“The first day we were reassigned here I fell,” Brandi Scheiner, 57, says, pointing to the gravel path. Scheiner is a former elementary school teacher and is walking toward a compound of red trailers outside George Washington High School in Washington Heights. The security guard’s booth happened to be empty at 7:30 a.m., so it was easy to walk through the chain-link fenced gate. There are at least 120 teachers assigned to the eleven trailers here. Scheiner taught in Manhattan for 21 years and was assigned to Trailer 14 last fall.
“When we got here there were only two tables,” she says, looking around the fluorescent-lit room. She shows me clusters of desks and a bulletin board she decorated. “So I set it up this way, you know like the way you would set it up in a classroom.”
The bulletin board does look like what you would see in an elementary school, only it’s covered with newspaper clippings instead of vocabulary words. Crowded schools often use trailers for extra class space, but this is the first time they’ve been used as rubber rooms. Scheiner wasn’t thrilled with the amenities.
“This is our bathroom,” she says, walking into a room with a stainless steel sink. “When we came here there was no hot water so now we have hot water.” She pushes a lever and the water does flow, but only from one side. “It’s broken. You see it’s broken.”
Scheiner was suspended in 2007 when her principal accused her of incompetence and insubordination. She claims it was really a case of age discrimination.
Of course she was "too expensive," just as I was.
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