Principal throws away $25K in desks for ‘progressive’ tables
Students at PS 169 in Brooklyn are learning a tough lesson in subtraction — the school has trashed more than 1,200 perfectly good desks.
The desks — which were only two to four years old — are being replaced by $25,000 worth of tables because Principal Eujin Jaela Kim believes tables improve pupil “discourse.”
“This is a zero-waste school, yet there is a lot of waste,” said an insider. “Even if there are positive aspects to the tables, the desks should not have been tossed in the trash.”
Kim “always wants to appear innovative and progressive,” the insider added. “It’s an atrocity. It’s shameful.”
“When she came to our school in 2014, she threw a lot of materials away. Brand new books, curriculums — and she has a tendency that she throws something out and then after several months will change her mind and go back to what she had thrown out — and then buy it again.”
The Sunset Park school’s Resource Committee sent a memo to school staffers in early June saying the tables — four or five to a room, each seating as many as eight students — also benefitted the school’s janitors cleaning classrooms during the summer because “it’s much easier for them to move five tables as opposed to 32 desks.”
The teacher said, “Really? You are buying tables to make it easier for custodians to sweep?”
Dozens of the desks — which cost about $50 each, according to an insider — were seen piled up, along with chairs, in the schoolyard and in a trash bin over the last two weeks. A Department of Education spokesman said about 900 desks “went to salvage and scrap vendors.”
He could not immediately say if the desks were sold to those vendors and if so, where the money went. He could not immediately estimate how much taxpayer money was spent in the conversion. Kim, 34, did not return calls for comment.
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