Max Wild Journey

Really the End?

2008-07-01T15:56:00.000-05:00

On June 6th 2008 they say they closed the doors forever to Prospect School. “Budget cuts”, explained the Herald County Superintendent. The local paper quoted Herald County Principals reacting to the news:

“My main concern is that if we are not successful in disciplining unruly children then these kids will be taking instructional time from the others.”

“We will definitely use in-school suspension more. It may mean that the expulsion route may be considered more often.”
(In Florida expelled students are not legally entitled to ANY education.)

But Henry, my public school liaison is quoted as saying that disruptive elementary and middle school students will be moved to ESAK, the alternative High School or to another alternative school that is exclusively for Special Education. “I don’t think there will be a problem. There will be room.”

TRAC - a possible solution?

2008-06-17T03:48:00.000-05:00

TRAC – a possible solution for Herald County

Given Herald County School System’s support and enthusiasm for punishment, Zero Tolerance policies and “getting the bad kids out of the classroom,” there is little hope, in the short run, of decreasing the number of children in Herald County defined as needing Alternative Education. However given not only this reality, but also guided by my experience at Prospect School and informed by formal studies on Alternative Schools, I believe there is a better answer for the at-risk Herald County school children.

The response of Herald County to highly disruptive children typically falls into three categories: keep the child in his or her classroom, keep suspending (or expel) the child or send the child to a privately run Alternative School. None of these are good answers. TRAC (Temporary Removal from Assigned Classes) offers a better solution, for the children, their families and the schools.

TRAC differs in three key elements from the typical approaches for dealing with disruptive children. Most importantly, children would remain on their school campus and continue to be enrolled in the public school system. This will allow them to receive the full complement of services the public school provides as well as preventing them from becoming invisible in a parallel system where school laws and regulations often do not apply. The other differences are the extended day schedule and the using a diverse team to develop and modify a prescriptive plan tailored to each child’s unique needs and situation.

TRAC Scheduling
TRAC scheduling and staffing would differ from the mainstream school program. The extended day would permit the child to receive the counseling and additional tutoring she or he needs, plus keeps the child “off the streets” during the prime time for juvenile crime, 3:00 p.m. -7:00 p.m. With few exceptions, children who have been disruptive in school are behind academically. While experts argue whether poor academic performance is a cause or effect of highly disruptive students, the additional schooling will serve to improve academic performance. These double long school days could also be viewed as a punishment, molifying the pro-punishment advocates and the extended days may serve as a deterrent (assuming children of this age think about consequences before they act, an uncertain proposition at best). The staffing for this extended day should include two TRAC teachers with overlapping shifts at mid-day for example, one teacher might arrive at 7:00 am and work until 2:00 while the second teacher would arrive at noon and work until 7:00 pm. The teachers should be certified public school teachers employed by the child’s school providing individualized or small group instruction in all subjects using the same texts and curriculum used by the child’s regular teachers.

TRAC Classrooms
Each portable classroom should be designed to accommodate ten to twelve TRAC students at a time. When there are fewer children, the TRAC staff can spend some of their days working with those difficult children identified by the principal as heading down the path to removal from assigned classes (pre-TRAC). If the numbers on any given campus increase, more staff and portables need to be made available. Since it is difficult to predict with certainty the number of children on any given campus who will require TRAC during the school year, it could be necessary to shift these human and physical resources from one campus to another. Children however, should not be transferred. The classrooms wiould thus be staffed with three adults, the two teachers with overlapping shifts and a counselor. The TRAC counselor would be present in the portable to provide structured, scheduled counseling, as well as counseling on an as-needed basis (on everything from anger control to peer relations) and to accompany the child to class when she or he first returns.

TRAC Team
The first phase for TRAC, would be a meeting, organized by the Director of Alternative Education, with all the vital players:
• the child
• the child’s parents or guardian
• DCF caseworker
• the child’s minister
• the school principal
• the child’s teachers
• the school counselor
• the school resource officer
• the child’s bus driver
• representatives from relevant social agencies – drug rehab, sexual abstinence, anger control
• representatives from the child’s outside activities both current and potential, such a football coach, gymnastics instructor, piano teacher etcetera.
• If the child has a probation officer, she or he should attend. The director of alternative education should be the organizer for this meeting.
• the TRAC teachers and counselor

Why would these people be considered necessary at this TRAC meeting? The child and his/her parents or guardians must be present. This seems so obvious, but all too often decisions are made about students in their absence. It is vital for parents to be present and flexibility should be shown in scheduling the meeting and in helping with transportation. If necessary, pressure can and should be brought to bear to get parents to attend, and this is one role the DCF representative should play.

It should become regular practice to open a DCF case every time a child is referred to TRAC (assuming the child doesn’t already have a DCF caseworker). Is neglectful or abusive parenting what lies behind the troubling behaviors? Any referral to remove a child from the educational mainstream, implies the principal and parent were unable to form a team to help the child.

DCF should use the carrot/stick approach. Parents need to fear termination of parental rights but also need to be made aware of affordable treatment options and support services to help them cope with their out-of-control child. The threat of termination of parental rights may help inspire reluctant parents to attend the conference. DCF cannot be present in name only. This ailing agency needs to locate, develop and incent more and better foster homes including therapeutic foster homes to provide viable options for these highly disruptive children found living in neglectful or abusive situations. If DCF decides to place the child in a relative’s care, more frequent and substantial monitoring and support than currently exists, needs to be provided. Moreover, DCF needs to make referrals to support current family structures which although dysfunctional, don’t require removing the child from the home.

A minister or other religious leader should be present. At first blush this may sound like a strange request that possibly blurs the lines between church and state. However religion plays a large role in American life. This is especially true in the culture of the south, including Florida and very much so in Herald County. Religious institutions whether churches, temples or mosques, serve an important function in creating communities and like a village, can help raise a child.

If the child’s family belongs to a religious institution, even if they are not regular attendees, their religious leader should be present at the conference. This religious leader would attend to be made aware of the problem, to become part of the solution and to encourage and if necessary pressure the child to become involved in youth group and other religious sponsored activities which promote the values seemingly missing based on the child’s misbehavior. In the event the child does not identify with a religion, a religious leader could still be present. In Herald County there is a movement called: One church, One child. The idea is that every church should “adopt” a troubled child and his/her family regardless of their religious beliefs, and mentor and assist the child with all the resources the church can bring to the table.

The school principal and all the child’s teachers should to be present. The presence of parents and teachers will strengthen the home / school connection showing the child a united front and helping the child understand that these parties will continue to communicate in the future. Moreover by having all the teachers present there can be no chance for a miscommunication, no teacher will be left in the dark. In most cases the classroom teacher was, intentionally or unintentionally, shown disrespect by the child. Thus it is the teacher who can best deliver the message telling the child she or he must not only by attend all mandatory counseling sessions, required meetings and activities, but more importantly, the child must refrain from engaging in inappropriate behavior in the classroom. The teachers and principal are best suited for clarifying the school rules and expectations and helping the child understand that at least in the short term, he or she is now viewed as untrustworthy.

The school counselor, SRO (school resource officer, aka Deputy) and a bus driver should be present at the conference. Part of the treatment plan for the child would involve regular, frequent counseling sessions. Initially these should be daily tapering off to no fewer than once a week until all parties are convinced the child can be released from the contract. The SRO assigned to the school, should be present both to become aware of the status of this student and for clear communication. The presence of the deputy would help the child realize that she or he has become “one of the usual suspects” and will need to avoid any perception of and association with wrong doing. The bus driver is present because with few exceptions, these highly disruptive children should not be permitted on their regular school bus. However the public schools should still provide transportation via a separate bus. It will not be necessary to hire a new driver or purchase another bus due to the requirement that the TRAC schedule be for an extended day program.

Representatives from social service agencies outside the school should be present. If the child’s misbehavior involved sex, the volunteers from a sex education program should not only be present but the child should be mandated to complete their program. Similarly if the offense involved drugs, the child should be required to complete an anti-drug program with random drug testing. With few exceptions, all of these troubled children will require anger control classes. Children should receive anger control training at school but also outside of school along with other family members. The family life of most of these troubled children is stressful and too often their families respond to stress with anger. We have neither the resources nor the ability to provide these families with cars that don’t break down, well paying jobs with reasonable bosses, good health and satisfying relationships with significant others. But we can teach parents and children how to respond to the stress caused by the lack of these essentials with something other than anger. Thus a counselor from a local anger control program should be present. If the child is academically deficient, as are most children currently referred to alternative schools, then a tutor or representative from a tutoring program should be present with the stipulation that the contract calls for daily after school tutoring. These social service interventions ideally would take place on the school campus before or after regular school hours. If that is not feasible, transportation should be arranged so the child’s success isn’t dependent on a parent who can’t or won’t comply.

The conference and subsequent contract should not be exclusively punitive. The child’s strengths should be noted – artistic abilities, musical talents, athletic prowess. If the child isn’t already involved in sports, activities or classes to exploit these strengths, arrangements should be made to include these but again a timeline needs to be devised. “We’ve signed you up for a ten month gymnastic course at a private gym. Classes are three times a week. But they won’t begin until you meet all the criteria of this contract for two months and since the contract runs for twelve months, if you start gymnastics and then fail to comply with the contract, gymnastics classes will be put on hold.”

All team members should anticipate and in fact expect the child to progress with two steps forward, one step back. Children will “fall off the wagon,” there will be recidivism. While these slips are depressing and disheartening to all involved, they must not cause the key players to view the child as a failure or the situation as hopeless. A meeting should be held to analyze the situation and determine what went well and what went wrong and why, then a new timetable devised and the program started anew.

