A Brooklyn probationary firefighter training to join the FDNY was only days away from graduation when he says he got called before a chief to receive a brutal message: resign, or be fired.
Jason Ruben believed he had successfully made it through the grueling four-month Fire Department Fire Academy training. His instructors gave him his dress blue uniform. They ordered him to practice marching with the rest of his squad and pose with them for an official FDNY graduation picture. His mom flew in from out of state.
Six days before the 2017 ceremony, Ruben alleged in a discrimination lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court against New York City, he and six other Black firefighters were pulled out of class at the academy and told to wait in the cafeteria. They sat there for 10 hours, he said.
Then, one by one, they were brought in front of a chief. The officer told Ruben he did not meet the standard to graduate, he claims. He could resign or be terminated — but if he forced the FDNY to fire him, it might be harder for him to get employed at other city agencies.
“Right there, just like that, I had to decide,” Ruben, now 34, told the Daily News. “I was given no other information. They said they couldn’t tell me anything, and I just had to choose.”
That moment sent Ruben into an emotional tailspin — first the shock, then the embarrassment, and ultimately, the frustration.
“I just wanted to know why,” he told The News.
That quest brought Ruben — who eventually moved to Texas to begin a new life, in part to escape the bad memories of his Fire Academy experience — to file his discrimination lawsuit against the city and, by extension, the FDNY.
While he hopes to reverse the FDNY decision to push him out, he mostly wants to force the city to change how the agency evaluates probies at the academy — both the devastating way he was fired and, according to his lawsuit, the confusing and inconsistent way performances were graded.
“The whole process is just wrong to me,” he said.
Ruben, a Brooklyn native who briefly attended Canarsie High School but finished his studies in North Carolina, sat for the FDNY entrance exam in January 2012, not long after he moved back to the city and settled in Crown Heights.
He didn’t know anything about New York City’s Bravest. He didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a firefighter. He didn’t know an FDNY firefighter typically makes over $100,000 after five years on the job. He had no knowledge of the FDNY’s past troubles recruiting and retaining Black, Latino and women firefighters. He’d never even heard of the Vulcan Society, the association of Black firefighters who, in 2007, successfully sued the FDNY over its hiring practices in a landmark discrimination case.
But he frequently walked by a firehouse a few blocks from his home, and it dawned on him that was a job he would like to do.
“It just seemed like something that I would enjoy — you know, helping people,” Ruben said.
He scored a 98 on the entrance exam — a great score, but one that was barely good enough to make the cut in the highly competitive FDNY. It took roughly five years for Ruben, who was about to join the State Troopers, to get called to the department’s 18-week training class at Randall’s Island. He was sworn in on June 12, 2017 as a probationary firefighter.
He got up every day at 3 a.m. to get to the academy by 5 a.m., arriving clean-shaven and neat as a pin. Classes started at 6 a.m., but the instructors told the probies, “If you aren’t an hour early, you’re already late.”
The days were divided between physical fitness training — which Ruben had no trouble handling — and academics and practical skills. In the academics segment, probies learned about the science of firefighting. In the practical segment, they learned the mechanics of life-saving techniques, like how to fashion knots to rappel down burning buildings.
Ruben knew that he needed to have an overall passing score to graduate from the academy. And he had to pass either academics or the practical skills test with a 75 or above. But what he didn’t know, according to his lawsuit, was that every time he attempted one of the practical drills, the result mattered.
The first time he made a single slide knot it was like he had “two left hands,” Ruben said.
The FDNY formula for scoring practical skills, according to Ruben’s lawsuit, is calculated by taking the number of times a probie does a drill correctly divided by the number of attempts. Any time Ruben took the drill but didn’t make the single side knot correctly, it counted against him, his suit said.
“It shouldn’t matter how many times I needed to learn a new skill — what matters is that I had it perfected by the end of the academy,” Ruben noted.
He also struggled initially with academics class as well. Candidates got frequent quizzes and exams but no feedback on what they got right or wrong, his lawsuit said. Some questions were the same from quiz to quiz, meaning Ruben could be repeating his own errors with no chance to understand his mistakes.
Ruben also came to dread the days probies were called into the auditorium for quizzes and tests. He and others who were struggling were called out by name and sent up to a balcony to work from there.
They were almost all Black, Ruben said. Jokes became the norm, with the balcony candidates told to wait for their “crayons and coloring books” to be brought to them, the lawsuit said.
“We became known as the ‘dumb ones,'” Ruben said. “It was humiliating and stressful.” On one early academics test, he received a 35.
Halfway through the academy, the FDNY began offering voluntary extra tutoring on weekends. Ruben attended religiously and it was there that he first got academic feedback. His performance and grades improved rapidly, he said. Even his instructors commented on it.
But in the final tally, his surge of success came too late. Ruben scored above passing in the overall grade — but didn’t get the required 75 in either academics or the practical skills components. A 75 in just one would have let him graduate. He was only two points shy, with a 73, in academics ? brought low by that early quiz score of 35.
With his lawsuit, Ruben hopes to force the same kind of change at the academy that occurred with FDNY hiring practices after the Vulcans’ lawsuit. If nothing else, he hopes that no future probie will ever face the kind of decision he had to make.
“There has just got to be a better way,” he said. “It’s just not a good way to treat people.”
In response to Ruben’s allegations, the city Law Department pointed to the FDNY’s recent success in bringing some diversity to its ranks.
“Over the last five years the FDNY has graduated more firefighters of color than in any point in its history. We’ll have to review these particular claims,” said spokesman Nick Paolucci.