The Toxicity of Environments in Specialized High Schools
Following the end of mid-winter break and the start of school, many students at the Bronx High School of Science, and the other specialized high schools, were bombarded with homework and projects from teachers. Lots of these students took to social media to air out their complaints against the school and its administration for not doing something about all of this work, and not enforcing the work limits from teachers as set forth at the beginning of the school year. A senior student even described how the immense workload given at schools like Bronx Science gave them trauma and is not healthy for any high schooler to have, especially in such trying times with the COVID-19 pandemic.
This type of sentiment did not sit right with some students, however, and these students argued against these claims by saying that we, as students, chose to give ourselves the workload and should not be complaining about it. One person even said, “it is laughable to say that homework gave you trauma”. A few of them even pointed out that we shouldn’t be complaining about the school as a result of some incredible opportunities that these specialized high schools provide. Although these messages are harsh and largely unsympathetic to the situations of hundreds of students, it still begs the question: how much of the blame is on the school’s administration for the larger issue of workload management? And how is the lack of sympathy from the school affecting different demographics more than others?
To fully understand the issue, you have to know the typical school day for the average student. At Bronx Science, the vast majority of students reside in other boroughs. For a student residing in Queens, whether they decide to take public transportation or Vallo (the school’s designated busing partner), they will need to wake up at 5:30 AM or even earlier if they want to make it to school by 8 AM. Many students will then have a full day of classes, with maybe a lunch/free period in between if they are lucky, with the regular bell schedule around 3 PM. Some students go home afterward, but most days, many stay behind for clubs or sports practice. If they do sports, they may end their day at school around 6 PM and would get home by 8/8:30 PM. If they have some rest and dinner, they will start their homework around 10 PM. The typical workload for a student is around 2 and a half hours, but many students get a lot more homework or last-minute projects, leading to them staying up till 2 AM just finishing schoolwork. These kids end up with only 3-6 hours of sleep before starting the day again and repeating the same drawn-out schedule.
Under any other circumstances, this would be considered insanity or literal torture. But under the guise of a specialized high school student, this is just the “hard work necessary to succeed”. This is obviously not the reality for all students. I know people who get home by 6 PM and are in bed by 9 PM. But the overwhelming majority of students at specialized high schools have had at least a couple of weeks/months of experience with this barbaric cycle. You could even tell who has had it the worst by seeing the students falling asleep in the middle of the hallways with notes in their hands.
Schools have been aware of this issue for years, but have done little to nothing about it. Prior to COVID, many teachers could end up giving 1.5 hours of homework for a single subject without any warning. Enough of these surprises in one day, and there is no chance you are sleeping. Despite the school having a “no work over break” policy, teachers would assign work for the second day after school comes back so that it is “technically not break gay HW”. Before the end of marking periods/semesters, they would assign twice as many assignments and “final projects”, putting students through a tortuous final week. During the pandemic, at Bronx Science, we were told teachers could only assign work to be done during the asynchronous periods of the week, and not give any work that would add up beyond a time limit (ex. 150 minutes) for the week. Teachers not only repeatedly violated these policies, but also exceeded their own time limits for synchronous learning as well. The school did nothing about these even after it was brought to them countless times.
These issues affect every student at Bronx Science to some small extent at the minimum but are especially worse for students who live in immigrant/BIPOC households. In this day and age, in order to uphold our family’s dreams and hopes of success in America, we are expected to perform exponentially better than our non-BIPOC counterparts. We are told we have to take the hardest classes, have the highest grades, participate in every extracurricular activity, get into the Ivies/best “top” level colleges, and so much more. Because if we mess up even a little, we will be considered a failure. The stresses from our household environments alone are enough for many kids to develop lifelong trauma and anxiety issues, so the LEAST a school like Bronx Science could do is crack down on these workload issues.
Schools like Bronx Science provide tremendous opportunities for students that you really don’t get at any other schools in NYC, no one doubts that. But that does not mean they should be above criticism for it. If we allow ourselves to accept these issues as a tradeoff necessary to have these opportunities, we would just be subjecting future students to years of trauma and emotional torture all to “get a good education/job”, and is that the legacy we want to leave behind? Change can only come when we start a conversation and work to make a difference. We have to leave behind a better environment than how we found it.