After the initial meeting, the second and most difficult phase of TRAC involves trust. The child should be made to understand that while all academic expectations and materials including lessons, textbooks, assignments and homework will remain the same, some things will change. The child would now be required always be within arm’s length of a teacher or counselor. This identifies the child as a risk, as a person in need of extra supervision and requiring accommodations such as an assigned seat near the teacher and no privileges such as delivering messages to the office. The clear message should be that this child cannot be trusted. The stigmatizing effect would help satisfy those who cry for punishment while simultaneously serving a safety and security purpose. The written contract would specify how much time must elapse and what behaviors must be demonstrated for the child to be worthy of trust and thus released from arm’s length status.

The stigmatizing and ostracizing of the child may be anathema from a psychological perspective, but it is important to remember the emotions regarding these very troubled and troublesome children: school administrators and the school board want them out of their schools, parents don’t want these “bad” children near their offspring and everyone is looking for sanctions and punishments. However, revoking all privileges and putting a child on arm’s length status are not merely a sop to placate the angry mob, these children really do jeopardize safety and security and in order to achieve rapid reintegration into their regular classrooms, they need to be easily and obviously identified. Individual schools could design rules and privileges regarding the students who must be within arms length of an adult at all times, they may get served last at lunch and not be permitted to use the bathroom without an escort. It is important to make the rules for getting off arm’s length status clear and not too difficult to achieve. The objective is for the child to want to be trusted and to slowly move the child toward regaining trust. The goal is to move rapidly to a time when we can start adding positive activities that speak to a child’s strengths.

Once the child is off “arm’s length status”, the third phase of TRAC begins. During the initial meeting, the child’s interests and strengths were identified. Now is the time to get the child involved in activities that capitalize on those interests and abilities (artistic, musical and athletic). If the child isn’t already involved in sports, activities or classes to exploit these strengths, then this is the time to make it happen.

TRAC Completion
The final phase of TRAC is reintegration. The return to regular classes should be done very slowly and with much discussion and support. At the team conference a determination should be made as to in which class the child had the fewest problems and devise a timeline listing that class as the first for reintegration. Prior to returning, a meeting should take place with that teacher, the TRAC teachers, counselor and the student to be sure expectations are clear. Just before class, the counselor would remind the student of the goals and accompanies the child to class. If the child successfully attends class, the counselor would continue to attend but slowly taper off, remaining in the classroom for fewer and fewer minutes until the child is attending on his or her own but still working on the feedback loop to insure frequent and clear communication regarding the child’s return to that class. After a time a second class is added using the same procedure. Careful monitoring and immediate feedback is necessary to catch small problems before they escalate. Once the child is attending mainstream classes full-time, support systems should remain to prevent recidivism. This is a child at-risk and as long as the child is at this school, she or he will need a school-centered safety net.

Not just a Florida Problem

School Board members, politicians and educators, in Herald County and across the United States, proudly tout their Zero Tolerance policies. Zero Tolerance continues to help fuel the national growth in suspensions and expulsions. Enacted in response to several well-publicized school shootings, Zero Tolerance became the law of the land in 1994 when President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA). By then, New York, California and Kentucky already had Zero Tolerance laws on the books mandating expulsion for gang violence, fighting and drugs.

While GFSA required expulsion of students who brought a weapon to school, educators pushed for, and legislators and school boards eagerly supported, expanding the definition of “weapon” to include not only firearms, but also knives, illegal drugs, water pistols, prescription and over-the-counter medication. But Zero Tolerance isn’t limited to “weapons,” (no matter how broadly defined) the Zero Tolerance list now includes expulsion for alcohol, fighting, swearing, disrupting class, disobedience, truancy and more than a dozen other forms of misbehavior.

In 2005, media attention on arrests of children in Florida and Nevada turned up the heat on Zero Tolerance policies. Eyebrows were raised when two elementary school children were arrested in Ocala, Florida, for drawing threatening stick figures in class, a 6-year-old in Florida's Brevard County was handcuffed and removed from school for hitting his teacher and a police officer with a book and in Nevada, Clark County School District officials tried to expel a student who drew a comic strip depicting the death of his teacher.

Ruth Zweifler, executive director of Michigan's Student Advocacy Center (SAC), doesn't mince words. "Zero tolerance," she says, "has become a full-blown war on children. Instead of being targeted for reform, students are being targeted for expulsion. School districts have a duty to find children who have special problems and address their needs before it's too late. Instead, they're engaged in a 'child hunt.'"

"Clearly I think there are incidents that are so excessive that the facts show that this (Zero Tolerance) is a mindless policy in most places," said Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that works on child-welfare and juvenile justice system issues.

But Zero Tolerance is more than “mindless.” In school districts across the United States, Zero Tolerance has been shown to primarily victimize poor, black children.
“In Texas, zero-tolerance policies have resulted in a disproportionate number of low-income, disabled and minority students being sent to alternative disciplinary schools, most of which have few books or computers and substandard teachers . . .. What makes me really concerned is that the majority of kids sent to disciplinary schools are poor kids, almost all black and brown children," - Texas state Rep. Dora Olivo.

Beverly Cross, an urban education specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who contributed to a 2001 study of racial profiling and punishment in U.S. public schools published by the Applied Research Center's ERASE Initiative, found Zero Tolerance has created many rule-bound "maximum security schools" where students of color are suspended and expelled at increasing rates, often for nonviolent and subjectively defined offenses. "Racism rests just beneath the surface of zero-tolerance decisions."

In their 2001 report Zero Tolerance: Unfair, with Little Recourse, Dan Losen and Johanna Wald of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project and Judith Browne, senior attorney at the Advancement Project, report that although black students make up only 17 percent of all U.S. students, they account for 33 percent of all out-of-school suspensions and 31 percent of all expulsions. By contrast, 63 percent of all students are white, but they account for only 50 percent of out-of-school suspensions. What's more, the Civil Rights Project reports, students of color are more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled for willful acts, often labeled as disobedience, disruption, or disrespect for authority.
National trends show a significant increase in the number of students who are expelled and suspended each year as well as an increase in the amount of time these students are excluded from school. While some of these children are victims of misapplied Zero Tolerance policies, many are very troubled and highly disruptive students and their numbers are challenging school boards and legislators across the United States.

Massachusetts: "It's become acceptable to push students out of the classroom rather than addressing the underlying issue."
Emily Anthes Boston Globe “Academic discipline actions on rise” 4/6/2004

Texas: “The law states that every student in an alternative learning center (ALC) is required to receive a comparable education to that of regular schools. But after hearing the complaints of parents who had children in one of the ALC schools in my district, I found otherwise I visited the [ALC] school, and the school still had no textbooks [and] there was a lack of adequate materials for the teachers. Clearly, and not through the fault of the teachers, this was a clear-cut picture of ‘warehousing.’ It is very irresponsible to allow such a situation to exist and totally disregards the best interest of the children.” Dora Olivo, Texas State Representative, District 27
North Carolina: “Regular schools reduce their efforts to address discipline and behavior problems by changing the school culture, finding it easier simply to exclude “problem” students. Alternative schools become a dumping ground for unwanted students. A disproportionate number of African American students are placed in alternative schools, resulting in racial resegregation of public schools. Few students sent to alternative schools ever return to their regular schools, and their likelihood of dropping out may even increase. Ineffective alternative schools consume resources that would have been better spent to improve regular schools.”

Ohio: Steve Rosenthal, the director of information and resources at the Alternative Education Resource Organization, expressed concern that alternative education in the Cleveland Schools could become a warehouse for kids who did not fit well at traditional schools. “A lot of (alternative) schools are just a dumping ground for kids who are not fitting in, administrators want to get them out of the population and don’t do much for the kids after removing them from traditional school.”

Arkansas: When the Arkansas Interim Committee on Education asked educators for input on how to cope with violent students, many teachers loudly demanded more Alternative Schools so they can “get these bad children out of the classroom” while others, more familiar with Alternative Schools objected saying these are nothing more than “discipline dumps.”

In May 1999, 47 states had laws permitting or mandating Alternative Schools, by 2004 virtually every state offered Alternative Schooling for disruptive students. Although educators may use the term “Alternative School,” meanings differ dramatically between states, and even between school districts within each state.

Alternative School can mean:
• a shortened school day or a later school start time
• classes on Saturdays
• a classroom within the school for part or all of the day
• a school within a school program
• a work-study program
• home instruction
• a separate school run by the public school
• a boarding school
• an innovative school not primarily discipline oriented
• a separate school run by a private non-profit or for profit company

There is more agreement about what makes a successful Alternative School. Although due to financial and political considerations, the practice rarely mirrors the research. Studies point to a dozen characteristics necessary for a successful Alternative School.

1. School Size: The school should have a teacher/student ratio of no more than 1:10 and the student population should not exceed 250 students.
2. Mission and Purpose: The school should have a well-defined mission and purpose along with a clearly articulated discipline code.
3. Faculty: The school must recruit, train and retain qualified and highly trained staff with special expertise in alternative education. The faculty needs to be caring, competent and committed to the philosophy of alternative schooling. They must volunteer, not get assigned, to teach in the Alternative School. Faculty must receive continual staff development. One of the most critical factors in the success of an alternative school is the personal relationship that exists between the students and their teachers.
4. Safety and Security: The school must promote a sense of belonging. Students should feel cared for, respected and safe (academically, physically, emotionally and socially).
5. Counseling: Students need regular and frequent access to effective social services and counseling. The school must provide and integrate into the school program, community mental health, health and social services with other collaborating agencies in the community.
6. Parental Involvement: To the maximum extent possible, parents need to be actively engaged in the Alternative School.
7. The School Building: The Alternative School should be a modern, welcoming physical environment well stocked with the books, furniture and technology equivalent to the mainstream school.
8. Voluntary Participation: Students must not feel they have been sentenced to the Alternative School. Attending the school should be viewed by students, parents, faculty and the community as a privilege rather than a punishment.
9. Curriculum: The curriculum should mirror the mainstream school but with a student-centered approach allowing for student input and tailored to diverse learning styles. Clear, well-defined learning objectives are mandatory. The faculty must maintain high expectations for student achievement, promoting high standards, student accountability and a variety of assessment tools for measuring student progress.
10. School to School Relationship: Frequent, regular communication between the mainstream (sending) school and the Alternative School is required along with strong support from the school board and school district. The Alternative School must be a part of, and have a close working relationship with, all parts of the school system.
11. Community: Efforts must be made to reach out to, gain the support of and involve the local community in the Alternative School.
12. Hope: The single most critical factor in the success of the Alternative School is the total commitment to have every student be a success. A clearly defined plan for each student’s future, including when appropriate, the criteria to reenter the mainstream school is the roadmap to hope

Life Guards: Epilogues of Hope

2008-06-10T03:55:00.000-05:00

Life Guards: epilogues of hope

A river ran through the village. One day a villager heard cries coming from the river and saw a child struggling and floundering in the rushing water. The villager leapt into the icy current and with much effort pulled the child to safety.

