The heat at Robeson High: an interview with Dan Reyes, Part 1
Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish an edited interview with the amazing teacher and organizer Dan Reyes. I met Dan through work with the Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America, but also through this newsletter. Dan has been in the trenches of the fight for school facilities in Philly and his group won a victory recently at his school, pressuring the district for air conditioning and other fixes in their building. In our interview we talked about the campaign, how it came together, and how they won. Here’s the first part.
DB: Thanks Dan for taking the time to talk! I'm interested in hearing the sort of issues that you are/were organizing to change at Robeson in terms of the demands, and then the on the ground details of how it went. The story on it. Organizing stories are precious because they show you that things can change how they get changed, particularly when it comes to school infrastructure. How would you tell it?
Dan Reyes: I'll give you a little background about Robeson first. So Paul Robeson High School, we're on the smaller side and we’re a citywide admit school, which means we're not we're not a magnet school. But we're not we're not like a regular neighborhood catchment school. We wind up having mostly kids from West Philly but kids from all around the city apply and at this point it works like a lottery system. So we're a category of school called city wide access, somewhere in between a magnet and the neighborhood school.
In 2013, which was before I was teaching, when the district was doing a round of school closures, they attempted to close our school. You know I think there's a lot of different reasons why that was— they were trying to close and consolidate these smaller schools. And you know, honestly, we’re a majority Black poor and working class high school and I think they thought that they could get away with eliminating us.
There was a big organizing fight to prevent that and Robeson was saved. We're still located at 41st and Ludlow in West Philly. Since then we have had our principal Richard Gordon, who came after that closure fight, and really helped to raise the school's profile, helped create a really healthy staff and students culture in the building. He won national principal of the year a couple years ago. And between that core of staff that were there for the original fight to keep the school open, plus Mr Gordon, we developed a school with a strong culture of caring for one another looking out for one another. On the day to day, I don’t mean that there’s necessarily an organizing culture, but more a culture of solidarity. So that's some important background: that there was already this kind of culture of solidarity in the building.
DB: There was a sense of organizing together, kind of a potential for organizing.
Reyes: Right, exactly. So I started at the school as a teacher resident in 2019. I became a teacher for a lot of different reasons. Among them wanting to become a rank and file union organizer within the teachers union. You know, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers is one of the largest union locals in the state. If we can build a strong teachers’ union in Philadelphia, it not only changes the balance of power in Philly, it changes the balance of power in the state.
So I trained at Robeson as a teacher resident, and the first thing that hit me that year was, when we started school in August, was how hot it was in the building. Just insanely hot. There's no air conditioning. The building was built in the 50s. And it almost looks like it hasn't been updated since. You know the only form of ventilation is the windows pretty much.
DB: Do the windows open?
Reyes: Some open, but some don’t! And during that year, I saw kids skip school because of the heat and we're a school with a pretty good attendance rate. I had a student pass out in one of her classes because of the heat. I personally felt physically ill because of the heat. My co-workers felt physically ill from the heat.
It was just extremely intense, then we went out of the building due to the pandemic that spring, right after I started, and the next year we were virtual. And I think the experience of being home for that full school year. Then coming back into the buildings after the reopening was sort of what did it.
DB: Interesting. Going back to the building after being out of it shed a new fresh light on the problems. It was like a new experience.
Reyes: Right, and we also had had a pretty militant year for our Union. We had that experience of doing the February teach out about facilities problems. Our building was organized to support the elementary schools and middle schools that were taking that action. So there was a heightened sense of anger I think, and a willingness to take action.
DB: It was in the air, everything was sort of shaken up and it maybe felt more electric/contingent. So you come back to the building and suddenly you're like...
Reyes: We’re like, “this is totally unacceptable.” And of course it's gotten harder—climate change means it's just getting hotter and I think that, knowing that also pushed people further because it was clear this problem is not going to get better.
DB: That’s been in the air politically too, with the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal—we have 12 years to go before climate catastrophes reach a tipping point, so that’s out there too.
Reyes: Right. So I'm on our building committee, me and a few other co-workers, and our building rep Andrew Saltz. Our building committee decided that we were going to run a campaign this year. The first thing we did was run a petition demanding long overdue renovations to the building, which included things related to our plumbing, school beautification also, because we don't just want a school that is physically habitable. We want a school that everyone feels good about walking into every day.
DB: Something you're proud of.
Reyes: Yes. And we were clear about that from the beginning, but we also understood that's a longer fight. We decided we were going to put what we wanted on the table, deciding that we’d really push for air conditioning. So we ran a petition. And we got all the members of our PFT chapter to sign and then all other staff in the building represented by different bargaining units, like people represented by CASA, people represented by SEIU, people represented by UNITE HERE. We wanted all staff involved because it's the thing that was, the building where we all work. It was our most common grievance. It was the most widely and deeply felt issue in the building from the cafeteria and the basement to the secretary's office to the teachers and the classrooms to the custodial staff, everyone. We felt both physically harmed by the working conditions and also we felt indignant about it. It's not a dignified working environment or learning environment. So we got 100% signatures on the petition, which was our goal. This is also really helpful for building up the capacity of our building committee.
Next we started thinking more about who to target, because we knew at the beginning of the year that Superintendent Hite was on his way out. So he's not a good target. He's also kind of just been absorbing pressure and energy for the past 10 years. And actually was reading your blog that went into the actual bureaucratic structure of the district around facilities that got us thinking: Okay, what can target someone that doesn't get targeted as frequently that might be more vulnerable to pressure and press.
DB: I remember that was part of our conversation at that time: here's how it works, here's who's in this office, etc.
Reyes: Exactly, and that was super helpful because, as you wrote about, it's incredibly obscure who does what in the district. So we initially addressed our petition to Ahmed Sultan, the director of capital programs. We pretty quickly got a response because the thing is, when they see just random online petitions or they just get a couple phone calls, they don't pay attention. When they see all the staff in a building saying “we're demanding this,” it freaks them out. And those people don't get these kind of emails very frequently. I think Hite is essentially blocking for that. He winds up getting all the focus or it gets absorbed at school board testimony. I'll talk more about what we did with the school board. It's not like those are unimportant targets but…
DB: Sure, there are different pressure points and it’s important to see how they exert the force that they do, and what you have to do and when. It's like threading a needle figuring out where to put the pressure and when you have to put pressure on the board.
Reyes: So when we sent that email and our petition, we also copied various electives and union heads and stuff like that. Our principal got an email—he wasn't involved in the petition, he was supportive but wasn't involved in the petition or really any of the organizing efforts...
DB: Sure.
Reyes: He got an email from Reggie McNeal, the chief operating officer of the district, and that's how we figured out, okay, this is the guy who's actually sitting on top of all of this. So Ahmed Sultan forwarded to McNeil and sent an email to our principal and and that's how we figured out our target. We were like, okay, this is the guy who makes the final decisions, who all these people report to. They met with our principal, or rather said that they would at that point—the details get a little fuzzy. But the thing that did happen, immediately after our petition, is that operations vans and operations guys were showing up at our school fulfilling work orders that had been backlogged for literally years.
DB: Wow. Do you know how those work orders were registered, how were they put into the district?
Reyes: They get put in through our Secretary through our building engineer, then they get sent to the operations department, where they usually die. And that's really no fault of the workers themselves. There's not enough staff, there's too many buildings to cover, there's a ton of work orders, because all the buildings are dilapidated, or most of them.
DB: Right.
Reyes: So they started showing up and McNeil said he was going to meet with our principal and visit the school. But he didn't do that, so then we started moving on to phase two.
Look out for the next part of the interview coming soon!