bad education

Happy With the Results of the Goose Genocide, Officials Massacre Perfectly Good Furniture

Despite drastic steps to close a $500 million budget gap for city schools, officials from Greenwich Village Middle School decided to destroy expensive classroom furniture like desks, chairs, and cabinets. Perhaps they got a little lightheaded after hearing the jobs bill passed with $10 billion for teacher’s salaries? Some village residents “watched in horror” as sanitation workers crushed the items in the back of their truck. Others took action. Pulling a sort of reverse Robin Hood, Robert Nassau, whose wife runs Greene Hill School, a new private school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, rescued dozens of items from imminent pulverization. After sanitation workers gave him the okay, he shelled out $600 for a truck to haul more of it to Brooklyn. “It was either going to go to a private school or to a landfill.”

Irene Papoutsis decided to film the carnage. Her video depicts furniture lined up for the slaughter on Hudson Street “as far as the camera can see.” As for the perfectly viable goods, Papoutsis, who recently worked in a Bronx public school, said, “These desks were better than what they’re using there.” The Post points out that this comes a week after the DOE trashed thousands of books from a Manhattan Catholic school being transformed into a public school. Part of closing the $500 million gap involved cutting school budgets by an average of 4 percent and denying 5,000 kids yellow-bus service. Maybe the city’s kill first, ask questions later policy toward terrorist birds and innocent office furniture needs a little reevaluating.

Grade-A dunces dumping desks [NYP]

Happy With the Results of the Goose Genocide, Officials Massacre Perfectly Good Furniture