The next day two other villagers heard cries from the river and they too worked to pull several children out of the swiftly flowing water.

Day after day it continued. Little and big, boys and girls, the children kept coming. They tumbled down the river, nearly downing, gasping for breath, needing to be rescued.

The villagers called a meeting. They honored the brave rescuers and then began to discuss better ways to save the children, more efficient techniques and procedures. They talked about how to get more rescuers and to start a campaign to raise money for rescue training. They talked late into the night until one villager raised her hand and asked a question:

“I was wondering, how did these children come to be in the river in the first place?”

The Children’s Alliance, with my mentor, Rex Stewart as Chair and Dr. Mike Jordan (his real name) as Program Coordinator, is working to keep children from venturing near the riverbank, and helping to pull them out when they are drowning. The Children’s Alliance is a non-profit organization whose vision is to create, in Herald County, “a community that values all children and families, accomplished by nurturing a family environment while providing safe, effective services of the highest quality.” In 2004 the Children’s Alliance obtained $568,000 in grants to fund programs for children. One area of concern has been the lack of after school programs. Currently the Children’s Alliance funds 17 after school programs reaching over 700 children. In 2005 the Children’s Alliance identified child abuse and family violence as posing the greatest risk to Herald County children. The Children’s Alliance partnered with the Herald County Sheriff’s department, formed a task force, then hired and trained people to combat all types of domestic violence.

Readers who wish to help the children in mentioned in this book and hundreds of others like them, are encouraged to donate generously to the Children’s Alliance. For more information:

The web site is: www.mcchildrensalliance.com
The email address is: mcpsalliance@marion.k12.fl.us
The phone number for Dr. Mike Jordan is: (352) 671-7237

Epilogue: All Children Left Behind - or is there Another Way?

2008-06-03T06:32:00.001-05:00

Epilogue: All Children Left Behind – or is there Another Way?

What should be done with the children who are currently sent to alternative schools, the children who are left behind? Given the intensity and multiplicity of challenges these children present, along with the host of deep rooted problems from which they suffer, it is clear that very few will somehow just outgrow or “get over” their problems. It is equally clear that we cannot continue the practice of depriving children of their right to an education under the veil of reassigning them to privately run alternative schools. Separate but equal was a lie for black children sentenced to “negro” schools and it is a lie for misbehaving children sent to “alternative” schools.

But what is the solution?

Here’s the system I would create. First and foremost, highly disruptive children would remain under the direct care of the public schools, on their home campus, with formalized support systems to help them change their behavior and develop their deficient skills. While most of these children would need to be temporarily removed from their regular classrooms, the goal would be to begin the process of reintegrating them as quickly as possible.

The costs associated with keeping children in public school but in specialized programs would be paid, in large part, with the money currently given to the private companies running alternative schools.

The current set-up in which a public school employee (such as Henry) oversees and approves the identification of children in need of alternative education, generally works. While this “Director of Alternative Education” would no longer manage contracts, he or she would be able to ensure consistency across the school district regarding which behaviors merit temporary removal from assigned classes, to share best practices and to reallocate resources as needed.

Once a child has been identified as requiring Temporary Removal from Assigned Classes (I’ll call it TRAC, since every good policy needs an acronym or two!) the treatment would begin with a written contract developed at a conference attended by all key stakeholders who will play a role on the child’s treatment team. These vital players include the child, his or her parents or guardian, the school principal, the child’s teachers, the school counselor, the school resource officer, the child’s bus driver, the TRAC teachers, the TRAC counselor, a DCF caseworker, the child’s minister and representatives from relevant social agencies – drug rehab, sexual abstinence, anger control. Also present should be any representatives from the child’s outside activities both current and potential, such a football coach, gymnastics instructor, piano teacher etcetera. If the child has a probation officer, she or he should attend. The director of alternative education should be the organizer for this meeting.
The TRAC plan has special staffing needs and for maximum effectiveness, requires an extended day program. The TRAC plan has four phases. The meeting with the all the key players and identification of their roles, begins the plan. The second phase is the shortest but also the most controversial as it combines a punitive element with a risk identifier. The third phase focuses on accentuating the child’s strengths and interests. The final phase reintegrates the child into the mainstream school program.

The TRAC model for treating and educating troubled children would, of course, be more difficult and expensive than the current practice of transferring children to an alternative “school.” It would require bringing more people to the table and taking more time to focus on the troubled child. Given the level of animosity these children provoke in adults, especially teachers, and knowing that the children will relapse before they succeed, such an approach is likely to be a pretty hard sell. But while few would advocate throwing these children in a dumpster, that is effectively what happens with the current scheme. The public school spends millions, but few of the children get educated. In addition to being morally wrong, this approach doesn’t make financial sense. Uneducated, emotionally troubled children grow up to be uneducated troubled adults who will likely need public assistance and will probably get in trouble with the law and eventually mistreat their own children starting the circle all over again. The bill for the money, time and energy we don’t spend on these children today will come due in a few years.

This model will likely invoke the wrath of those who rail at the unfairness of the “bad” children getting more resources than the “good” kids. This plan will provide more attention, counseling, tutoring, extra-curricular activities and other “benefits” all of which cost more money. In the fiscal conservatism of the south, there is a reluctance to spend more on education, moreover this model will be viewed as robbing the good to “throw money” at the bad and let’s face it, the parents of these children don’t vote for the school board and these children are not seen as savable. To succeed, this model will require a “tough on crime” champion to sell the financial advantages of effectively educating disrupted youths.

This model will also meet opposition by from private companies such as Ebencorp as well as from public school administrators. NIH anticipated this problem in its findings: “The barriers to implementing clearly effective programs inevitably include the resistance of the individuals operating ineffective programs to have their institutions closed and their jobs abolished. Furthermore, despite evidence for intensive multisystem therapy, communities are probably apprehensive at having delinquent youngsters treated in their midst as opposed to segregating them in detention centers that have the appearance of being safer and keep the children invisible.”

Educator John Dewey once wrote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children.”

When parents can’t or won’t provide an environment that permits their children to succeed in school, the community (the village) must rally and provide what is necessary to give every child a chance at an education, a chance for a future.

Chapter Sixty-Three: Whatever Happened to...

2008-05-27T06:55:00.002-05:00

Chapter 63: Whatever Happened to…?

I am always asking for news of my former students, staff and coworkers. Sometimes I wish I didn’t ask. I am usually dismayed by what I hear, though not surprised. I didn’t need a crystal ball to predict some of the outcomes.

A UPS chasing substitute teacher? About two months before I left, Lynne handed me a pile of phone messages from someone who called half a dozen times that day seemingly desperate to teach at Prospect. With a straight face Lynne watched me read the messages. “The name of this wanna-be teacher was vaguely familiar. Should I know her?” Lynne’s curly red hair is standing on end and her eyes are bulging as she takes her hands as if to strangle me, saying, “It’s The Prison Guard!” I rapidly discard the stack of phone messages as if they were flaming and advise Lynne to throw away any subsequent phone messages from this caller.

Oscar, the principal of Haven Hill? He almost lost his job again for incompetence (again) but he begged the Superintendent to let him stay, saying he only has a few years before he retires. So the Superintendent made him principal at the public school for the ESE (Special Education) students with disabilities so debilitating they can’t function in a regular classroom. Once again, the children who need the most get the least….

Agnes, Oscar’s secretary at Haven Hill? She is the receptionist at a Herald County Public School building. Unclear as to whether she hung her Confederate flag in her new office.

Vince, the custodian? He retired.

Mr. Ericson, the owner of Ericson’s Speedy Mart who made a racist comment about the music? He and his wife sold the gas station to a family from India and are now customers rather than owners of Ericsons.

Stone, the teacher who wanted to be a Baptist Minister? After I left, he was groomed by The Boss to become principal and was put in that position temporarily, but the promotion never came to pass. Stone was furious and shortly thereafter, in September 2004, his name appeared in the local section of the newspaper: “An alternative school teacher was arrested Wednesday after fighting with a student, authorities said…. (He) was charged with physical child abuse after witnesses said he attacked a Prospect School student.”

Witnesses say Stone was heaping insults on the boy and poking him in the chest when the boy punched Stone. Stone shoved the boy, the boy hit back and Stone began to punch the boy violently in the face. Marci, the permanent substitute teacher, was standing nearby. Stone asked her to say he didn’t hit the boy. She refused, telling me later she couldn’t tell whether Stone, in his fit of rage. really didn’t remember hitting the boy or whether he was asking her to lie. Stone turned in his resignation, was handcuffed and taken away in the squad car to the county jail where he was later released after posting $2000 bond. Two months later Stone phoned asking me to write him a recommendation for a job that did not involve working with children.

Noreen, the math teacher with a criminal background who altered the hospital discharge papers for which she was subsequently fired? She was hired in 2004 as a teacher at ESAK and two weeks later was promoted to Director of Education at ESAK where she works today.

Marci the substitute teacher? After my departure she was made a teacher with the largest class despite only having a two year degree in criminology. During the Stone incident, Marci tried to break up the fight. In the course of this action, two of Stone’s punches connected with her head. Marci resigned shortly after the Stone incident and took a position at ESAK in their “outdoors” program. She will soon complete her BA in criminal justice and wants to earn an MA in counseling.

