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Correction: East Boston school does not need water coolers
By adamg on Wed, 10/24/2018 - 9:47am
This morning I posted something about a teacher at the Guild School in East Boston going online to request donations to buy a couple of water coolers so that kids could get water to drink without having to worry about missing classes.
I expressed some outrage.
I was wrong. The teacher and BPS both say that although the school's water is marked "offline" in a BPS list of schools with possibly contaminated water discovered in 2016, which the teacher used to bolster his case, the school had stopped relying on tap water for thirsty students long before 2016.
In a statement, BPS says:
Boston Public Schools is committed to providing access to easily available safe, clean drinking water for all students. The Guild Elementary School has relied on bottled water for many years, and school leaders report no issues with students' access to drinking water. BPS is ready to provide additional bottled water to any school should there be an issue where access may be a concern.
The teacher is contacting two Boston residents who went to Amazon and purchased the water coolers he'd initially requested to let them know that if they can't cancel the orders, the school will send the coolers back so they can at least get their money refunded.
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Comments
Perhaps
one or more of the large corporations in town wants to show what they are made of right away and buy these kids water. and let's call that "emergency water." definitely this is a disturbing plea
Companies
Instead a shakedown of private companies, how about Boston raises property taxes to cover this stuff.
Or you might do some homework
And find that Boston's per capita tax collections are already among the highest in the state especially among larger municipalities.
Yes
Let's make Boston even more unaffordable for the people living here.
Or the city
Does it fucking job!
This makes me sad.
This makes me sad.
This surely cannot be happening in America...
But it is. In this great country with wealth all around us, we have students going to schools that are barely 20th Century, let alone 21st Century. Clean and available drinking water is one problem, adequate heat and air conditioning another. Student and staff bathrooms are deficient, old, often unsanitary, without soap, hot water, and reliable toilet tissue. Hand sanitizer is provided by teachers and parents. Next time you visit a school, check out student lavatories for a real treat. So now teachers have to raise money for water. I am not surprised. They already raise money for field trips, supplies, and ask parents to donate things like sanitizer and tissues. I know, I know, the city's plan to spend $1 billion will fix all this. Bullshit. The city's plan is going by and large to build a few newBIG schools and a few small boutique schools. The great majority of students are getting nothing, bubkes. Their teachers will still be looking for funds for water, hand sanitizer, and portable heaters.
Let's get the universities,which pay nothing in property taxes under a law passed in 1837, to pay their fair share so our students can have running water. And hand sanitizer. And working, decent student lavatories.
Also...
We also need to stop giving special consideration to churches and other religious organizations around paying taxes on property and income. They are businesses and should be treated as such.
Or
Require that all nonprofits truly follow nondiscrimination laws and practices like non-religious organizations (including for-profit ones, to an extent) are required to. Let the religious organizations choose whether they want to be affirming to everyone, or be classified and taxed as a business.
It has nothing to do with America as a whole
Please see surrounding school districts and their new infrastructure. It's Boston and other major cities, not the country as a whole. Shit, poor southern town have better schools than us.
Example, Lumpkin County GA, poor mountain school near Army Ranger training compound.
Google image search their facilities.
Its piss poor management the teachers union gobbling up every penny they can.
It's just as bad elsewhere
Ever heard of South Carolina's corridor of shame? I went to a public school in a "right-to-work" state with no unions, and let me tell you, those facilities sure weren't swanky. When property taxes are the majority of school funding, schools in poor areas are SOL and– shocker– most of those kids stay poor.
GFY
Greedy teachers? Shut up arsehole.
Try Greedy property owners and Bezosian business owners.
Stop attacking the working class, jerkwad!
Massachusetts has the highest
Massachusetts has the highest ranked school system in the country. Georgia is 32nd. Other southern states are even worse. Don't let a couple crummy buildings in MA or shiny high school football stadiums in the south trick you. There is no such thing as a republican state with an excellent school system. And way to attack the middle class teachers. They are raising your brats for a modest paycheck and that is the thanks they get?
Studies show America as a whole is mediocre when it comes to education. Like everything else it is the red states that are dragging the country down.
Modest?
