Although much of the debate about Locke's future has played out in heated faculty and community meetings after hours, at times it has spilled into the school's wide cinder-block corridors.
"Why are you even here? Why don't you just leave?" gym teacher Simone Chait hollered at an English instructor, Bruce Smith, who has vocally supported Green Dot, one morning as dozens of students looked on.
"Because I want something better for these kids. I don't want half of them to disappear," he shot back, referring to the school's 50% dropout rate.
The decision whether to leave the district would be much easier for Cubias if he hadn't seen some progress in recent years.
Take the third-floor math lab that opened this year. A windowless room with missing ceiling panels and exposed pipes, it has new computer terminals running a specialized software program that provides instruction for struggling students at high risk of dropping out.
Teaching leaves him exhausted, but Cubias clearly enjoys the four remedial algebra classes he teaches each day in the lab. Students work on their own, each struggling in different areas and often calling out, "Cubias, some help!" or "Cubias, over here!" He moves from one to the next, leaning over their shoulders, helping them work through equations and graphs.
He understands them -- how they feel like they could drop out and no one at the school would notice or care -- because he used to be one of them. Once a failing student who frequently ditched classes in order to hang out at the school's handball courts, Cubias credits a demanding English teacher with keeping him in school.
"People tell me my problem is that I take this too personally," he said. "I have a really hard time explaining to them that I \o7do \f7take this personally because this \o7is \f7personal for me."
Cubias also sees promise in the cadre of young, talented teachers who have been hired in recent years and now make up about half of Locke's math faculty.
And then there are the signs, however fleeting, that the school can offer a student a way out. Walking down the hall, he points to a gangly, shaggy-haired kid loping down the hallway, the first anyone can remember being admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Cubias notes that the number of students going on to two- and four-year colleges has been climbing in recent years.