Buffy, the certified elementary teacher who never hung anything on her walls? Buffy was hired by Herald County Public Schools to teach the most at-risk third graders – those who were repeating third grade for the first or second time due to failing the FCAT. The principal who hired her without soliciting any feedback from me, is reportedly very unhappy with Buffy. She struggles with classroom management, the children aren’t learning, and their parents complained to him that when they came to open house night, they were upset to see bleak, bare classroom walls.

Henry, my public school liaison? Henry still has his job as liaison to the alternative schools and he is still of the opinion that these troubled children don’t deserve any more than they are getting.

Lucy, my fellow Prospect principal who resigned before me? She is an art teacher at a public school in a poor neighborhood in Tampa.

Lynne, my business manager? She is the receptionist at a Herald County Public elementary school. She is very overqualified for the position and the pay is much less than her former salary, but it is a job without the daily stress she experienced at Prospect. She reports that no parents curse at her and she never has to deal with anyone like The Boss. She does report that the principal at her new school has staff hold hands and pray before meetings.

Jordan, the teacher? After he and his new wife returned to his home in Alabama to care for his terminally ill father, they now have three daughters and he is working as a middle school social studies teacher in the public schools.

Rosie, my counselor? Initially She was working for a private counseling firm that contracts with the public schools to work with Medicaid-eligible children who need counseling. She had an office in a school in the north east corner of the county – the very white section where black people are discouraged from living. Boyd, the former Prospect student who didn’t bathe often enough, ran up to her in the hall, gave Rosie a big hug and told her how happy he is to be out of that awful school. He said his worst day was when Ernie slammed him up against a wall. Rosie said he just kept hugging her and hugging her. Rosie is now a teacher in a Special Education class.

Rex Stewart, my mentor? Rex moved from middle school principal to elementary school principal and just retired this year. He continues his work for local child advocacy as Chair of a local social services agency.

Lorayne, of tongue ring fame, who lives with her grandmother except for her stay in a foster home after she was found living with her forty-something “boy friend”?

Lorayne was sent to ESAK (the Ebencorp High School in Herald County) where she often missed classes due to her pregnancy.

Robyn, the girl who couldn’t find a quiet place to do her homework and was sent to live with her grandmother in Cincinnati? After she crawled out the bathroom window to play hooky one time too many, Grandma returned her to Florida. But her stepmother refused to let her live in the family’s trailer. The receptionist at the office where Robyn’s father works offered to have Robyn live with her. Robyn was sleeping on the receptionist’s couch and not going to school.

DerMarr, the 5th grader we put in a middle school classroom where his teacher, Jana, helped him grow from the student we almost rejected to our most improved student until his mother transferred him to public school prematurely? He spent most of the last two academic quarters suspended from school and thus failed to be promoted to 6th grade and, despite a previous retention and his large size, he was held back in 5th grade.

Tyryona, the aspiring actress living with her cousin? Tyryona did star in the play and my husband and I saw her stunning performance. There was one interruption half-way through the play when a very dressed up woman with a fancy hat made an entrance so dramatic it distracted from the performance. It was Tyryona’s mother. Tyryona didn’t last long with her cousin and shortly after the play, I heard Tyryona was bouncing from foster home to foster home.

Luke, with the hoop earrings and mother at McDonalds? Luke was sent to ESAK where he spends his afternoons in a “job training program” working in a fast food restaurant. I believe he is now at Popeye’s.

Darius, the gifted boy who lived in so many foster homes? The Boss had him arrested for throwing balled up paper at the bus driver. His foster mother washed her hands of him when she heard he was arrested so he was released to the Cressler House where he was involved in a fight, arrested again and found to have enough points to be held in the JDC (Juvenile Detention Center). When he was released he was sent to yet another foster home, this one in another county.

Perry, the boy who was raped as a preschooler? Perry spent 6 months in a boot camp and upon release was sent back to Prospect where he will stay until The Boss feels he is ready to return to public school. I think the odds are against that happening.

Warenita, the girl whose mother only needed one friend, Jesus? Mom lost her battle with drug addiction and also lost custody of her daughter. Warenita is living in a foster home attending ESAK.

Glenn, the unappealing boy who choked in our Geography Bee? His mother decided she couldn’t handle him and “gave him up to the system.” He has been moved from foster home to foster home. So far no foster family wants him.

Karla, the girl whose mother lives with the Rainbow People? Mom sent Karla to live with an aunt in Georgia. Karla and her cousin, the aunt’s daughter, ran away with the cousin’s boyfriend, a 24 year old man. They went to Ohio. The police followed them. The man was arrested. The cousin was sent home and her aunt promptly pulled her out of public school and sent her to a Catholic school. And Karla, she was arrested and sent to a juvenile detention center then onto a “program.” After three months she returned to Lakeboro and Prospect. For a few weeks she attended school regularly. Then she began getting on the bus and watching out the window intently for Lorayne illegally driving her boyfriend’s pick-up truck. At the next stop she’d dash off the bus as the sleepy eyed children tried to get on and run to join Lorayne. She did this on and off for a couple weeks, then stopped attending school at all. No one seemed to care or notice.

Mookie, the boy whose parents died of AIDS and who felt he had no future? We returned Mookie to public school at the end of the 2002-03 school year and so far he has not returned to Prospect. Fingers crossed, Mookie might just have a future after all.

Chapter Sixty-Two: Rumor Mill

2008-05-20T05:59:00.001-05:00

Chapter 62: Rumor Mill

After I left Prospect, for a while my email box was full with stories from my former coworkers. Since they all knew I was writing about the experience, often the subject line would read: “Here’s one for your journal.” Frequently the emails would detail the same incident from with different points of view. Here’s what I hear:

On the first day at Prospect without me, The Boss arrived late, at 8:40, with an entourage of “Enforcers”, several large and muscular Ebencorp employees from other residential programs. He gathered everyone in the parking lot and told the team he didn’t know I was going to resign and didn’t want me to do so, but he and his boss Clyde, felt I was not taking this program (note his word choice: program, not school!) in the direction Ebencorp wants it to go, thus he is taking over. At 3:30 he gathered all the students in the parking lot and tells the children too that he didn’t want me to leave. One of the girls reportedly yells “bullshit.”

The Boss then announced some changes effective immediately: no more blue jeans, no more Activity Period and no more Friday Career Days. (He later told the staff he didn’t like Career Days because he was not comfortable with the public “coming on campus and sticking their noses in our business.” Lynne wondered what he had to hide.) He also announced he is starting a new punishment program with both after school and Saturday detention sessions.

The Boss’s unveiling of his plan was interrupted by Tiombe, a student not known for self-control. He began to loudly vent his opinion with some profanity-laced statements regarding these changes. Immediately two Ebencorp Enforcers flanked Tiombe. One grabbed his shirt and spun him around. The other slammed him against the fence by the ball field then both “got in his face” and began to shout at him. The other students watched in stunned silence. The Boss went on to announce that he was shortening the school day. Prospect would no longer run from 9:00-4:00. The new school hours would be 9:00-2:50. The students didn’t cheer but the staff did.

Tiombe was the first but not the last. The following day as students were getting off the bus in the morning, The Boss decided, seemingly impulsively, that boys could no longer wear any earrings. When Antwonn stepped off the bus, The Boss had two Ebencorp Enforcers demand Antwonn give up his earrings. Antwonn protested saying it was written in the Prospect handbook that two stud earrings were acceptable. Antwonn then bent over his three ring binder to find that paragraph in the handbook. One of the Ebencorp men grabbed Antwonn’s arms and pulled them behind his back while the other started to shout very close to his face. Antwonn dropped his notebook. Counselor Rusty, witnessing this, interceded and said he would take Antwonn’s earrings whispering to Antwonn that he was right about the rule, but better to give the earrings to Rusty now than … Antwonn handed Rusty his earrings.

Maybe when The Boss said I didn’t follow the Ebencorp way it was because I didn’t physically intimidate the children….

Odis arrived at school wearing blue jeans. When the Ebencorp duo began to yell at him he said his mother was angry that the dress code was changing in the middle of the year and she had bought him new blue jeans for school. This made the Ebencorp Enforcers angrier and Odis received the Tiombe treatment complete with up close shouting and fence slamming. In addition he was kept after school. When The Boss called Odis’s mother, she said she had no car and couldn’t come get him. The Boss had to drive Odis home in his car and got lost (Odis claims he “was playing” with The Boss and provided incorrect directions.) Odis got home at 7:00 pm.

On Friday The Boss kept five children after school for detention and was surprised again when none of their parents could or would come pick them up and he had to spend hours transporting them to all corners of Herald County. Funny about The Boss driving the students home in his car since Ebencorp’s own policy states that transporting students in a personal vehicle should be avoided.

Although I am no longer principal, I made promises to some of the boys about attending their football games that weekend, so on Saturday morning, off to Berke Jungers I go. The first Prospect person I run into is Rusty. He tells me he resigned the day before. The Boss asked him to reconsider but Rusty refused. He didn’t give The Boss an explanation beyond saying it was for his health, but Rusty says he couldn’t stand by and watch the abuse.

Rusty and I watch several football games. When Parker sees me he waves and at the end of his game the sweaty equipment-laden boy gives me a big hug saying “We miss you Ms. Smee.”

My wonderful business manager, Lynne, emails me daily for some time:

Monday:
The Boss has decided he will take attendance himself since he wants the data before 10:00 am and feels our method is too slow. I think he isn’t used to a school with so many students! He first tried to take attendance as the children got off the busses. That didn’t work! He didn’t have a headcount for Shasta in time for her to pick up lunches and when she asked he got mad.

Tuesday:
The Boss told Rosie she is not a good teacher and she should look for work elsewhere and if she did he would write her a recommendation. Rosie cried.

The Boss left campus and returned with rakes, dozens of rakes. All day kids are out raking. There are no lessons, no counseling, just raking.

