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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 BOE archive.

Good morning. How are you doing?

First of all, to look through it,

you have to go to a century-old municipal building downtown.

Arched 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 a librarian rolls your boxes up to you on a 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-spaced 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,

...