Community, teachers are discovering they may have less power than before–not more.
That’s the thrust of an emerging disagreement between teachers and their union leadership at the 230-student magnet school on Water Street.
High School in the Community (HSC) has been teacher-run since its inception in 1970: Instead of answering to a principal, teachers elect their own peers to run the school through a democratic process.
That democratic process may soon change. The new boss threatening to change the rules is not a central office bureaucrat, but the very man teachers elected to lead their union, Dave Cicarella (pictured above).
Cicarella took on a new role last fall, when his union took over management of HSC as part of a new experiment aimed at turning around a failing school.