Wednesday:
The Boss told the team no more morning meetings and they don’t need to arrive to work at 8:00 anymore. He says “you can arrive whenever, just be here by 9:00.”

The Boss isn’t getting the attendance done until early afternoon and Henry’s secretary has been phoning saying they need me to input the attendance earlier. I explained about the “new” procedure…

Thursday:
Most of the team decided they still wanted to have morning meetings even if The Boss didn’t mandate them or chair them. They arrive at 8:00 and start the meeting, but when The Boss comes in (about 8:30) he tells them they are not to meet and he doesn’t want them coming into this portable because they disturb him.

That new math teacher you hired to replace Valerie called in sick. (That would be ZG, the zany guy.) The Boss called him at home and insisted he come to work right away, sick or not. Later I find a note taped to the door from the new math teacher – it is his resignation! The Boss told me we need to hire staff and I should put an advertisement in the local paper. I printed the text from one you and I developed but he crossed out the part about “college degree and teacher certification required.” He said to describe the job as “redirection.” I guess you don’t need a college degree to supervise raking.

Friday:
The Boss forgot to call the Career Day people on the list you gave him so they showed up this morning and he told them Career Days are cancelled. As far as I can see everything is cancelled. All the kids do is rake. Oh and The Boss suggested if they do a good job raking then teachers should show movies!

When I asked The Boss for the attendance today he told me he isn’t going to do it anymore and we’ll go back to the old way, but since we don’t have meetings anymore, none of the teachers know this and so no attendance was taken today. Oh and The Boss hired his first new employee today: Ernie! I started to tell The Boss about some of the Ernie problems but he told me Ernie is a big, muscular man and that you, Kathleen, just didn’t know how to handle him!

Monday:
The Boss has left Ernie in charge of the campus! Ernie is strutting around making up policies and threatening children. The kids rake and no one takes attendance.

Tuesday:
Rosie was trying to hold classes this morning. It’s hard since the girls would rather be raking. Ernie came in the class and decided to remove six girls for rake duty. They were happy to go. The Boss showed up on campus about 2:00 and told Rosie how pleased he was that she was starting to kick more girls out of class for misbehavior. Rosie told him she hadn’t kicked them out and she wasn’t sure why or how Ernie chose them for rake duty. The Boss looked disappointed.

Wednesday:
I gave my resignation to The Boss today. Now both my husband and I are unemployed but I just can’t take this anymore!

Chapter Sixty-One: Game Over

2008-05-13T06:46:00.000-05:00

Chapter 61: Game Over

I park the Saturn, loaded with the contents of my office (minus the books and games that wouldn’t fit) outside Books-a-Million and I phone my husband. I coach myself on being brave but when I tell him, I cry.

I try to stop because I can hear the pain in his voice, a pain that he isn’t here to hold me, hug me or comfort me. He works to reassure me with his words: it will be okay, this is for the best, now you can write your book. I choke back the rest of the crying to keep my husband from hurting more.

When I get home, and unpack the car and sit alone on the bed in my beautiful new Florida home that now I might not be able to afford, I cry the rest of the tears, surprised to find there are so many. All the sobs I stifled and swallowed whole, all the unwept tears I trapped and denied, they all rush forward like the opening of a lock on a canal. I cry tears of self-pity, tears of boss loathing and tears of suffering children. I cry tears of frustration, failure and confusion, tears of anger, hate, loss and even loneliness. I cry tears of despair, desperation and the deep depths of depression. I cry me a river.

Then I stop. I have heard that crying depletes the immune system and I don’t want to get sick – I force this somewhat specious notion to triumph over my out-of-control emotions. The tears, like the rushing water in the canal locks, make changes to ensure smooth sailing forward on my journey. I reshape the rest of my tears into words: words for my journal, words for my book, words for emails, words to cope.

Chapter Sixty: The Last Epiphany

2008-05-06T04:49:00.001-05:00

Chapter 60: The Last Epiphany

I ran a 10K race recently and somehow in the course of running, I got this mistaken idea that a 10K race was equivalent to 6.4 miles. Maybe all the blood was being rerouted to my legs rather than to my brain, but whatever my excuse, when I turned a corner and suddenly saw the finish line, I was upset. If it hadn’t been a hidden finish and if I had realized a 10K equals only 6.2, not 6.4 miles, I could have run a better time. I still had a reserve of unused energy and moreover I’d been practicing my sprints to the finish line. While I was annoyed at the race organizers for hiding the finish line around a corner, I was more annoyed at myself for not realizing the end was so near.

When the 2003 school year started, I hoped my principalship at Prospect would last at least the academic year. But I was wrong and, as with the 10K, I just couldn’t see the finish line.

But first, Valerie, Rita Mae and Jordan give me their two week notice.

Valerie, who I hired last year as the Title One Math teacher, returned this year to be a classroom teacher only because I begged her to do so. She teaches math and science but keeps telling me to look for a replacement. I find this sort of zany guy (ZG) who might work out, but I keep hoping Valerie will stay. Today she makes it clear, she won’t. Okay, I can get a grip and hire ZG.

I had no warning and can’t get a grip about Rita Mae. My all-girl teacher is leaving Prospect to go teach at ESAK?! When she tells me I am speechless. At first I think it is a joke, but her face and tone are anything but joking. Henry, my public school liaison, has frequently quoted Rocky, (principal of ESAK) as saying he is impressed by the caliber of the teachers I hire. I give Henry my “secret” of posting job openings on the web site “teach-in-florida.com” but Rocky doesn’t use it – he continues to rely on ads in the local paper with predictably poor results. But now I guess Rocky found a new technique: recruit my Prospect teachers.

A couple weeks ago, Marci, my permanent substitute, told me Rocky called her and asked if she would come to ESAK. She told him no and reported the conversation to me. He then apparently contacted Rita Mae and offered her more pay. She is a single parent; he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. I call The Boss. ESAK and Prospect share the same parent company, is this ethical? The Boss tells me Rocky denies contacting Rita Mae, one of his employees did it. I just need to deal with it.

Rita Mae is overheard saying she is leaving because the girls are so bad and she doesn’t get any support from Rusty, Rosie or me. Maybe she feels guilty saying she is leaving for more money; maybe there is truth in both tales. But sadly, not only do I overhear her but, the girls hear it as well. Girl wars break out in Rita Mae’s classroom. One group of girls shouts they hate her and they are glad she is leaving, the rest of the girls shout how much they love her and never before has a teacher cared so much for them and they love the all-girls class and they know Rita Mae is leaving because of those other girls, the bad ones. Different days different girls join different sides of this argument. I do a lot of running to Rita Mae’s class and suddenly it is rare not to have a surly group of misbehaving girls scowling in my office. I am mad at Rita Mae for revealing her intentions to her class so soon. I am mad at her for leaving. I am mad.

Meanwhile, for future daughter-in-law Sarah’s last two weeks at Prospect she is never without another adult in the classroom and thus survives to her wedding date without any further violence. She departs on a Wednesday. I leave the following evening, feeling guilty at taking off even one day to attend the wedding of my son and Sarah in Maryland. But before I leave, Jordan, my brave and brilliant elementary teacher, tells me he and his wife have decided to move back to Alabama to care for his dying father. How can you beg someone to stay who is prioritizing his family over his career? I fly north wondering how to find a Title One Reading teacher to replace Sarah, an all-girls teacher to replace Rita Mae, an elementary teacher to replace Jordan and worrying whether ZG will work out with Valerie’s class.

My day off for the wedding was approved in advance by The Boss, but that doesn’t stop him from phoning me Friday morning. I tell him I am in the church in the middle of my son’s wedding rehearsal. He says fine, this is urgent, then proceeds to discuss Rusty’s health problems. As he talks I picture my insides turning to dust, crumbling and raining down to my feet so that when he is done I am just a pile of small pebbles and sand.

The morning of the wedding of my only child, I go to a college track and run. It is cold in Maryland in October, but I run fast and faster, twenty times around the track. A track lets you run without thinking about running, no cars to dodge or people who wave. I run and ruminate to the rhythm of my Asics on the rubbery synthetic-surface track.

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First lap and I calculate that for nearly a year and a half I have been searching for solutions, now I am searching for an exit. As principal at Prospect, I am perpetrating the myth of the acceptability of a separate education. I am part of the problem. I think of that saying “when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas.” What I am doing is not good for my students, my staff or for me. I need to work to abolish this system, not tweak it and make superficial improvements. It is wrong to remove the troubled children from school and put them all in a separate, non-public school. No two ways about it, it is wrong. Prospect is not now, nor ever can be, a good place for children or teachers. I’ve left jobs before, but never without another job lined up. But how much longer can I stay in this situation?

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Next lap I envision trying to explain my departure to Darius, Karla, Mookie. How can I abandon them? Am I trying to rationalize quitting because the job is too hard, The Boss too difficult? I’ve had hard jobs before. I should not give up.

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Around the track again, each lap takes less than two minutes. Now I am thinking about my family. The husband I only see on weekends because I took this crazy job. The son who has a distracted empty shell of a mother at his wedding, the same mother who allowed his young bride to be assaulted.

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I see bills. The bills for the mortgage on our new house. The bills for student loans for our son’s Ivy league education. The bills for all those flights up and down the east coast so my husband and I could see each other. How do we pay these bills if I’m not getting paid? While both of the two alternative schools that wanted to open in Herald County have expressed a strong desire to hire me as their principal, the school board rejected their applications and insisted some unrealistic demands be met before either could reapply. Thus it is unlikely either of these companies will choose to open a school in Herald County. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I want to write about this experience, but such a risk, such a leap of faith!

