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‘On the Backs of Our Neediest Programs’: Seeing Saxe Middle School with Principal Greg Macedo
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Greg Macedo walked a hallway toward the northwest corner of Saxe Middle School on a recent weekday morning, in what’s known as the “8th Grade Wing,” part of a 1997 expansion of the brick building at Farm and South. There, a freestanding office partition that stands five feet high—a bit shorter than the average height of a 13-year-old boy—“separates” the hallway from a 150-square-foot area never meant to serve as a classroom. Yet—in a far-reaching knock-on effect that has seen rising enrollment, new programming and state-mandated classes push “regular” classrooms into what had been designed as Special Education spaces—the now-1,328 students at a school built to accommodate 1,200 at most, have forced Macedo, Saxe’s principal, to push Special Ed programming into what had been office spaces for teachers, storage rooms and hallways. “We have balanced the space problems on the backs of our neediest programs,” said Macedo, looking over this makeshift classroom, cordoned off five years ago and including the assorted bouncy balls, mats, bean bags and trampolines that provide physical stimulation for kids on the autism spectrum. “Kids would not feel like they are in a classroom here,” he said, speaking from a similarly carved-out hallway space one floor up.
