Kenneth Chanko's Blog
November 14, 2025
Rubber Room Writings
If I hadn’t been arrested on Valentine’s Day in 2014, you wouldn’t be reading this. There’d be no blog because there’d be no book.
Not that I want to spoil your reading of my debut novel—I know you’re eager to get your hands on "Exit Tickets" (pub date: Nov 18)—but that agonizing experience provided me with the time to start scribbling and informed the plot of "Exit Tickets."
Not, however, while I was in lock-up at the legendary Fort Apache precinct in the Bronx, the good ole 41st on Longwood. (Btw: Don’t sleep on that gritty 1981 Paul Newman movie, Fort Apache, the Bronx—it captures those pungent old days in the South Bronx.) Cuffed behind my back—really tight; for weeks afterward my left pinky numbly tingled—I was shuffled into and out of various holding pens for eight hours on that Friday in February ’14. My writing ability was, uhm, hampered, to say the least. But I was beginning to play out certain scenarios in my head.
Two cops had come to my school, P.S. 134 in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx, the day before. They were generous enough to not escort me out of my school in handcuffs—“Nothing to see here, kids, and don’t forget to do your homework over the Winter Break!” They allowed me to show up on my own at the precinct the following morning to be formally arrested, photographed and fingerprinted. I want to dispose of this part as quickly as possible since there was no validity to the charges against me: a mother of one of my students, who wanted to get back at my principal for whatever reason(s), accused me of hurting her son in my classroom. She must’ve had some pull at the precinct or whatever. The case was thrown out moments after the assistant DA finally had time to interview the mother in depth. But that was weeks after my arrest.
Before the dropped charges, I had been allowed out on a no-cash bail thanks to my UFT attorney. I was tenured; if I hadn’t been, and was still probationary, I’d have had to pay $8,000 out-of-pocket for an attorney and I wouldn’t have collected a paycheck while out of my classroom. It took three weeks to get the case dismissed, but I wouldn’t be going back quite yet. The NYC DOE had (and I can only assume still has) a policy that it won’t begin its own internal investigation of potential teacher wrongdoing until after any criminal charges are resolved. So between the three weeks of pending criminal charges and the three-plus months of the DOE’s own investigation (my kids wrote statements; the gym teacher stated that the boy who accused me of seriously injuring his back had participated with gusto in gym class after the purported injury that same day, etc.), I didn’t get back into my classroom until mid-June. Just two weeks before the end of the school year. My kids had a sub for four full months. Not good for my kids, not good for me.
But here’s where the silver lining revealed itself. While cooling my heals in various DOE rubber rooms (first in downtown Manhattan, then in the Bronx, near enough to Arthur Avenue for some tasty Italian lunches now and then), I started writing short stories. Hey, why not? I always liked writing, although I’d never seriously tried my hand at fiction. There was little else to do. So I scribbled away—in those early drafts, mostly vented—for those three months, long enough to discern an outline of something intriguing taking shape. As I calmed down and began looking at things with a clearer eye, I also began exploring the POVs of various characters. Sure, there was a story about a hard-pressed new teacher, but also a story from the perspective of a troubled student, and another that got into the head of a veteran teacher dealing with an uptight assistant principal, and one about the school's principal, and so on. And now, eleven years later, here we are. When I finally arrived back in my classroom that June more than a decade ago now, my students were jubilant—even the ones who gave me headaches. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. And hey, I missed them, too.
I returned the following school year, if only to show the mother that she couldn’t run me out of the Bronx. Believe it or not, she kept her kid at the school. She got the feds involved, claiming that her son wasn’t getting his mandated IEP services. If so, that was on my admin, not me. Investigators from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) swooped in and interviewed me, the boy’s other teachers, various administrators, the school’s social worker, psychologist, speech therapist, et al.
That was my last year. Burnt out, big-time.