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Running on this track is a relief for my pavement-pounded knees and feet. I could ease the wear and tear by running on trails, but I’m afraid I’ll lose my footing on a root, hole or stone and I don’t want to fall. Several years ago a boss told me I wasn’t a risk taker. That criticism has stuck with me. Am I utterly stodgy? A stick-in-the-mud old lady who needs her half glass of milk at 3:00 p.m. and can’t sleep without her own pillow? That isn’t how I see myself, but now I worry I’ve taken too big a risk, too many risks, and I am scared. Suddenly my life is riddled with roots, holes and stones and I find myself deep in the woods on a trail far from any paved road. And I am so scared of falling.

When I return to Prospect, Rita Mae leaves, then Valerie (ZG can’t start yet). Shortly thereafter, Jordan leaves.

Rosie volunteers to cover the all girls’ class temporarily but she makes it clear she got her Master’s degree in Social Work because she wants to be a counselor, not a teacher. The teachers are all upset because without a Title One teacher they aren’t getting their breaks and now with only one Counselor, they are having a harder time getting students removed from their classroom. Rusty is upset since with Rosie teaching, he has to handle all the troubled students alone. Things are falling apart and the center cannot hold. In my search for solutions I stop sleeping. I reluctantly call on The Boss for help. He promises to send counselors from other programs, but forgets his promise. I call him again. The Boss sends a counselor and then he comes to campus too. He delivers an ultimatum: he is going to take over the school. I can resign or I can work under him and if I choose the latter that means I will no longer be the principal and I must do everything he says and never question him.

I resign.

Chapter 59: The Beginning of the End

2008-04-29T07:13:00.001-05:00

Section VI: Autumn 2003 – the last academic quarter
Chapter 59: The Beginning of the End

The First Day of School: the phrase is pregnant with possibilities. It speaks of second chances and fresh starts, anxiety about the new and joy at reuniting with the familiar. At Prospect, the first day of school in August 2003 starts inauspiciously. In fact things that day foreshadow what’s to come in this academic quarter.

On the first day of school, thirty minutes before the first bus arrives, I receive a phone call from Agnes, the secretary at Haven High, telling us to go into lockdown mode. While I go to find out what “lockdown mode” entails, a police helicopter repeatedly circles overhead, the rhythmic, thumping blades forcing all conversations to be SHOUTED to no avail. All our words, stolen by the chopper’s roar. Teachers begin to arrive reporting they saw police cars on every corner. RitaMae says she saw deputies with bloodhounds on 36th Avenue. Our very own Deputy (OVOD) arrives, (this year we no longer have the ever changing Deputy on Duty, but one Deputy assigned exclusively to our campus! I have Henry to thank him for this “gift.”). OVOD tells us the police were searching for an escaped prisoner from Hillsborough County described as 5’9”, 150 pounds wearing a black shirt and black underpants. I figure the weight, height and shirt color are pretty irrelevant if the guy is running around in his underwear.

While the minutes tick by counting down to the 9:00 arrival of our students, we are treated to a play-by-play of the police chase as we gather around OVOD and hear the transmissions from his walkie-talkie. Suspect in black boxers spotted running behind a church. Officers in pursuit. Running through backyards in Red Creek subdivision. One officer loses him, another has him in sight. Transmissions of breathless panting, then silence – we hold our breath. The radio crackles: the suspect has been apprehended! Cheers and relief. The lockdown is lifted and we don’t have to start our school year by detaining all the busses and bus drivers on campus and herding all the students into darkened classrooms in the cinderblock building.

The busses arrive and with them 75 students - well 74, since Boyd has head lice and must go home as soon as we can awaken his nocturnal mother. As the girls line up in front of their brand new all-girl classroom, one girl says she wants to go home complaining that her throat is sore. I somewhat sarcastically tell her to be brave and try not to swallow. The girls in line go crazy at this comment and I am bombarded with remarks such as: “Ms. Smee, how can you say that in front of our virgin ears.” And “I don’t swallow I spit.” Delightful girls.

Before the day is over, two violent, truant bothers (Iggy and Pedro) transfer back to public school against my better judgment mostly because I can’t effectively communicate with their non-english speaking parents. A bus driver reports to me that a child (Perry) was masturbating on the bus this morning and kissing himself at the same time. Before I can question Perry I learn he has run off-campus and is able to cover many miles before OVOD in his squad car can locate him. Another child (Ethan) has a wild tantrum and although OVOD handcuffs him, I’m relieved when he does not make an arrest. A new boy (Fenton) arrives with his mother who tearfully tells me her baby doesn’t belong with all these bad, black kids - he is here because he brought a gun to school but wait, she can explain. A new girl (Alexa) and her aunt want to talk to me, the aunt is Alexa’s guardian and they tell me Alexa was raped this year and is relieved we have an all-girl classroom since she is scared of boys. Alexa tells me “I can’t sleep now unless I have my feet touching someone safe and I think I might be gay now.” I have two irate parents in my office recycling last year’s complaints regarding their daughter (TobyBeth). A boy (Tyrell) who was told to stand by the tree, starts to “hump” the tree and is sent to class where he interrupts the placement testing by announcing he has an erection. In Orientation, one boy who is not new but was absent so often we put him in Orientation (Tiombe) , throws another boy who is new (Buster) over a desk, across the room and into a computer where the new boy gashes his head. Also in Orientation, a new elementary boy (Forrest) who was kicked out of a local charter school, defecates in his pants and his mother and grandmother come to yell at me and to blame Stone, who now runs Orientation, for not letting him use the bathroom. In the course of the discussion, they lecture me on different types of bowel movements and the relative immediacy of each. One counselor (Rusty) has to leave right away with a toothache but knows no dentist, I refer him to mine and the other counselor (Rosie) has to leave early too because of an issue at her daughter’s school. It is a long first day of school.

During the first quarter of my second year at Prospect here is what works very well: the Book Mobile, the employee handbooks I wrote and had printed over the summer and, joy of joys, the all-girls classroom. In fact all of these changes are so successful I kick myself for not implementing them sooner although I know the delay was not due to procrastination on my part.

The Book Mobile is just great. Once every other week this oversized mobile home pulls into our driveway filled with shelves of books. We insisted all our students apply for a library card before school started. Each class has 15-20 minutes to browse and check out books. As the students spill out of the Book Mobile they are eager to show me their selections. The friendly but firm librarian is willing to order books for teachers on upcoming subjects. I struggle to get the teachers to take advantage of this service.

Our morning meetings now begin with everyone opening their spanking bright red binders and reading or rereading various pages in our new handbook. Sometimes there is an issue or information not contained in the handbook we need to discuss, but mostly we focus on the same old stuff: use of walkie-talkies, walking in line protocol, teachers leaving before students etc.

As for the all-girls classroom, the girls love it, the boys hate it. One boy, Darnell, asks Rosie what would happen if a gay boy came to Prospect – would we assign him to the girl’s class? Rosie tells him no. Darnell is disappointed. He planned to tell Rosie he was gay so he could get reassigned!

Here is what does not work well: the elementary classroom and hiring my future daughter-in-law. Over the summer two of my best teachers, Jordan and Sam, asked to teach the elementary students. They both volunteered in the Public School’s elementary summer reading program and thus received extensive training in teaching reading to struggling readers. Sam’s wife is an elementary school teacher and she helped him set up his classroom. Our opening enrollment for the elementary students is low so Sam and Jordan decide to team-teach their class of six boys. My initial concern is that my middle school teachers will complain that it isn’t fair for them to have fifteen students while Jordan and Sam share half a dozen. No middle school teachers complain. Jordan and Sam complain, especially Sam. Their six boys are very difficult.

Eight-year-old Anfernee says he misses his mother in Virginia and he can’t phone her because it costs too much money but his grandfather says if he keeps misbehaving he’ll send him back to live with his mother so Anfernee asks Jordan and Sam to tell his grandfather how bad he is. Kareem interrupts to say that Anfernee is so poor his grandfather has to work at Winn Dixie to get the free food they throw out, which causes Anfernee to jump on Kareem and, in a flash, all six boys are fighting, throwing, running and screaming. This scene repeats, with slightly varying dialogue, every few minutes. The two to six teacher-student ratio is not enough. I arrange to have a behavior specialist from the public schools observe the class and give feedback. He writes two pages of recommendations but the bottom line is that Sam and Jordan are doing everything right, it is the kids who are wrong. Sam demands I transfer him to a middle school classroom. I do. Jordan redesigns the point cards for the elementary boys so they get a happy or sad face every fifteen minutes. It is a tough procedure to administer but when he can stay on top of it he has fewer riots. Even so, we never make it through a morning without two or more elementary boys removed from class.

When Hannah resigned the day before school opened, not only did I lose a valuable teacher, I lost my Title One teacher which meant my students would lose their extra reading classes and my teachers would lose their planning periods (I scheduled the Title One reading teacher work with every class twice a week, thus insuring some breaks for classroom teachers). In addition, my gifted readers are losing their daily gifted reading class, my lowest readers are losing their small group extra reading instruction and I am wasting my Title One funding by not having a teacher in place as per my approved grant plan. I feel frantic and desperate. I make phone calls to potential teachers but no luck. I think about who I know who can teach reading, who loves literature, who can cope with Prospect students. Then I think of my future daughter-in-law, Sarah.

In August 2003 Sarah, who like my son had recently graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English, was living at home in Maryland preparing for her October wedding. I knew she was very familiar with and loved children’s literature. And while at Columbia she tutored at-risk youths. I also knew, but tried not to think about the fact, that Sarah was a sweet, innocent, 21 year-old with no teaching experience and thus no classroom management skills. After I lost Hannah, I offered Sarah the job. She accepted and I made a decision that in retrospect, was one of my worst and would break my heart ten times over.

Sarah enjoys and is good at working with one or two children at a time, but when she works with half a dozen gifted or remedial kids or whole classrooms for enrichment reading, it doesn’t go well. The classes are loud, no one listens and there are fights. The counselors and OVOD are called to Sarah’s classroom nearly every time she has a class. We meet frequently to talk about strategies but after a month she gives me her two week notice and tells me she will not return after the wedding. I feel terrible, my choice was bad for the school, the staff, the students and for Sarah. But wait, it gets worse.

