September 10, 2025
Dear Families,
Our school has a brand-new new restroom.
Back in 2019, CPE1 applied for a grant to convert a hallway closet into a one-person bathroom. The new bathroom sits between the boys restroom and the girls restroom. It has one sink and one toilet. This restroom locks for privacy, although an outside key allows staff to open it in an emergency.
Six years ago, I wrote this to families:
Single-occupancy restrooms will help us meet the New York City Department of Education’s guidelines for supporting gender-expansive students. Schools must accommodate “any student who expresses a need or desire for increased privacy.” But once single-occupancy restrooms have been created, no child or adult will have to ask. Human rights should not depend on individual requests.
Our school stands by that purpose. Also, there are other good reasons for having a one-person restroom. For example, children who have accidents at school will have a more private place to change clothes. Teachers often wait hours for an opportunity to run to the restroom; now there will be another option if the original adult bathroom is locked.
Funding for this project came from our city council representative, Diana Ayala, and our former borough president, Gale Brewer. I continue to be grateful for their support. I am so pleased that we were able to create this new, useful space.
Restroom Frustrations
On Friday, I reported issues with the new restroom door. The contractor came to see it on Monday. The restroom will be out of service until the door is adjusted, which I was told should take place by the end of the week.
That’s not the biggest frustration.
This project was funded in 2019. Actual construction began in July 2023. Within two months, the toilet flushed, water flowed through the sink, and all the pipes were sealed behind gleaming new tile. By September 2023, the city’s Department of Buildings cleared the restroom for use. However, the School Construction Authority still hadn’t inspected.
The School Construction Authority (SCA) coordinates grants to improve school buildings. SCA also directly oversees major projects. For small grant awards such as our restroom, SCA contracts with a private firm, Gordian Group, to facilitate. But even small projects must meet SCA’s standards. Apparently, the toilet and sink were installed before SCA ever inspected the new restroom’s plumbing. In October 2023, the toilet and sink were unscrewed from the wall. They gathered dust on the floor for the next twenty months.
It took 650 days from the first failed SCA inspection until the restroom’s final approval. That’s 244 days more than it took to build the entire Empire State Building.
How does a one-toilet restroom take so much longer than a skyscraper with more than 2,000 toilets and fifty-two miles of plumbing? Obviously, construction standards, including worker and environmental safety, were different in 1930. Also, the Empire State Building often had more 3,000 laborers working together on the same day. For most of the twenty-months it took for our restroom to pass inspections, the number of workers showing up was zero.
About once a month, I asked the project manager from Gordian for status updates. For every period of inactivity, there was always a reason, such as waiting for a part the contractor did not realize SCA required, or waiting for the architect to revise a drawing, or waiting for an inspector to be available to check the insulation around the pipes. Across two school years, Gordian always provided a seemingly reasonable explanation. But over all, is it reasonable to take two years to approve one toilet? If a plumber walked into your apartment, pulled your sink off the wall, and left it on the floor for twenty months, would that be reasonable? Why should that be acceptable in a public school?
Unfinished Work
The work funded by this grant is not complete.
Two years ago, we got approval for a second project using funds remaining from the restroom. Currently, Aishah’s classroom is actually two rooms. A wall separates the library and meeting area from the tables where children complete their work; you can’t see one side of the class from the other. This grant will pay to remove the dividing wall and to replace Aishah’s old sink and cabinets.
To remove the wall, we need only a one-week window when students are away from school. In May 2024, the project manager from Gordian wrote to me, “I do not see any impediments to beginning when school ends” the following month.
But the wall removal didn’t happen in Summer 2024. The one-week project didn’t happen during December, February, or April vacations. And it didn’t happen during Summer 2025, either.
How could a one-week project miss so many opportunities? The Gordian project manager’s explanations often involved someone else’s delays. For example, an architect completed plans for the wall removal by March of 2024, yet four months later, still had not filed those plans with the city’s Department of Buildings. Last year, the general contractor took 51 weeks to give the project manager a required written proposal. In other words, Aishah’s class might have been improved more than a year ago… if not for missing paperwork.
It pains me to think of that lost time. Our teachers plan classroom environments and learning materials so intentionally. We want the best learning spaces we can give our kids.
I hope that this quick wall removal can be scheduled for Aishah’s classroom soon. I hope that students in that classroom get the space they deserve.