Marvis Christie, 48, and her son, Yusef, 18, were at Trenton Central High School to pick up some paperwork. They asked a secretary for the documents. She stood up to retrieve the papers, but before going into the file room Marvis and Yusef watched her put on a protective mask. After securing the mask, the secretary made her way into the file room.
“They had files from way back when, like transcripts. It was a safe, like a vault that was secure, where everybody’s files were,” said Marvis. “There was just white stuff coming out of the paint. This bubbly, acidic-looking stuff coming down the walls in the room where she had to wear the mask.”
“You can imagine all the mold in there,” said Yusef. “And asbestos,” added his mother.
This was in 2014 – just one year before the demolition of Trenton Central High School’s Chambers Street campus had begun. While the school employees wore masks over their faces to enter certain rooms, about 1,800 students still filled the halls and classrooms.
For the past decade and a half, repairs of the dilapidated structure have been the subject of much debate among various government agencies, private contractors, community organizations, students, parents, and teachers.
While plans to renovate or rebuild the structure crumbled, the students, faculty, and staff of Trenton Central High School were left to endure the burdens that years of neglected maintenance and underfunding had created.
Trenton Central High School opened its doors to students in 1932. The magnificent structure was one of the largest high schools built in the country, and was once hailed as an ornament to the city. The school’s façade stretched down nearly 1,000 feet of its Chambers Street address – making it nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall, notes the Trenton Historical Society.
Time had done little to hide the building’s exterior beauty. The school’s Georgian design was adorned with red brick and limestone. It was built to last. There was even a sublayer that could be used as a bomb shelter.
The broad central wing was flanked by two smaller symmetrical wings, with towers adorning each of the three wings. The center tower was fitted with a clock that would become an iconic symbol to the community. Enormous white columns stood before each wing’s entrance, inducing a stately air.
But the outer beauty was merely a shell – not a reflection of the interior conditions.
Today, Dr. Rosetta Treece is the principal of a New Jersey public middle school. As a student at the College of New Jersey, she conducted her student teaching at Trenton Central. She then went to work at Trenton Central High School as an English teacher from 2002 to 2006. Dr. Treece knows firsthand the types of conditions that children and teachers were subjected to.
“They had issues with plumbing – open plumbing – and sewage leaking,” she said, “There was one side of the building – literally the pipe was open and there was raw sewage dripping into a bucket.”
Some of the science labs had to be closed during her time there. Mercury thermometers were commonly used in lab classes throughout previous decades. Dropping the thermometers was an unavoidable occurrence and over time that mercury accumulated. “It would get down beneath the plate of the floor,” she said.
There was an inspection of the laboratory facilities as part of a survey to determine if the school should be rebuilt entirely or gutted and renovated. “They found, basically, big globules of mercury, because mercury will find itself and make a big ball,” she said, “So they had to close down portions of the building to address that.”
“There definitely was asbestos in the building and they have gone through waves of trying to remove that over the years,” she said, “but there was still some in the building up until recently,”
She recalled how the building had no ventilation or air conditioning. “The windows were sealed. You couldn’t open the windows because they were broken,” she said, “No matter how hot it was, that window was shut.”
The roof allowed an alarming amount of rainwater into the building. The combination of no ventilation and heavy moisture made the building an incubation chamber for mold.
Dr. Treece went to great lengths to keep her classroom and students in the best possible learning environment. During the summer her husband would accompany her to the school where the two would perform maintenance on her classroom. They did everything from repainting walls to replacing broken desks.
“When the students came in my room they felt cared for and they felt like ‘this is a room where I can really learn,’” she said, “This space reflects that someone cares for me.”
Teachers weren’t just concerned about the students’ ability to learn in the building. Some were concerned for their own health as well.
“There were teachers complaining about asthma attacks, allergies – these issues – and some people were complaining that the building was making them sick,” she said.
Marvis and Yusef understand the teachers’ concerns for their health. Yusef has been dealing with respiratory issues for most of his life. He suffers from asthma and allergies. As he grew older his asthma and allergies became much more manageable. He often required just one inhaler that would last him months.
There were a few times in his youth when Marvis had to rush him to the emergency room, so she bought a nebulizer to avoid future hospital visits. Though the nebulizer was meant to alleviate occasional hospital visits it became a fixture in Yusef’s life while attending Trenton Central.
Marvis calls the nebulizer “the machine” when she refers to it. “He was on the asthma machine a little when he was younger. When he went to Trenton Central High School it was major. He was at the doctors all the time, he was always sick – it was just terrible. It was terrible.”
