building” is Joanne Leach, and she’s one of the luckier ones, because she teaches in a temperature-controlled trailer. But there’s a “bad smell” from the water that seeps in underneath, she said, and several students have runny noses and eye problems. They also trip on the asbestos tiles, she said, pointing to some that are coming up from the floor outside her room.

Jody Mangiaratti knows about bad odors; across the way from Leach, her classroom is next to a bathroom; so, not only do the students hear the toilets flushing and running water during class, but they smell the permeating “sewer air,” as the district describes the smell.

Useless locker rooms

Former principal Joseph Militello opened up the boys’ locker room for a look. The drains don’t work and students can’t use the showers. In the girls’ locker, the showers are used to store the sports equipment. There’s no heat, so plastic is put on the windows to keep the warmth in.

Since Minatello, the principal for 28 years before Mike Zajac took over, was in the building during the tour, he was asked about the lack of maintenance that could have produced such a dilapidated building. No, he said, the issue hasn’t really been a failure of maintenance, but “it’s just a matter of growing old and worn. This is a cinderblock building on a slab,” and up against “tight budgets,” the building fell apart from the “deterioration over time” more than “neglect,” he said.

Moving, all day long

Hanging out in the cafeteria can demonstrate how congested and cramped Cole is. Music teacher Brian Levesque doesn’t have his own music room; so he has turned the stage into a makeshift classroom. Three times a week, during lunch, he loses instructional time every time his class has to move their instruments from his “class” in the cafeteria to the gym.

 “It’s a good ten-minute process,” Vice  Principal Alexis Meyer said.

The cafeteria is also a scene of extracurricular jostling, as the drama club and the cheerleaders are compete for practicing room there, which is another scheduling headache for staff. What’s more, the drama club may practice here, but as there are no lights, the stage can’t be performed on, which means all the shows take place at the high school.

“Research shows that the more children participate in extracurricular activities, the higher their GPA and achievement,” Zajac said. “We have a lot of successful programs, but due to lack of space, we can’t have as many as we’d like.”

Small spaces

Zajac’s other example of space shortage is the language classes.

About 77 percent of the students take a foreign language, Zajac said, which is “incredible,” except for the fact there’s barely any room to learn. There are two Spanish teachers and a part-time Latin teacher and a part-time French teacher, or what the school defines as a total of 3.2 teachers, all sharing a classroom.

“It has a direct impact on instruction, not having your own classroom, there’s no doubt,” he said.

The room shortages also impinges on administrators, trying to meet with other administrators, students, or parents.

 “Meetings are a logistical nightmare,” he said.

“We have to jockey around the buildings to find a room,” he said. “It gets to the point where we have to get up and move, or displace a teacher. When a parent or a child is quite upset, it’s very uncomfortable to have to say, ‘we have to move to another location’ such as the home ec room or an empty classroom.”

And then there are the closets, when the classrooms are full and there’s nowhere else to go.

“We have people in closets, seeing students in closets,” Meyer said, including a social worker, the police department’s  student resource officer, information technology and Aramark services. The guidance counselor, formerly in a closet, has a window this year.

The nurse works in a space that could be defined as a closet, being big enough for only one couch, which can be awkward if more than one student at a time is sick or needs attention. “There’s no space for kids to have privacy,” Zajac said.

The other space constraint, apparent on rainy or bad weather days, is the lack of a large enough front lobby, where the students cram themselves in to socialize every morning before classes start.

“There’s just so much you can do,” Zajac said, summing up the issues. “It’s an old outdated system. The staff have adapted, they make the best of it.”

Zajac rattled off more things: leaking, rusting pipes, inadequate wiring, making it a struggle to stay compliant with the fire codes; floors so hot, “you can fry an egg on them.” Clocks that don’t run on time. Termites. Mice. The list is long.

“I’ve had teachers who want to leave because of their working conditions,” Meyer said.

The point, Zajac said, is that if the bond is passed, “I’m very excited with the change in atmosphere and attitude and a determination to succeed, in a new facility,” he said. “I’m excited about the untapped potential here for our students. It’s exciting and it’s scary, because I don’t know what we’re going to do if it doesn’t pass. It would be a complete disservice to our kids.”