Jelani Cobb’s piece about the closure of Jamaica High School hit home for me in so many different ways that I’m not even sure where to begin, especially as the issue at hand is something that directly affected me.

I guess I’ll start with my own personal experience. I live by the border of Queens and Long Island, and I’m zoned to District 26 schools, highly regarded as one of the top performing school districts in the city. I went to PS 94, MS 67, and Cardozo. It is the last of the 3 schools that really has me thinking right now. Throughout the majority of my life, Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, New York was an award-winning academic caliber, an amazing and diverse school in the heart of Queens… until Jamaica High School closed. By the time I was graduating middle school, Cardozo’s reputation had already begun tanking. I still remember the day we got our high school results — people who didn’t get into any specialized high schools were sitting on the floor bawling their eyes out because they were stuck with Dozo. Some people even moved to Long Island, Great Neck South in particular because it’s right next to Little Neck, just to avoid going to BNCHS. Yet only a few years beforehand, people would go out of their way to move to D26 just to attend Cardozo… which brings me to another point that struck me from the article: Going to Jamaica High School was a dream come true for many people in the 20th century. It was an academic caliber that placed people from all paths of life on a road to success. And now, here we are: Jamaica is closed; Cardozo recently had a gun threat, along with a bomb threat, and just last week dealt with an incident of two girls fighting and throwing bleach; and yet just a few miles east, William A. Shine Great Neck South High School is one of the best schools in the country, let alone one of the best on Long Island.

A lot of Dozo students regard the Jamaica High School closure and distribution of students, along with a series of budget cuts from Mayor Bloomberg, as the downfall of the school. Nobody, myself included until now, really thinks about what caused the downfall of Jamaica HS itself. In fact, I don’t think any of us even knew that Jamaica was once so highly regarded. We associated it with crime and violence, and never thought twice about that association.

I can’t help but wonder what things would look like right now if integration policies had even been the slightest bit different.

One last thing that struck me from the article: “School shootings were not yet recognized as a common feature of American life, which meant that the incident generated an enormous amount of news coverage, and also that there were no established safety or emotional-health protocols with which to respond to it.” I remember seeing a headline of an Onion article following a mass shooting: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Sadly, such shootings have become all too common in this developed country, to the point where people identify with The Onion, and elementary school children participate in active-shooter drills.