“At the very least, public things press us into relations with others. They are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties.” Bonnie Honig, Public Things, p. 6

Public schools are a crucial necessity for democratic life: the last few months have made that abundantly clear. School buildings are a central part of that equation; school buildings are public things per Bonnie Honig’s definition: they are one part of the physical infrastructure that makes public life possible.

In all the conversations about whether schools will be “open” in the fall, what we are talking about is NOT schools: schools will open on schedule, even if the instruction is done remotely. What we are talking about is school buildings.

But school buildings in the U.S. are not and have never been created equal. This is especially true in New Jersey, which has deep structural inequality in its schools, both in the delivery of education, and in the buildings where education usually takes place. In New Jersey, the poorest school districts also have many older buildings in need of repair or replacement. And funding those needs is the state’s responsibility.

One of the many decisions in the Abbott v. Burke litigation in New Jersey was a 1998 case that required the state of New Jersey, not the chronically historically underfunded districts commonly known as Abbott districts, to pay for school repair and for building new schools in those districts. The state established the School Development Authority (SDA) in 2002, and for a few years built new schools and repaired old buildings. And then about ten years ago, the state legislature just stopped funding the SDA.

To be fair, the SDA has been a site of a number of corruption scandals. Corruption stinks. But it can also serve as a distraction, or an excuse. Failing to fund the SDA is now having life and death consequences for kids, teachers, and families.

In a global pandemic, when the ventilation conditions inside buildings, and the facilities for keeping people and things clean are crucial, the children in the state of New Jersey who will be in the oldest and most poorly maintained buildings in the state are kids in the Abbott districts. These buildings are the least likely to be conducive to reducing transmission of the virus. As with so many circumstances of this pandemic, school buildings in New Jersey will make people who are already vulnerable, more vulnerable.

When and how will it be safe for school buildings to be the site once again for public education? As Danielle Allen points out, no country that has reopened school buildings after closing them because of the pandemic has done so “until after they had achieved near zero case incidence and low community transmission rates.”  Not to mention that they also have in place a solid infrastructure for testing, tracing, and supported isolation including for students and school staff.  And they have school buildings that can be made as safe as is possible. None of these circumstances are true of New Jersey right now.

Given those facts, reading the guidance from the New Jersey Department of Education, “The Road Back,” will make you want to weep. It will certainly make you want to turn to Alexandra Petri’s satire: “So will there be testing? Of course there will be! It’s a school! Probably there will also be essays and pop quizzes!”

Several provisions of the “Health and Safety” required minimum standards stood out to me as I read the report. First, “Schools and districts must ensure that their indoor facilities have adequate ventilation” (p. 19) and this includes, for example, the ability to open windows if there is no air conditioning. The majority of older buildings in Jersey City do not have air conditioning; indeed the district has had to shut down school on some sweltering summer days. In many of these buildings, the windows cannot be safely opened–this was true at PS 25 when my son attended there, until the SDA actually did fund window replacement, one of the only older buildings in Jersey City to have this funded. So this minimum standard is impossible to comply with in many Jersey City buildings, and this is directly due to the lack of state funding for these repairs. “The Road Back” makes no reference to this fact.

The other provisions that struck me were the next two, which designate the need for and locations of hand sanitizing stations, and provisions for frequent hand washing. In Jersey City, we have been fighting to get school facilities to have adequate provisions for potable drinking water, and as we have listened we have heard about non-functioning bathrooms, sinks falling off the wall, and never present soap. All because of the failure to provide funding to repair aging schools, making the underfunded district pay out of operating funds to address these problems.

Let me be clear: we have dedicated leaders in our district administration, we have great teachers, paraprofessionals, and security and cleaning staff in our district. What we don’t have is enough money. And this is made worse by the state failure to fund our school facilities, as it is obligated to do.

The effect of the lack of funding for SDA in Jersey City, chronicled in this document, is that the majority of school buildings in the district are not equipped to provide the bare minimum of what “The Road Back” expects. Jersey City is not alone in this circumstance, but you would not know this from reading “The Road Back”. There is some discussion of funding for additional costs due to the pandemic, but there is no discussion of the background conditions for those decisions of school buildings that are already inadequate.

Public things are deeply contested, sites of inequality, sites with different meanings to people situated differently in relation to social and political power. Bonnie Honig notes just briefly in the first chapter of Public Things that public schools in America were part of the regime of white supremacy, and thus are part of the hierarchy of citizenship. Public things act to exclude as well as to include. “Thus, when public things are democratized, the response of the powerful is often to abandon them. White flight is not just from the urban to the suburban; it is from the public to the private thing.” (24-25) This is precisely what the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has written about extensively, on white flight from public schools and how even in multi-racial school districts white parents often work to maintain racial inequality. In a state like New Jersey, where the state refuses to provide adequate school buildings in its poorest districts, a global pandemic means that this building inequality is deadly.

Public school buildings are public things. That means we need to fund them, fairly, equitably, fully.