Where there once was once a math classroom at the Amalia López de Vilá School in Levittown, a suburb near San Juan, there is now a man laying on the floor. Around him, there are school documents that became trash and attendance lists that were left there when the government closed the school in 2018. There is also dried excrement, used syringes, and other materials that this man used to get high on crack.

“There are no horses anymore, but there were,” said Darío Ortiz Seda, a community leader accompanying the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) on a tour of closed schools in Levittown.

It’s Saturday. Next to this overgrown school is an indoor court where youngsters play a girls’ volleyball tournament. On the other side of the school complex, there’s a church, and around the corner, there are houses as far as the eye can see.

A few blocks from here is the John F. Kennedy School, also closed and abandoned in 2018. From an elementary school, it became a gotcha field and a mini clandestine dump, next to what was a covered little league baseball park, which the Municipality says cost about $8 million, and has been abandoned for years.

The same fate of abandonment struck the María Libertad Gómez School in 2016, where there were three men, dressed in military clothing. They fire their gotcha pistols against the walls, “perfecting their aim” for when the Saturday games begin. Syringes and dried poop are scattered about the school’s halls and classrooms.

“If we hadn’t rescued the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano Elementary School [which was also in disuse], it would be like the rest of the abandoned schools in Levittown,” says Ortiz Seda.

Of 23 schools in Toa Baja, eight were closed between 2016 and 2018, five of them in Levittown. Currently, the rest of the closed schools in Levittown are abandoned except for the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano Elementary School.

The community rescued the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano Elementary School in Toa Baja.
Photo by Wanda Liz Vega | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

Buying schools was promoted as a public policy in 2016 through an executive order by former Governor Alejandro García Padilla that served as the basis for the transactions that his successor, Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, made happen with the signing of Act 26 of 2017. Official data shows that 480 public schools were closed between 2016 and 2021 in Puerto Rico.

“We were able to rescue that school because we stood firm, with an initiative that still today, despite multiple government obstacles, has as a priority offering a genuine service to the community,” the Toa Baja community leader explains.

In 2018, at the Lorencita Ramírez Elementary School, the Movement to the Rescue of Our Schools (MARES, in Spanish), a nonprofit organization whose Board of Directors Ortiz Seda chairs, was established.

Upon reaching the school’s main gate, the first thing you hear is the noise of power generators. There’s a volunteer running the trimmer and another fixing roof damage. There are several power generators that these volunteers bought. They are distributed throughout the school, because after rescuing it and fixing it up to offer multiple educational workshops, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) suspended their service.

So, they have spent almost five years fighting for ownership of the property while giving Zumba classes, theater, physical education, natural resources, art, and offering free tutoring and agricultural workshops to the community. “But what they do is block us,” Ortiz Seda insists.

Abandonment bureaucracy

In 2021, Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP, in Spanish) Rep. Denis Márquez Lebrón, together with Popular Democratic Party (PPD, in Spanish) Rep. Deborah Soto Arroyo, filed Joint House Resolution 28 to order the Real Estate Evaluation and Disposal Committee (CEDBI, in Spanish), the transfer of the school to MARES, for $1. The measure got a pocket veto from Governor Pedro Pierluisi in January 2022.

The CEDBI was created with the Fiscal Plan Compliance Act to “carry out all the necessary actions to achieve the disposal of real estate,” under the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF, in Spanish). Between 2017 and March 2023, CEDBI approved the rental of 206 disused school buildings to municipalities and 82 schools to private entities. According to the transition report of the CEDBI’s defunct School Site Transfer Evaluation Subcommittee, between 2017 and 2019, 231 schools were rented for one year at a monthly fee of $1. The AAFAF did not specify if the 231 properties are still under lease.

Meanwhile, between 2018 and March 2023, CEDBI authorized 36 transactions for the sale of schools to private entities and eight to municipalities, according to the information provided.

Effective 2016, Governor García Padilla authorized the commercialization of schools not used by the Department of Education through an executive order that also required the secretary of that agency to submit to the Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTOP, in Spanish) the inventory of schools available for sale. Since 1975, the DTOP secretary has had the power to sell, exchange, encumber, and lease any State property that has ceased to be of public use.

