The woes of Food & Finance High are emblematic of a failed system
Yoav Gonen’s Post scoop on the School Construction Authority’s screwup is only the latest mess to plague the Food & Finance HS. The full history tells a grim tale of a dysfunctional school system.
Without notifying F&F administrators, the SCA transferred money earmarked to fund upgrades of the school science labs to cover cost overruns of a roof-top greenhouse(!) — an eye-popping $1.2 million.
At least $1 million of the cash had been earmarked for the labs by then-City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. Yet the SCA refuses to account for its actions.
The snafu puts seniors at risk of not graduating on time in June. With no lab, they can’t earn their Regents diplomas, says F&F’s principal, Roger Turgeon.
But this is only the school’s latest woe. In December, The Post reported that nearly all of F&F’s kitchens had been inoperable since the previous June.
This past March, The Post’s Selim Algar learned the entire campus housing Food & Finance and several other schools had been without hot water since 2014.
Then there was the time the aspiring chefs had to make due with an extended gas outage. Talk about “Hell’s Kitchen.”
Adults at the Department of Education and the SCA have been failing these poor kids for years. And apparently, only the kids have had to suffer any consequences.
Then there’s this: F&F has a graduation rate of 80 percent — but a college/career-readiness rate of just 13.4 percent.
After a homicide at a Bronx school last week, the issue of safety understandably was this week’s education news. But peril in the halls is only the tip of a vast iceberg of failure.
Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña routinely insist that gradual improvement is all this school system needs. It’s OK, apparently, to fail most of another generation of children.