Don’t get me wrong—I really liked my kids. I also got a kick out of walking the several blocks from the Freeman Street stop on the 5 train to 134 on Bristow, or from school to train, and hearing shouts of, “Yo, there goes Mr. Chanko!” A real community school, kids and their families living right there in the neighborhood, some just across the street from the school. I taught for nine years at the school, teaching writing enrichment and, when needed, all subjects in various grades. Very different from my first year of teaching…
As my stories took shape in that Bronx rubber room (okay, officially: in the “Temporary Reassignment Center”), I began thinking more about the setting of my stories. Should it be in the South Bronx, in a school like the one I taught in? Sure, that would lend it a certain gritty gravitas; after all, it’s the South Bronx. But I began harkening back to my incredibly turbulent first year of teaching, in ’05/’06, before arriving at 134. It was a District 75 school on the Upper East Side and there were these intriguing layers: a school whose population was all Black and brown kids, having been labeled severely emotionally disturbed, yet the school was on the very white and hoity-toity Upper East Side of Manhattan, on 88th between Park and Lex. And so nearly every year there was a sizable handful of new do-gooder white teachers, all out of their depth. Including me. I was thrown into a situation for which I was totally ill-prepared. I’ll say no more about it here, because in several significant ways, Mr. J’s experiences in Exit Tickets, and how he feels about them, mirrored my own as a first-year teacher working with special-ed teenagers.
So, yeah, getting arrested was certainly no fun. And my Bronx kids that school year suffered, too. Not that I was ever in the running for Teacher Of the Year; but I was more than competent by my ninth year of teaching and had developed a rapport with my kids during those first five months, before being forced from my classroom. I had also started an afterschool chess club, which the school never had before, and as far as I know, has never had since. So my chess-playing kids were also left in the lurch.
That’s how I came to write my book. If nothing else, it touches on that old lemons-into-lemonade axiom, about not knowing at the time how an event you thought was one of the worst in your life turns out to have served up an unlikely but real opportunity. It did for me. I started my novel way back then, after being banished from my classroom. My, ahem, exit ticket. And now my novel, Exit Tickets, is about to be published. Go figure.
Not that I want to spoil your reading of my debut novel—I know you’re eager to get your hands on "Exit Tickets" (pub date: Nov 18)—but that agonizing experience provided me with the time to start scribbling and informed the plot of "Exit Tickets."
Not, however, while I was in lock-up at the legendary Fort Apache precinct in the Bronx, the good ole 41st on Longwood. (Btw: Don’t sleep on that gritty 1981 Paul Newman movie, Fort Apache, the Bronx—it captures those pungent old days in the South Bronx.) Cuffed behind my back—really tight; for weeks afterward my left pinky numbly tingled—I was shuffled into and out of various holding pens for eight hours on that Friday in February ’14. My writing ability was, uhm, hampered, to say the least. But I was beginning to play out certain scenarios in my head.
Two cops had come to my school, P.S. 134 in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx, the day before. They were generous enough to not escort me out of my school in handcuffs—“Nothing to see here, kids, and don’t forget to do your homework over the Winter Break!” They allowed me to show up on my own at the precinct the following morning to be formally arrested, photographed and fingerprinted. I want to dispose of this part as quickly as possible since there was no validity to the charges against me: a mother of one of my students, who wanted to get back at my principal for whatever reason(s), accused me of hurting her son in my classroom. She must’ve had some pull at the precinct or whatever. The case was thrown out moments after the assistant DA finally had time to interview the mother in depth. But that was weeks after my arrest.
Before the dropped charges, I had been allowed out on a no-cash bail thanks to my UFT attorney. I was tenured; if I hadn’t been, and was still probationary, I’d have had to pay $8,000 out-of-pocket for an attorney and I wouldn’t have collected a paycheck while out of my classroom. It took three weeks to get the case dismissed, but I wouldn’t be going back quite yet. The NYC DOE had (and I can only assume still has) a policy that it won’t begin its own internal investigation of potential teacher wrongdoing until after any criminal charges are resolved. So between the three weeks of pending criminal charges and the three-plus months of the DOE’s own investigation (my kids wrote statements; the gym teacher stated that the boy who accused me of seriously injuring his back had participated with gusto in gym class after the purported injury that same day, etc.), I didn’t get back into my classroom until mid-June. Just two weeks before the end of the school year. My kids had a sub for four full months. Not good for my kids, not good for me.