The reality is that the sale, exchange, or lease of disused schools falls to the DTOP. However, mayors have the political power to issue recommendations, permits, and promote the uses they want for closed schools in their towns. 

The Department of Education operates some 844 schools (56.9%), while 470 former school structures are closed or abandoned and 170 (11.5%) structures are operated by an organization, according to a new report conducted between March and June 2022 and presented this week by El Puente: Puerto Rico’s Latino Climate Action Link, in collaboration with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.

The Puerto Rico Public Schools Inventory Project (2011-2022), documented through on-site visits the status of 1,492 schools that are on an official list provided by the Department of Education.

In February 2022, after a meeting of the Broad Front in Defense of Public Education in La Fortaleza concluded, the president of the Teachers’ Federation, Mercedes Martínez, took the opportunity to question the Governor about the pocket veto. The Governor’s response was limited to pointing out the possibility of a mistake, and said he referred the case to CEDBI.

Teachers’ Federation President Mercedes Martínez.
Photo by Wanda Liz Vega | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

La Fortaleza’s Press Secretary, Sheila Angleró Mojica, told the CPI that “the measure was poorly drafted, the title did not correspond to the resolution, and that made it unconstitutional.” She specified that sections two, three, and four were incompatible with section one.

“Because the legislative bodies were in recess, it could not be returned for corrections. The authors were spoken to in January 2022 so that they could refile it and approve it,” she added. The head of the Teachers’ Federation rejected that the measure had errors and stressed that it was approved unanimously by the House and the Senate. She pointed out that they have all the documentation to complete the process through CEDBI.

“Under the tenure of [former Education Secretary] Eligio Hernández (2019-2020) we had several meetings. And we went to La Fortaleza to express ourselves, along with the president of the Teachers’ Federation and other colleagues. They met with us,” said Wanda Ivelisse González, secretary of the MARES organization. 

“After several meetings over several weeks with the Department of Education, we reached a supposed agreement for them to give us the property, but they told us that we had to wait for the structure to be transferred to the Department of Education from the Department of Transportation Works. Public. We’re still waiting,” she adds.

According to the list of available unused school campuses listed by CEDBI, updated in March, there are only 31 schools in all of Puerto Rico that could be available for sale, exchange, or lease transactions. Meanwhile, there are three schools in this municipality whose leases were approved that appear on the list of closed school transactions approved by CEDBI as of December 2022.

The Lorencita Ramírez School does not appear on any of the lists.

The CEDBI approved leasing the María Libertad Gómez school in Levittown and the Antonia Sáez Irizarry school in the Pájaros sector, to the nearby Municipality of Toa Baja. Although the transaction was approved in 2020, both are in total abandonment. The third disused school in Toa Baja on that list of leases is the Ernesto Juan Fonfrías School, in Barrio Candelaria, which was leased for a five-year term to Corazón Azul Inc., an independent living center for adults older than 21 with autism.

The María Libertad Gómez School is in total abandonment.
Photo by Wanda Liz Vega | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

MARES was informed that it had to carry out additional steps and submit a reference letter from the Puerto Rico Office for Socioeconomic and Community Development (ODSEC, in Spanish) and a copy of the 2022 tax return, which they did.

Before it was included in the list of hundreds of closed schools, Mercedes Martínez was a teacher at this school and her children also studied at Lorencita Ramírez.

“When work began to rescue this school, a census was carried out in the community where more than 200 people participated to find out what the community wanted to happen in this school. As a result, fine arts classes, physical education classes, and supervised studies are offered to the community here every Saturday with teachers from the Department of Education. We have turned this school into a community center because of a community alliance,” says Martínez.

She’s sorry that the school, which had an elementary school theater with a capacity for 150 people, dressing rooms and bathrooms, fell into disuse when the facility closed.

“They abandoned it. A new theater. It wasn’t enough for the government to close the school,” she said. 

“When they saw that we rescued it, they cut off the power. And we can’t put solar panels because we do not have ownership. Still, we’re here, and the children are here,” she adds.

