After mold was found in the Math Wing, Upper School humanities teachers were forced to share their spaces with displaced math teachers for a month. These mathematical nomads hunkered down in the Humanities Center, sharing a confined office space and temporarily moving to classrooms in order to teach. Ultimately, students and faculty all felt inconvenienced by the whole endeavor. However, tight offices, sharing classrooms, and spatial inequalities have occurred in the Science Hallway for over 30 years.
Upper School Science teacher Elizabeth Druger sits at her desk, a cubicle reminiscent of something on “The Office,” in a space no bigger than a large closet. She shares this room with two other Upper School science teachers, Bridget Lesinski and Dr. Julia Ehrhardt, a substitute teacher. “We’re all sort of stuffed in here,” Druger said.
Ehrhardt, who has spent her entire career in academic spaces, weighed in. “This school to me just seems very crowded in terms of interior design,” she said, “There’s just not enough room for everybody to live, move, and have their being.” Ehrhardt subs for science, language, and humanities classes, and the differences in the classroom spaces, she says, are drastic. “When I teach upstairs… there’s a projector in every room, there’s a place where I can leave my stuff… each teacher has their own classroom,” she said, “Where they [science teachers] are, they don’t have a room, they have a little desk, they don’t have a lot of personal space to put stuff.”
The Science Hallway uses five classrooms for Upper School classes, among which nine rotating teachers share the space. Druger calls this an issue of space equity. “There’s teachers that get their own classroom, and it’s fully decorated with all of their stuff,” Druger said, “During downtime, they’re in their room quietly working, and we’re packed like sardines into different corners and crevices of the space.”
Both Druger and fellow Upper School chemistry teacher Gigi Mathews consider the division of space not only stressful for educators but also detrimental to student experience and learning. “When you walk into your advisory, you want a warm, cozy room where you can sit down and have your snacks,” Druger said, “It’s not like we have a little seating area, not warm and cozy.” Mathews teaches the elective course Chemistry of Cooking held in room 183, which also houses the Advanced Physics class, and a field for the FTC Robotics team to test their robots. “It’s difficult for them [students] to move around the space,” Mathews said.
Transition periods can be a challenge, Mathews said because of the need to clean one space in preparation for its next use. “And then you need to go run and teach another class across the hall and get set up there in a seven-minute period,” she said. Mathews’s class utilizes chemicals and kitchenware as part of the class, all of which occupy the same tables that a physics class might use. “Maybe of all spaces in the school, this is the one that has the most, maybe innate danger of sharing space,” she said, “and yet it’s the place that needs to share the most space between the most people.”
Another factor of space sharing is its impact on student and teacher mental health. “When I’m on the fourth floor and the third floor, people seem a lot more relaxed,” Ehrhardt said. Druger also notices this shift and points to office space as a reason for it being so. While Druger’s own office is positioned next to the courtyard, other science teachers in the Science Wing have offices in a separate room, without any windows facing outside. “No natural lighting,” Druger said, “so it’s kind of dank down here.”
Ultimately, the current division of space among teachers in the Science Wing doesn’t seem to have many net positives for the teachers involved, according to Dr. Ehrhardt. “It doesn’t seem like there’s an equitable division of real estate,” she said. Ehrhardt was curious about some sort of solution to the problem, one that would work for the school and for the science department equitably. “You could ask a professional team to come in and do what’s called a space audit,” Ehrhardt said, also proposing an idea that a civic lab group might devise a plan that would benefit faculty and students using direct student input.
The City of Chicago has had its fair share of space issues among schools, with inequitable resources spread throughout different neighborhoods and parts of the city through its public school program via disproportionate property taxes, but with Parker being a private, non-profit institution, Druger argues we have more control over what we do with the space we have control over. “I think we hold some spaces so sacred that it really impacts the equitable use of other spaces,” she said “when one space, or one object, or one way of being is held sacred for not anything that serves a function.” Druger argued that as science teachers, they’re always looking for the function of things, and if something is serving a purpose or not. The system in the Science Hallway, she said, is dysfunctional.
