Every school should have a school street…
…but especially Thomas Edison High School.
Sitting near the Grand Central Parkway is Thomas Edison Career and Technical High School, a public high school in Jamaica, Queens. As we (organizers from Open Plans) entered the school to meet with Principal Moses Ojeda at 2:30 pm, we rushed through a wave of 2,000 teenagers leaving the school and filling out the adjacent one-way street, 84th Avenue. Dismissal is so congested, so unsafe, so full of students, buses, parents picking up their kids, and bikes, that we had to wait outside the door to avoid getting lost in the crowd. Of course, this was only more hectic because we visited on the Friday before Halloween. Two students dressed in massive purple and green Barney costumes demanded a photo with Principal Ojeda as he told us about his vision for the street near the school: hiring a local artist to paint the street, investing in furniture, planters, and street design, expanding the sidewalk into the street, and hosting creative programming for the broader school community to relish in.
Nestled within Jamaica Hills, a heavily Bangladeshi and immigrant neighborhood, Thomas Edison is no stranger to this creative, community-oriented programming. Just down 84th Avenue is the Jamaica Muslim Center, which has used the street outside of the school open for prayer and other cultural events. The athletic field that separates Jamaica High School and Thomas Edison annually serves as a site for Eid celebrations. Thomas Edison also uses the street as an open space to educate students about different holidays and cultural observances, which Principal Ojeda stresses the importance of as the student body is a mix of South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, Black, and Latinx.
Thomas Edison, despite temporarily using the space in front of the school, and desperately needing a car-free zone, does not have an Open Street for Schools - the program that the Department of Transportation manages to allow schools to run, maintain, and operate adjacent car-free streets. In fact, when we reached out, they had never heard of it, which is why they currently do not have a school street (despite temporarily closing it off or hosting creative outdoor programming in adjacent spaces). This is not any fault of Thomas Edison’s administration, who are constantly in conversation with their school community, community board, elected officials, parents, teachers, and students. In reality, most schools we speak to have never heard of Open Streets for Schools, or school streets, and don’t know how to get one. When schools do express interest, they are often (rightfully) daunted by the application, particularly the required three letters of recommendation from community members or intimidating urban design questions about site plans.
Dismissal time at Thomas Edison is a tangle of crowded sidewalks, vulnerable student pedestrians, and car-congested streets.
This is a shame, because 84th Avenue in front of Thomas Edison is the perfect candidate for a school street. There’s already a parking lot for teachers to use, the street is a one-way, it faces no residential buildings or restaurants to navigate ownership with, teachers are already assigned to the perimeter at key points throughout the day. Arrival and dismissal are a hectic street ballet of thousands of kids, criss crossing the narrow street, trying to avoid getting hit by buses or their peers. A school street would make it much safer; Streetsblog found that on school days, streets that are closer to schools are more dangerous and prone to traffic indents; “during the 8 a.m. hour, when hundreds of thousands of children stream into 1,600 city-run public schools, there are 57 percent more crashes and 25 percent more injuries per mile on streets near schools than on the city’s other streets. This disparity largely disappears on days when schools are closed.” If 84th Avenue was closed to traffic during arrival and dismissal, students would be in much less danger than they currently are.
However, the most exciting reason for creating a school street is Thomas Edison’s decidedly non-traditional curriculum. As a Career and Technical Education High School, Edison prides itself on preparing its students for their future careers: here in these circular halls future lawyers, car mechanics, urban farmers, computer engineers, and literary scholars have space to learn, grow, and play. Thomas Edison has a hydroponics farm, active mechanics shop, and cafe run entirely by the special education class that earns money for the department. The school emphasizes learning through doing, and it adapts its curriculum to the needs and specificities of its students. This is the ethos of school streets, which provide schools the opportunity to expand the classroom, take advantage of site-specific learning, and adapt the street to their unique needs.
School Streets can provide students with desperately needed space to safely walk to and from school.
One teacher noted that “a closed street could seamlessly be evolved into classroom space in a building stretched for space to create. We envision physics classes using the space to test solar powered robotic cars as an example of the type of activity that could be implemented in this type of setting. We also facilitate students engineering their own research projects in Advanced Placement Capstone and the usage of the street would greatly expand the type of educational opportunities in which students can operate. This would be perfect for family and community members to experience the work students are accomplishing and would be an excellent gateway towards furthering relations between the school and the businesses and other organizations in the community.”
Thomas Edison uses a project-based learning curriculum, so additional space outdoors will help teachers be more creative and effective, which is also important for a large school that lacks gym space. Teachers throughout the school, from science teachers to health teachers, stopped to talk to us and voice excitement to activate and use the street for class. One substitute history teacher was really excited to overhear that we were talking about school streets; they had seen them used successfully at other schools. The most successful school streets are those that are stewarded by eager and dedicated administration (of course, in partnership with parents and the broader school community); another reason that Thomas Edison is a great match for this program. Effervescent, passionate Principal Ojeda, who attended Thomas Edison himself, is the perfect steward for this space, and is excited to champion outdoor learning, gym class, and more.
The Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School uses their School Street as an incubator for scientific and environmental exploration. Source: Clean Air Green Corridor
Teachers are excited about the school streets’ transformative potential; one noted that “our students have long shown political activism including events regarding gun violence in schools and mental health. The opportunity to use the space in front of the school would allow them the chance to support other issues close to the heart of the Jamaica community and showcase the work of Edison in support of the area.”
Adjacent open streets should be the norm for every school. Right now, school communities must opt in to this program by filling out an onerous application. That adds more paperwork to busy administrators’ already overwhelming schedules. The application process can be so burdensome that we created a School Streets toolkit, with Transportation Alternatives, to guide schools through the process. But our ultimate goal is to reform the program; to make the process for creating a School Street so simple that our toolkit is unnecessary. Rather than require schools to undergo a lengthy and complex application, the DOT and DOE should collaborate to create a more accessible, open program with lower barriers to entry. Closing off the school in front of Thomas Edison is a good start. And with buy-in from stakeholders across the city, there’s no limit to where we can go from there.