During our visit, there were a dozen children dancing in the theater. They complete a couple’s dance session. Three groups of students are taking classes at the school. One group takes body movement, another takes a natural resources workshop and the third is a theater group. They rotate so they can take all three classes of the day. There are about 40 students. They are here from 9 a.m. until noon.

In February, they took steps to ensure that the drinking water service at the school was not suspended, after Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) representatives visited. In response, MARES submitted evidence of the procedures with CEDBI and La Fortaleza and, although they halted the cut, they still have the uncertainty of a possible suspension of the service at any time.

A different way of educating

Juan Camacho retired from the teaching profession in 2006 after almost four decades in the public system. For the past four years, he has been a second-grade teacher in a Montessorian project. At 76, Camacho, who was a teacher’s guild leader, is part of the volunteer teacher staff who go to the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano School.

“Here I offer poetry classes and natural resources in an environment that offers more freedom,” he says. “The idea is that the children break with the academic routine. They learn while having fun and that’s fundamental.”

Juan Camacho, a retired teacher, leads students at the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano School.
Photo by Wanda Liz Vega | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

For Camacho, examples such as this initiative, contextualized in the case of so many school closures in Levittown, are a message to the State that projects can move forward in this space.

“We have a project running,” says Camacho proudly. “Is it small? Yes, it’s small because we are doing it with our own resources and spending our money. They need to come here and see what is being done, that evidence is worth more than any piece of paper,” he pointed out.

It seems unreasonable to the elementary school teacher that the communities’ rescue of their abandoned schools be blocked or hindered.

“If the government didn’t keep them and left them abandoned, allowing them to become shooting galleries, nuisances covered in weeds, and an eyesore in residential areas, why prevent them from being rescued?” he asked.

Bureaucratic vulnerability

Just over an hour’s drive from the Lorencita Ramírez de Arellano Elementary School, in Humacao, on the East Coast, the Barrio Mariana Community Recreational and Educational Association (ARECMA, in Spanish) is claiming ownership of the Juan de Dios López Elementary School, closed in 2014 and which is one of the 15 schools the government shuttered in this town between 2010 and 2018.

This school is also under the DTOP’s umbrella and in 2020 the lease contract with ARECMA, which has its Community Transformation Center there, expired. Since then, there has been uncertainty in the organization, particularly due to the administrative instability of a municipality who’s former NPP Mayor Reynaldo Vargas Rodríguez was arrested for corruption in 2022, barely a year after he took office.

The Municipality of Humacao owns two schools that closed in 2017, Adrián Medina and Dr. Víctor Rincón, for which it paid $336,000 in 2020 and $539,000 in 2021, respectively, to locate head start centers. These two schools are part of the list of only six sales transactions approved by the CEDBI for municipalities with schools under DTOP. All those transactions were approved in 2019. Another 29 schools under the DTOP umbrella were sold to private entities between 2018 and March 2023.

“We’ve been fighting for the space to be given to the community since before 2020, because [the school] was rescued by its people, by the community itself after being abandoned,” says Zoeli Vega Vega, chairwoman of the ARECMA board of directors. “Beautiful projects have been created, especially for the elderly. What we want is to be sure that everything we have invested here, in effort and time, is not in vain and that we can pass it on to the next generations to continue working for the well-being of this community,” she said.

Zoeli Vega Vega, chairwoman of the Barrio Mariana Community Recreational and Educational Association (ARECMA, in Spanish).
Photo by José M. Encarnación Martínez | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

In the last five years, Humacao has had four mayors. In 2019, PDP Mayor Marcelo Trujillo Panisse died and was succeeded by Luis Raúl Sánchez Hernández. In 2021, Vargas Rodríguez was sworn in and Julio Geigel Pérez succeeded him. These changes in municipal administration have hindered the procedures that ARECMA has been carrying out to get the school transferred to them.

“We haven’t been able to reach an agreement with one administration or the next. Even knowing what the organization does in the Mariana community, we take on State responsibilities on a voluntary basis, for the well-being of the community where we live. We practically do their work and the only thing we ask is that they formally hand over the property to us,” Vega Vega said.

About 20% of the Barrio Mariana residents are over 65, according to 2020 Census data. About 30% of the housing units in this community are vacant.