I think the average teacher in Boston makes almost $100k. Plus amazing healthcare and pension and more puts average total comp at $125-$150k.
2 water coolers will arrive
2 water coolers will arrive Friday courtesy of Amazon Prime and 2 caring citizens.
Money
I'm a parent in a school where bottled water is trucked to the two coolers in the building.
I know I've had lots of back and forth with some on this website about whether or not BPS needs more money or whether it needs to change how it spends money.
All I know is that it's a damned embarassment that Bostonians send our kids to school in buildings that don't lock, have no potable water, freeze in the winter, and boil in September and June.
Put another band-aid on that band-aid
The water thing in Boston schools comes down to being unwilling to spend the money today to fix the problem permanently. Rather than running some new lines (or having one of the many companies who specialize in doing that in existing buildings do it) they call Belmont Springs (etc) and say bring in some coolers and a bunch of bottled water. And then more bottles and more bottles. In the long run, it's much more expensive than just fixing the pipes today, but they just keep doing the easiest thing, year after year.
Not just Belmont Springs
Some of the BPS schools call the crack truck.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9a/dd/0f/9add0f38fd2b20c6db633405047aa522...
Ten years ago I was aghast at
Ten years ago I was aghast at the number of 5-gallon water bottles being delivered to my government building. I found out that there was an established state-approved vendor for water filters. They could install a reverse-osmosis filter on every floor, run some pipes and distribute purified water throughout the building.
But, for some reason, the government still loves to pay to have bottles of hard water trucked in from Pennsylvania.
Government employee here
Our "bubbluhs" all filter, heat, and cool tapwater.
Should never be a permanent solution
I was annoyed that my son's school had bottled water when he started kindergarten, but that was a truly temporary situation while they rebuilt all the grade schools in the city with a lot of help from the state.
What is needed here - and this is NOT a Boston only problem, either - is a statewide legislative initiative to FIX THE PROBLEM once and for all.
The best way to solve it is to contact your state senator and state rep and demand action to support cities and towns to deflynt their school water supplies - and provide assistance for HVAC upgrades while they are at it.
If that doesn't work, an initiative petition threat might get them going on it.
Replace pipes
If they're replacing pipes, they could just finish the job. Boston water is the best. It's the pipes in the school and/or to the school that put the lead in it.
When you said it's bottleless
When you said it's bottleless, I thought that's a great idea. I assumed it filtered the lead out of tap water, so they wouldn't have to spend further money buying bottled water.
But the Amazon listing says it does take a bottle.
Better link: https://www
Better link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XJ86F7L
World Class!
Keep those tax break for developers and billion dollar corporations coming.
what's real here
seems hard to know suddenly. we do know what's been said and in what order it has been said-and that's all we have. presumably, there aren't kids dying of thirst in that school. i also want to believe that ruling that out is not the only criteria the school is going by when assessing how easy it is to get a drink of water in the building.
I work in operations at a BPS
I work in operations at a BPS building. We have coolers all over the school for the students and they are provided by Facilities and WB Mason. If the school has a demand for more coolers they just need to ask.
Unless she wants it just for her classroom, then that's a purchase she has to make. There should be shared ones close by.
Common areas, hallways, offices, cafes, kitchens are normally covered.
I’m confused here
I missed the original post, but I have read this, and there is a time stamp on this.
Are people really outraged that this school needs a source for water for kids when it has been shown that the school is all set for drinking water for the kids and has been for the past two years? Am I missing something here?
What you are missing
Your definition of "all set" for the last two years is greatly at odds with the reality of kids waiting for 15 minutes to get a drink of water.
Not quite
Before they started relying on bottled water (not the best plan in my mind, but whatever) I would assume the kids were lining up at the bubbler to drink at the source, no?
My son attends the same school I did. His K2 classroom this year was my grade 1 classroom in the 1970s. There was and now is one bubbler on the floor. We somehow managed to stay hydrated and learn things.
But as you note above, the city (with hopefully state help) should get the pipes fixed at the schools whose water shouldn’t be drunk.
Donors Choose
Teachers like this give Donors Choose a bad name and ruin this for other teachers. Hope this teacher gets disciplined.