Dear Editor:
Thank you to Mark Lord for sharing your poignant August Martin story (“August Martin: my first school,” April 19, multiple editions). As someone who lives in Southeast Queens and has admired the school over the decades, I cannot but despair along with you and everyone else who cares, that “there goes another school from our midst.”
Your recollection of time spent in the shaping of young minds there is a reminder to us that teaching is among the most honorable of professions. August Martin’s breathtaking edifice will continue to stand, but killing the school within is metaphorically gutting the building of its meaning to tens of thousands of people.
It is disheartening to the alumni of any school to lose the identity of where they spent four of their most precious years. I know this. My husband is an alumnus of Jamaica High School, which has suffered the same fate proposed for August Martin. Worst of all, we feel so powerless to stop the closings — or dare I say it, “the madness.”
Funds spent on creating small schools in existing school buildings could well be spent fixing what’s wrong with what we already have there.
Welcome to the discussion.
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