Mayor Geigel Pérez has not yet discussed the case of ARECMA and the Juan de Dios López School with the Mariana community, nor had his predecessor, and to date, no municipal official has visited this school to find out what is done there.

Still, Humacao presented a Recovery Plan in December 2022 in which it established the “short-term” initiative to manage the transfer of ownership of the school, from the DTOP to ARECMA.

But they must walk the talk.

“There’s no talk [in Humacao] of giving us ownership because the municipality presents it as something impossible right now. They say that it isn’t viable,” Vega Vega said. 

“They have a development plan, and the plan establishes the intention to cede the school, while they tell us otherwise. And they use as an excuse the fact that they don’t have the power to make that decision,” she adds.

This school, which operates with a solar panel system managed by ARECMA supported by the organization Para la Naturaleza, is an internship center for Social Work students from the University of Puerto Rico and students from different disciplines from private universities. It also operates a community clinic, a laundromat, a library, and is preparing to start a free after-school tutoring program for the children of the community.

But it is something more, because as part of its development, the members of this organization from Humacao, together with social work students from UPR- Humacao, prepared a map of the Mariana neighborhood, where the residences for the elderly were identified, the homes where there are children or young people, bodies of water, and people who need a hot plate of food daily. As we speak to their spokespersons, for example, an older man walks in with a letter. This is a case referred by the Family Department, which, given the insufficiency of social workers, turns to this organization to help this person in a family situation.

“There’s no talk [in Humacao] of giving us ownership because the municipality presents it as something impossible right now. They say that it isn’t viable,” Vega Vega said. 

“They have a development plan, and the plan establishes the intention to cede the school, while they tell us otherwise. And they use as an excuse the fact that they don’t have the power to make that decision,” she adds.

This school, which operates with a solar panel system managed by ARECMA supported by the organization Para la Naturaleza, is an internship center for Social Work students from the University of Puerto Rico and students from different disciplines from private universities. It also operates a community clinic, a laundromat, a library, and is preparing to start a free after-school tutoring program for the children of the community. But it is something more, because as part of its development, the members of this organization from Humacao, together with social work students from UPR- Humacao, prepared a map of the Mariana neighborhood, where the residences for the elderly were identified, the homes where there are children or young people, bodies of water, and people who need a hot plate of food daily. As we speak to their spokespersons, for example, an older man walks in with a letter. This is a case referred by the Family Department, which, given the insufficiency of social workers, turns to this organization to help this person in a family situation.

Ricarda Figueroa, administrator of the Center for Community Transformation, shows the map developed by student interns and ARECMA staff to give a broad reading of community realities.
Photo by José M. Encarnación Martínez | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

“We organized several committees in the community. In the context of drawing up an emergency plan, people organized to gather information to help us avoid what happened in this neighborhood during Hurricane María, when we were without power for nine months and six months without water. Now we have multiple water wells in different parts of the neighborhood and a center that operates with solar energy. That’s why we need to operate with the certainty that this will remain in the hands of the people,” Vega Vega said.

The chairwoman of the ARECMA Board of Directors explained that they are an organization with a 40-year history. She says that experience has taught them that the transfer of ownership is necessary “to prevent our work from being conditioned by the instability of the government’s bureaucratic and administrative processes.”

We move between Humacao and Yabucoa. Six minutes from the Juan de Dios School is the Manuel Surillo School, which has been completely abandoned since its closure in 2018. It does not appear on the list of transactions approved by CEDBI nor on the most recent list of available abandoned schools.

“You have organizations like ARECMA doing the work for the Department of Education, the Department of the Family, the municipality, and you can’t be a facilitator? They aren’t making things easier,” said Ricarda Figueroa, administrator of the Center for Community Transformation.

Ricarda Figueroa, administrator of the Barrio Mariana Community Recreational and Educational Association (ARECMA, in Spanish)
Photo by José M. Encarnación Martínez | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

The last communication from the Municipality of Humacao to ARECMA was about the intention to reach a lease agreement for a 10-year term. The DTOP would transfer ownership to the municipality, which would then reach an agreement with the organization. But a similar pact was what brought them here. This is the reason the community organization insists on a full transfer of ownership from the municipality to ARECMA.