Why Are So Many Puerto Rico Public Schools In Disrepair?

On the week of February 5, several stalls in the bathrooms at public high school Luis Felipe Crespo in Camuy, Puerto Rico, had padlocks on them for no apparent reason. Fed up with the many other maintenance issues at their school, three students, including 17-year-old Alaisha Torres Soto, decided to make a video showing the bathrooms’ conditions. The text overlaid on the video, which they posted on their graduating class’ TikTok account, read: “Uniforme completo jóvenes” (Students, wear your full uniforms). As they walk around the restroom, they point out the ridiculousness of having to wear their uniform correctly when the school can’t even provide running water, toilet paper, mirrors, functioning soap dispensers, and working stall doors.

It soon went viral, reaching hundreds of thousands of views in half an hour, and sparked a movement. At least a dozen other public school students posted their own versions, exposing the decrepit state of their schools — some with bathrooms in a similar state; others with mold and flooding in buildings. 

The students reignited the conversation on a long-standing and pressing issue on the archipelago: a public school system in severe disrepair and neglect. “We had to make that video so that everyone could see what was happening,” Torres Soto, who’s the president of her class, tells Refinery29 Somos in Spanish. Her school has long experienced infrastructure issues, besides the bathrooms — the video was just the tipping point. 

“The pipes get clogged; they break often. That leads to classrooms getting flooded with sewage. … The ceiling in front of the cafeteria [also] leaks and floods the floor right next to it,” she adds. Her school's classrooms also don’t have air conditioning, and in some cases, no fans either — with a heat index that can reach over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. “There are classrooms with more than 30 students with no fans. Sometimes the students or the teachers themselves [end up] bringing them.” 

As the trend highlighted, this constant state of dilapidation is the reality of many of the 856 public schools currently open in Puerto Rico. An August 2023 survey from the Puerto Rico Teachers Association, a union, found that 69% of public schools weren’t “structurally apt” to begin the school year due to persistent infrastructural issues, including short columns that make them vulnerable to earthquakes, roofs in need of sealing, and debris.

The Puerto Rico Department of Education did not respond to Somos’ requests for comment. In response to the video of Torres Soto’s school, the agency, along with the Public Buildings Authority, initially told local media that the bathrooms’ conditions were a product of “vandalism.” The Secretary of Education Yanira Raíces Vega then said on a radio show that she visited the school and spoke with students, adding that the archipelago’s public schools are undergoing a longer-term “rehabilitation process.”

So how did the United States’ sixth-largest school district get here?

Even before Hurricane María, which ravaged the archipelago and caused widespread structural damage in 2017, the Puerto Rico public school system was in crisis. 

In 2015, Puerto Rico’s then-governor Alejandro García Padilla said the commonwealth’s $72 billion debt was “not payable.” Around that time there had already been school closures: According to a 2020 report by UC Berkeley and the Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat, the Puerto Rico Department of Education closed at least 150 schools between 2010 and 2015. In 2016, then-President Barack Obama created the controversial Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which took control over Puerto Rico’s finances in the form of a fiscal control board. Puerto Ricans have criticized the fiscal control board, or “La Junta,” over the years for its colonial nature.

Then, in 2017 (before Hurricane María), Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy. Following Hurricane María, and as Puerto Ricans struggled to recover from the disaster while lacking support from the federal government, former Secretary of Education Julia Keleher announced the closure of around 263 schools in 2018. Back then, the fiscal control board warned the government it should save up to $40 million a month, suggesting hundreds of school closures.

School closures under Keleher continued en masse. A recent report found that Puerto Rico’s Department of Education has closed a total of 673 schools (44% of the archipelago’s total) since 2007. Years later, in 2021, Keleher was sentenced to prison for corruption. In 2018, the then-Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló (who resigned after 2019 protests), announced a plan to introduce privatization to the public school system through vouchers and charter schools. 

Additionally, a recent survey conducted by nonprofit El Puente found that 470 of the closed school buildings are now sitting abandoned in communities. “This was justified mainly as a way for the government to be able to sell [the school buildings] and get money for the country’s public debt,” says Federico Cintrón Moscoso, director of El Puente Puerto Rico. But as of 2020, the government had only been able to sell around 8% of those structures. “Another reason they gave was that there were less children [in Puerto Rico], and so not as many schools were needed,” he adds. “Though partly true, that was generalized. [There was no] study done per region or community to see if enrollment was lower and it was merited.”

“There was a process of disinvestment in schools,” Cintrón Moscoso adds. “So the buildings already had maintenance issues, and [the Department] used that as justification [to sell]. Of course, they were in those conditions because they didn’t maintain them the way they should have.” 

The public schools that remain open also have a wealth of maintenance and structural issues. Teachers, students, and activists alike wonder why Puerto Rico’s Department of Education has the largest budget among its government agencies ($2.5 billion), plus millions in federal funding, and schools continue to struggle.

In terms of federal funding, Lourdes Torres Santos, a public school teacher and member of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico, says that some funds come earmarked or tied to a specific project — for instance, the FEMA funds that Puerto Rico received following Hurricane María. At Doctor Facundo Bueso in Villa Palmeras, the school where Torres Santos teaches, constant water outages lead to monthly school closures. But she notes how, at times, the strict requirements for schools to receive certain funds make them harder to access. 

“The [federal] funds are not entirely discretionary and much less so in the case of Puerto Rico as a territory,” Torres Santos adds. “Sometimes that comes with some restrictions, and if the funding doesn’t have those restrictions, the particular school’s needs are not prioritized, [problems are handled in] bulk [with one-size-fits-all solutions].”

“The problem with the federal programs is that most of that money [goes to] specific things — teacher training, material creation — but it’s not money that goes to schools and school maintenance; it stays in consulting,” Cintrón Moscoso says. “So that money goes to a private [entity], so it’s not reinvested directly at a school.” 

One of Puerto Rico’s school system’s main differences compared to the contiguous U.S. is that it is a highly centralized process. Local school districts do not make decisions; the central Department of Education agency has that power. Though the current Puerto Rico government is trying to change that through a decentralization plan, the agency is still reeling from the recent corruption cases and mired by bureaucracy and a lack of democratic decision-making. The person who ultimately makes budget decisions, Torres Santos notes, “is in an air-conditioned office [and merely] shows up at your school once a year.”

“We can’t look at what’s happening in the Department of Education without looking at the broader politics,” Torres Santos says. “What’s been happening is a loss of democracy, and of real participation within the school culture, like what we’re living in the entire country, with the fiscal control board, that’s diminished the limited real democracy we have in Puerto Rico over essential matters.”

In response to the students’ videos and the school’s conditions, a U.S. Department of Education official said in a statement to Somos that while school facilities and maintenance are a state and local responsibility, the agency knows that “students need healthy environments to learn” and that they “shouldn’t have to resort to social media to get their administrator’s attention about school conditions.” The agency added that Puerto Rico can use funds from the American Rescue Plan to improve some of the schools’ conditions and that the archipelago should prioritize those investments, while “this further demonstrates why we’re committed to helping Puerto Rico decentralize its education system so students and families are benefitting from a system that responds directly to their needs.”

For now, some of the young students who started the TikTok trend are hoping for change, for the sake of Puerto Rico’s future. “There are so many problems with the schools’ facilities that it’s been very hard to get a good education here,” Torres Soto says. “The future of Puerto Rico is hanging by a thread because we’ve lost entire generations of students who could have had a better education.”