The day after Sarah gives me her notice, she is teaching Jana’s class when it is clear a fight is about to erupt. Sarah approaches the potential combatants but before she can get to them, two students grab Sarah to hold her back and thus permit the fight to take place. The two boys are brothers, new to Prospect this year but whose father is well-known: he is on trial for the murder of Selma’s brother. Sarah is unable to reach for her walkie-talkie as these brothers restrain her.

The brothers are arrested and charged with a felony attack on a teacher. My future daughter-in-law is in my office crying. In addition to my other errors in judgment, I have failed to protect my own family. I am wildly angry at the brothers and want to perform some bodily harm. They stare their apathetic, blank stares as they are stuffed into the back seat of the squad car. Mostly I am angry at myself. Really angry

Chapter Fifty-Eight: There Must be 50 Ways to Leave

2008-04-21T15:09:00.000-05:00

Chapter 58: There Must be 50 Ways to Leave….

Then suddenly it is late May and the school year is ending. Many of the students bring cards and gifts for their teachers and there are hugs and tears on the last days of school. But as the last bus pulls away there is also a feeling of relief. I think we worried that the year would end with an unforeseen disaster. It didn’t and we all seem to utter “phew” in unison.

Two days before the end of school Neeley had told me he had accepted a job as a reporter for a local newspaper and he started in a week. I was relieved and pleased for both of us: Neeley is not a good teacher. But I am not so pleased when Neeley goes to lunch on the last day of school and never returns. He isn’t around to input or even hand us his students’ grades, let alone to clean and inventory his classroom or to say goodbye. I try, unsuccessfully, to contact Neeley to get his grade book. Rita Mae, Neeley’s teammate is livid. She suggests she and PE teacher Billie, extrapolate Neeley’s grades from the grades they have for those same students in the classes they teach: PE & Health (Billie), and Social Studies & Math (RitaMae). We all know this is not the way it is supposed to be but my repeated attempts to phone and email Neeley are for naught.

Midge is leaving too. She has fallen back in love with a high school sweetheart who, over 30 years ago, her father forbade her to date because he was from the wrong side of the tracks. Given her recent hospitalizations, I think teaching at-risk children has put Midge’s health at risk and her decision to leave this job for romance is wise.

Theo, the former military man who teaches math, applied for a position in Herald County public schools. A principal calls me for a reference check and tells me he plans to hire Theo.

On a rainy morning in June, Billie arrives late, again. Clearly with our students gone there is less pressure to arrive on-time, but we still have our 8:00 a.m. meetings to plan our summer work days and Billie is consistently late. I know she has a long drive but I am frustrated by her frequent lateness. When she arrives, interrupting the morning meeting and with great fanfare but no acknowledgement of her tardiness, I suggest we talk after the meeting. I open the discussion saying we need to discuss her on-time arrival problem. Billie starts with her usual litany of excuses, the weather, the dog, her unemployed husband, her college bound son, she concludes with a pronouncement that she is not really late and she “knows” I manipulate the clock to make her look late. Wearily I begin to respond when Billie leaps from her seat, announces she quits, throws her keys at Lynne and departs. I am speechless and dumbfounded. Lynne, who overheard the whole discussion over the make-believe walls in our portable, is as mystified as I am. But I learned my lesson many months ago with Ernie: never beg a quitter to reconsider.

Even with all these teachers departing, my budget cannot support all the staff on my payroll. The nature of Prospect is that since the school year starts with fewer children, one must employ fewer teachers in August and hire only when more children arrive. Ebencorp’s HR department advises me to layoff the last hired: that would be The Mime. I don’t like telling anyone they are losing their job, even The Mime. A couple days after I give her the news, she tells me she has a new job teaching in Herald County public schools. I am surprised but relieved the principal didn’t call for a reference check. I would have struggled to discuss the strengths of The Mime.

Another principal hires Buffy to teach third graders who are repeating third grade, and he doesn’t call for a reference check on her either. I am relieved both that she is gone and that I didn’t have to lie to help her land a new job.

But to balance the budget I have to layoff even more people. I eliminate the position of cafeteria worker and orientation leader. I decide we can make do with teachers serving students the food since the food is packaged into individual servings and Shasta, my transportation coordinator can help oversee the program. I don’t want to do this, but I have to prioritize classroom teachers. Similarly I need the person who runs orientation to be a certified teacher so when the enrollment in the orientation class is low, I can redeploy the orientation leader in a classroom. Stephanie did not go to college and thus isn’t comfortable with or qualified to teach academics. Both Stephanie and Ruth are very upset and the layoff conversations are stressful. Stephanie tells me now she will have to move back in with her abusive husband since she is unemployed.

Goodbye Neeley, Midge, Theo, Billie, Mime, Buffy, Ruth and Stephanie.

I am frustrated by the Ebencorp policy for balancing the budget for Prospect Schools: eviscerate a coherent staff every summer and then rehire new teachers in the fall, winter and spring as the student population grows. This system may make for a tidy spreadsheet, but it isn’t good for my teachers, students or for me.

With Stephanie gone, I make Stone my Orientation leader and decide to make Orientation a combination of Orientation and re-orientation. The idea is that some children may need to go through orientation a second time. It would be a stretch to say Stone is pleased, he is never pleased, but he seems not terribly unhappy.

I continue to work at Prospect over the summer, supervising staff, developing behavior plans, curricula and a faculty handbook. The handbook has been my dream project all year. I’ve been saving my meeting agendas, staff memos and random notes to compile a definitive guide on everything including consistent grading practices, guidelines for Activity Period, line protocol, rules on bus arrival and walkie-talkie use. I meet with my mentor, Rex, to solicit his input. As I complete each section, I share it with my staff for feedback. They are atypically enthusiastic and ask why I didn’t publish it sooner! Writing the handbook gives me a real sense of accomplishment and I am excited about using it in the fall. I imagine our morning meetings guided not by yet another hastily prepared agenda, but by “turn to page 17 and let’s review the procedure for fire drills.”

The Boss informs me we must run a summer school program. Without money for busses I am pessimistic about enrollment. The Boss is not interested in my assessment. We advertise summer school. On the first day, three children come. We call it individual tutoring and teachers take turns working one-on-one with the students. These children only come a couple days a week for a couple weeks. Meanwhile the teachers work on lesson plans and complain about having to work all summer for a lower salary than their public school counterparts.

Corinna, the Title One woman, arrives bearing strange but very good news. We still have over a thousand dollars to spend and we must spend it fast. Can I spend it at Books-a-million and at Barnes & Noble? Absolutely, but time is running out, so hurry! The staff divides into two teams and we buy hundreds of books for all our classrooms.

The best part about the summer: Rita Mae’s enthusiasm as she prepares to teach an all-girl class in the fall. She reads books on the subject, paints the walls lavender, buys pillows and beanbag chairs for her classroom, decorates the walls with posters and makes up a bulletin board with photos and mementos of her life with plenty of room for her students to add theirs. I find her working late at night, sometimes with her adolescent daughter, sometimes with her Mother who is visiting from out of town. She takes the books aimed at girls who are reluctant readers, recently purchased with the Title One windfall, and arranges them in fabric lined baskets and displays them on top of cabinets. Her classroom is transformed into a cozy nook for “her girls.” Rita Mae’s energy and positive attitude are infectious. Soon we have a steady parade of teachers, staff and visitors checking out her room.

The most unnerving part of the summer: Billie’s Revenge. Apparently the day Billie resigned in anger, she expected me to chase after her and beg her to stay. When I didn’t she began a disturbing campaign. The first salvos were by email. Guessing I wouldn’t open email addressed from her, she went to on-line greeting card sites and sent me hate mail using RitaMae’s and Hannah’s return addresses. In some of the email cards she called me names, in others she threatened to get a gun and shoot me. Rita Mae and Hannah reported receiving similar emails. I forwarded a selection to The Boss and asked for help, support and advice from Ebencorp. When The Boss did nothing, Billie began the second phase of her revenge. She began calling people and describing me as unethical, evil and incompetent. She called the woman who administers one of our grants, she called school board members, she called Henry, my public school liaison, she called The Boss and his boss, Clyde. The School Board was due to vote on renewing our contract and now they were receiving these strange phone calls. The Boss finally took action. He launched an investigation – into my behavior to see if Billie’s claims were true. When I went to the School Board meeting the night of the vote, sitting across the aisle from me I found Billie and former Prospect counselor, Ernie. Blasts from the past. The Boss intended to attend but arrived late, after the meeting adjourned. Billie hissed that she was going to make a public statement about my incompetence, but she didn’t. In the meantime I felt rather like vomiting. The School Board renewed the contract. The Ebencorp investigation lasted all summer and despite my phone calls asking for results, I never heard their findings. The Boss and I never had a follow-up discussion after the worm tree talk. I try to ignore it all and move forward. It is easy enough to be fully engaged with my summer projects such as writing the faculty handbook, but like a case of poison oak, it’s hard to ignore the itching.

During the summer Dana, my wonderful Title One Reading teacher, phoned to say that with four children under age 12, she felt she couldn’t work full-time in the fall. She said if I started a night school to let her know. I wished her luck and offered Hannah, I’m-even-mean-to-my-cat, the Title One Reading position. She had expressed an interest and, with her degree in English, it looked like a good fit. Her enthusiasm about becoming the Reading teacher nearly matched that of all-girl teacher Rita Mae!

Then, the day before school was to open, Hannah quits. Months earlier Hannah told me a public school principal (the same one who hired Buffy) was trying to hire her, but after she was chosen to be the Title One Reading teacher for the fall, she was so excited she didn’t want to leave Prospect. The day before school opens Hannah tells me something different. She says that same principal phoned her and offered her more money and she couldn’t say no. Sorry, thanks, bye. Déjà vu all over again, my memories of teachers quitting right before opening day 2002 come rushing back.