But here’s where the silver lining revealed itself. While cooling my heals in various DOE rubber rooms (first in downtown Manhattan, then in the Bronx, near enough to Arthur Avenue for some tasty Italian lunches now and then), I started writing short stories. Hey, why not? I always liked writing, although I’d never seriously tried my hand at fiction. There was little else to do. So I scribbled away—in those early drafts, mostly vented—for those three months, long enough to discern an outline of something intriguing taking shape. As I calmed down and began looking at things with a clearer eye, I also began exploring the POVs of various characters. Sure, there was a story about a hard-pressed new teacher, but also a story from the perspective of a troubled student, and another that got into the head of a veteran teacher dealing with an uptight assistant principal, and one about the school's principal, and so on. And now, eleven years later, here we are. When I finally arrived back in my classroom that June more than a decade ago now, my students were jubilant—even the ones who gave me headaches. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. And hey, I missed them, too.
I returned the following school year, if only to show the mother that she couldn’t run me out of the Bronx. Believe it or not, she kept her kid at the school. She got the feds involved, claiming that her son wasn’t getting his mandated IEP services. If so, that was on my admin, not me. Investigators from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) swooped in and interviewed me, the boy’s other teachers, various administrators, the school’s social worker, psychologist, speech therapist, et al.
That was my last year. Burnt out, big-time.
Don’t get me wrong—I really liked my kids. I also got a kick out of walking the several blocks from the Freeman Street stop on the 5 train to 134 on Bristow, or from school to train, and hearing shouts of, “Yo, there goes Mr. Chanko!” A real community school, kids and their families living right there in the neighborhood, some just across the street from the school. I taught for nine years at the school, teaching writing enrichment and, when needed, all subjects in various grades. Very different from my first year of teaching…
As my stories took shape in that Bronx rubber room (okay, officially: in the “Temporary Reassignment Center”), I began thinking more about the setting of my stories. Should it be in the South Bronx, in a school like the one I taught in? Sure, that would lend it a certain gritty gravitas; after all, it’s the South Bronx. But I began harkening back to my incredibly turbulent first year of teaching, in ’05/’06, before arriving at 134. It was a District 75 school on the Upper East Side and there were these intriguing layers: a school whose population was all Black and brown kids, having been labeled severely emotionally disturbed, yet the school was on the very white and hoity-toity Upper East Side of Manhattan, on 88th between Park and Lex. And so nearly every year there was a sizable handful of new do-gooder white teachers, all out of their depth. Including me. I was thrown into a situation for which I was totally ill-prepared. I’ll say no more about it here, because in several significant ways, Mr. J’s experiences in Exit Tickets, and how he feels about them, mirrored my own as a first-year teacher working with special-ed teenagers.
So, yeah, getting arrested was certainly no fun. And my Bronx kids that school year suffered, too. Not that I was ever in the running for Teacher Of the Year; but I was more than competent by my ninth year of teaching and had developed a rapport with my kids during those first five months, before being forced from my classroom. I had also started an afterschool chess club, which the school never had before, and as far as I know, has never had since. So my chess-playing kids were also left in the lurch.
That’s how I came to write my book. If nothing else, it touches on that old lemons-into-lemonade axiom, about not knowing at the time how an event you thought was one of the worst in your life turns out to have served up an unlikely but real opportunity. It did for me. I started my novel way back then, after being banished from my classroom. My, ahem, exit ticket. And now my novel, Exit Tickets, is about to be published. Go figure.
