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The New York City Board of Education has an archive of all of its records.

Everything that goes into making thousands of schools run for years and years is sitting

in boxes in the municipal building.

I love the B.O.E. archive.

Good morning, Harry Dunn.

First of all, to look through it, you have to go to a century old municipal building downtown.

Arch doorways, lots of marble and echo, vaulted ceilings.

Really makes a person feel like she's up to something important.

You sit at a table and then a librarian rolls your boxes up to you on the cart.

Inside the boxes are all the dramas of a school system.

Big ones, tiny ones, bureaucratic, personal, it's all in there.

There's a union contract and then a zoning plan.

And special reports on teacher credentialing, a weird personal note from a bureaucrat to

his assistant.

A three-page single-space plea from Cindy's grandmother, who would please like for her

not to be held back in the second grade.

An historian friend once pulled a folder out of the archive and a note fell out.

Something a teacher clearly made a kid write in the 1950s that read, quote,

I am a lazy boy.

Miss Fitzgerald says, when I go in the army, I will be expendable.

Expendable means that the country doesn't care whether I get killed or not.

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