Yusef explains that each of his asthma inhalers has about 200 pumps. “During the winter months I would go through at least two or three of those pumps every two months,” said Yusef. When the pumps wouldn’t work he had to be on the nebulizer. When his attacks were at their worst he would have to be on the nebulizer 2 or 3 times a day. The sudden upswing in his respiratory issues coincided exactly with his four years at Trenton Central.
During a doctor’s office visit, a doctor told Yusef that running track would condition his lungs by opening them up for more oxygen flow. “So, I did it,” said Yusef. He took up running track for three years in order to strengthen his lungs against the onslaught of mold, stagnant air and worse – all of which comes attached to a Trenton Central High School education.
How Trenton Central High School became the nightmare it was, is a story unto itself. Interviews and an examination of public documents reveal that the school was on course to receive major renovations in late 2000. The plans and new design were completed in late 2004, but only one contractor bid on the plan. The contractor’s estimate of $140 million was $12 million greater than the state’s Schools Development Authority (SDA), then called the Schools Construction Corporation, was willing to pay so the renovations were scrapped. The next year, $24 million was allocated to Trenton Central by the SDA for piecemeal renovations. That money never materialized.
In 2009, the SDA proposed demolishing and rebuilding Trenton Central, but community members were not as receptive to a new building as they had been previously been to renovating the historic school. The plans for Trenton Central were now back where they began in late 2000. While the discussions around demolition or renovation continued into 2015 – even after the building had been found structurally unsound – the funding required to fix leaking roofs and hosts of other concerns rarely appeared, and when it did it wasn’t enough to counter the previous years of neglect. Several legal battles, a few more unfulfilled promises by the SDA and more school funding cuts did nothing to solve this dilemma.
The school’s principal and the district’s union, Principal Hope Grant and the Trenton Educators Association, failed to return numerous requests for interviews, but the complaints about the conditions in the building had been piling up in news articles for years.
Measures to ensure that New Jersey urban schools do not fall into a state of disrepair have been established, but they failed to prevent exactly that from happening to Trenton Central High School. Beginning in 1985, a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings known as Abbott rulings came about as result of Abbott v. Burke.
The Court ruled that the State’s method of funding schools through property taxes was unconstitutional as it would allow for considerable disparities between poor urban and wealthy suburban school districts. If the State wants to fund schools through property taxes, then the State must also provide the additional funding required to keep urban schools on par with suburban schools. The school districts receiving the additional funds became known as “Abbott Districts”. Court battles and a score of remedial orders have altered the original ruling but the core of the ruling remains intact.
The additional state funding has been the subject of much legal contention. State legislators and governors have had difficulty implementing Abbott funds in a successful or popular fashion. School construction funds were depleted faster than projected. Governors would alter or cut funds that were allocated by previous administrations. Abbott district funding for repairs and upkeep was sometimes not provided or was not enough to combat the forces of nature and time.
The failures to provide adequate funding were painfully visible. Community members and legislators who wanted a resolution on Trenton Central tried an alternative approach to call attention to the conditions at the high school. District State Senator Shirley Turner, neighbors and other legislators brought in local media coverage and directly contacted Governor Chris Christie to try to bring special attention to the conditions.
In the wake of Governor Chris Christie’s presidential bid, community members contacted several news organizations in an attempt to coerce the governor into taking action. The plan had some success. National media picked-up on the conditions of Trenton Central and the school became the subject of an NBC Nightly News broadcast on January 23, 2014.
“We invited Governor Christie several times; however, he never responded to those invitations,” Senator Turner said in response to an email. “Prior to this effort to bring media attention to the problem, little could be done to hasten a resolution without funding.”
The final resolution – the deathblow – for the school came when surveyors, sent in the wake of national coverage, found cracks in its foundation in September of 2014. Trenton Central High School would be rebuilt, not renovated. Demolition and reconstruction plans were agreed upon the following month.
The school is being demolished as I write. The new Trenton Central is scheduled to open in 2019. Unlike older city residents and community members living adjacent to Trenton Central, Yusef isn’t sad to see the old structure go – perhaps the nostalgia hasn’t set in yet. For now, he’s happy to be done with it.
Since leaving Trenton Central his asthma attacks have subsided considerably. His nebulizer has sat unused in its case since he graduated this year. He had to dig through his closet to find it and hasn’t really kept track of all the pieces – a few aren’t in the case.
I asked him how often he uses his inhaler now that he’s graduated. He looks off in the distance for a moment then looks at me unsure. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I don’t really use it at all.”
“See? See!,” said Ms. Christie, “That’s wonderful!”