I am starting this school year with only four teachers: one teacher for the girls – RitaMae, one teacher for the boys – Jana (who gave birth to her baby boy over the summer), two elementary teachers: Jordan and Sam (formerly middle school teachers, but up for this challenge) along with one permanent substitute – Marci. I am desperately looking for a Title One Reading teacher to replace Hannah and at least one more middle school teacher. I have been working on getting Valerie, last year’s Title One math teacher, to return as a middle school teacher.

I know it is futile, but I whine to Henry about his public school principals stealing my teachers at the last minute. He expresses empathy. And the summer ends as it began, with staff departures.

Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Second of Three Epiphanies

2008-04-15T04:56:00.001-05:00

Chapter 57 – The Second of Three Epiphanies

There’s nothing like a funeral, a graduation and the threat of unemployment to make a person reexamine her priorities. My second epiphany: if I am going to help the troubled children of Central Florida I need a different relationship with The Boss or a different boss. This second Epiphany leads me to do two things: meet with Clyde, the boss of The Boss and begin looking for another job.

The year before, just after Thanksgiving 2002, I spent a night at Clyde’s house. It was strange. Clyde invited me to be on a “select team of rising leaders” to help guide policies at Ebencorp. Clyde’s secretary called before the meeting to tell me Clyde insisted that after the meeting I not drive “all the way home” but rather that I spend the night with him and his family. I assured her the drive from Tampa to my home was not a problem but she said it wasn’t just the drive, Clyde wanted to get to know me better. I was pretty uncomfortable but I obeyed. Now in May 2003, I feel I might have some “money in the bank” with Clyde and maybe he’ll be willing to listen to me about The Boss. I act on this despite my former boss, Stephen, warning against going to Clyde about The Boss.

I call Clyde’s secretary and make an appointment to meet with him at 11:00 am. When I arrive he greets me saying he is starving and wants to go to lunch immediately. I’m not hungry, but assume he feels more comfortable talking candidly away from the office. Curiously he doesn’t ask me what cuisine I like. He drives us to a tiny Argentine restaurant with a menu featuring meat, meat and meat – even the salad is meat salad. Clyde speaks Spanish to the waitress and I try to order something with less meat. Luckily I’m not hungry.

Clyde begins by asking me why I scheduled this meeting, but before I can utter a complete sentence, he launches into a monologue on the wonders of The Boss. When I try to ask questions to determine whether the focus on punishment is coming from The Boss or is an Ebencorp value, Clyde is evasive and continues to lavish praise on The Boss. I stir my meat soup and try to approach the subject from a different angle – the dichotomy between what Herald County wants from me and what The Boss wants. Clyde doesn’t nibble. His riff on The Boss ends when he finishes his meal, looks at his watch and announces he has to get back to work.

Driving back to Lakeboro, I feel frustrated, defeated and hungry. Back in my apartment I stay up late refining my resume and writing cover letters. It’s time to search for a new job. Two charter schools have advertised their plans to open in Herald County. I apply for principal positions at both. One company runs a school 150 miles south of here. I drive down and spend the day touring and talking with the principal. I go to interviews and wait while they process the paperwork necessary for the Herald County school board to determine whether to approve their schools. Both schools seem to want to hire me, but without the Herald County School Board ‘s approval, there will be no schools.

In May the Herald County School Board meets and rejects all applications for new alternative charter schools. The Board especially doesn’t want any school that will compete with ESAK, Ebencorp’s alternative high school. The fact that one of the School Board members also sits on the board of ESAK isn’t deemed significant enough for him to recuse himself from the voting.

Chapter Fifty-Six: The Worms Crawl In

2008-04-07T18:47:00.001-05:00

Chapter 56 – The Worms Crawl In

Recently I have not had any headache inducing-encounters with The Boss.

Admittedly there was the post-marathon incident and shortly thereafter I did receive a couple e-mails mandating all Prospect principals to attend a week-long retreat in April and a four-day “convention” in May and there was that e-mail in which he decreed a new policy saying he wants to interview all new hires after I interview them.

When I read these e-mails my first reaction was to clench my teeth and hyperventilate, then I remembered my resolution not to waste my limited psychic energy. So rather than respond, I print, file and forget about his e-mail. Passive aggressiveness is not my usual style, but in this case, intentional amnesia seemed to be my wisest response.

The explanation for the dearth of e-mails, phone calls or surprise visits from The Boss is that he has been focused on another principal, Lucy and her Prospect School in Naples. While The Boss is busy micromanaging Lucy’s campus and making her miserable, he is leaving me alone.

I am sorry for Lucy, but I am happy for me. I have enough on my plate with Prospect faculty, students and their parents.
My “vacation” from the boss starts to unravel a few weeks into May. In the early morning when I get on-line, the first email that pops up is from Lucy. It is written to The Boss, and I am blind copied. Lucy is submitting her resignation today. She feels she has no choice. I feel really sad about losing Lucy as my fellow Prospect principal and I want to phone her right away but, as always, the campus is already hopping. I decide to call her tonight.

When I return to my office at mid-day, The Boss is sitting at my desk. Surprise. I haven’t had any Boss-related problems since he turned his focus to Lucy’s campus. I guess he is done with that project and back to me. The Boss says he wants to talk privately. He suggests we sit outside. It is a hot day in mid-May. We end up at a dilapidated picnic table under a huge oak festooned with hatching worms. Lynne warned me about these worms, they look a little like fuzzy caterpillars but they sting. As The Boss talks worms drop from the tree onto the grass near our feet and occasionally, onto the picnic table.

Thinking about the email from Lucy, I wonder whether The Boss is going to ask me to be the principal at both Prospect schools until he can find a replacement. As it turns out, I could not be further from the truth.

The Boss has a yellow legal pad covered with pages and pages of writing. He reads from it beginning with a statement that my campus is a mad house and the children show a lack of respect, are defiant and profane. He says Prospect students aren’t ready for classroom experiences when they come to us and we need to focus instead on behavior and punishment. We need to develop more “uncomfortable consequences.” He tells me my counselors, Rusty and Rosie, are not the right people for their jobs. Moreover he doesn’t like my priorities, for example why do I spend time chasing down truant students? If children don’t come to school that is one less student to trouble our staff.

He continues, saying I am insubordinate, guarded, aloof, protective and not a team player. He plans to make changes on my campus and he can do it with me or without me. The Boss says he does not enjoy our working relationship, it causes him discomfort and distress and he is ready to resolve it or end it.

He goes on and on making the same points over and over while the worms drop from the branches. I take notes to maintain control over my emotions. The Boss talks for nearly two hours. When he permits me to speak I ask him for specifics on how he feels I should deal with our disrespectful, defiant and profane students. He tells me this is what I was hired to do and reminds me he feels my focus on academics is misguided.

I then ask how I have been insubordinate. The Boss refers to his legal pad and lists off five examples of my insubordination. The first item he cites is that just this morning I accepted a bcc email from Lucy on a subject that was neither my business nor related to me. Here The Boss stops and points his finger at me for emphasis admonishing, “You are NEVER to accept bcc emails.” The next example happened several months ago when I tried to set up a meeting with my fellow Prospect principals. The Boss says he knows I was attempting to organize a meeting that would exclude him. Thirdly, I didn’t remind him of my days off for the Marathon. My fourth indiscretion is that I have “engaged in conversations which have negatively impacted the morale of others.” And the final example of my insubordination was that I did not attend the week-long training last fall and I am using my son’s college graduation as an excuse to not attend the week long training later this month.

For over three hours, sweat running down his face, The Boss persists in what he thinks of as “providing feedback,” which isn’t quite how I view it. I try to keep a frozen expression that reveals no emotion while inside a battle rages. I want to yell and shout at this man, my boss. I want to argue each of his points, the half-truths, misinterpretations and lies. I want to ask him why he is working so hard to crush me rather than support me. But fear paralyzes me.

At the same time I want to cry. I am afraid I am going to lose my job and we just moved into our new house two months ago and how will we pay our bills without my income? I want to cry because my school is not the way I want it and listening to The Boss I am afraid maybe it really is my fault. Maybe the students aren’t ready to learn and if that is the case I am not sure I have the skills or desire to change from running an academic institution to a work camp. I remember that when The Boss was a Prospect principal he had the students walking in circles carrying five or ten pound buckets of concrete or scrubbing the building with toothbrushes. I am no more interested in implementing those punishments than I am in administering corporal punishment to the children.

In May 2003, sitting under that worm tree, what I knew to be true but couldn’t prove, was that the boot camp approach advocated by The Boss was not the answer and that removing the “bad” children from public school and segregating them at Prospect was not in the children’s best interests. Had I been able to time travel to October 2004, I could have supported my contentions with a report published by a 13-member panel convened by the National Institutes of Health to review scientific evidence on the causes and prevention of youth violence. A key finding was that boot camps and other “get tough” programs for adolescents do not prevent criminal behavior and may make the problem worse since they bring together teens who are inclined toward violence and they often teach each other how to commit more.

But in May 2003, The Boss departs (after promising to put “all this” in an email to make it a formal letter of reprimand) and I am upset with myself for not being more assertive. After all, don’t I constantly receive positive feedback from all the people with whom I work in the public schools, especially from Henry, my liaison and Rex, my mentor and fellow middle school principal? These educators keep telling me Prospect has never run so well and been so academically oriented and so much like “a real school.” They share with me horror stories of Prospect’s past. Prospect may be far from the school I want to create, but I also know it is better now than it ever has been. I should be empowered to call the bluff of The Boss. Would he really fire the best principal Prospect has ever had? Would he risk incurring the wrath of the Herald County Public Schools, a key stakeholder, our customer? Would he risk them pulling the contract or not renewing the contract? And finally and perhaps most perplexing I keep asking myself: why is my relationship with The Boss so toxic?

As far as my thoughts about confronting The Boss, it is just as well I didn’t because I am not sure I would have had much back up. About a year after I left Prospect, Henry and I got together for breakfast. I listened to him complain about The Boss. Since his job is to negotiate and manage the contract with Prospect, I asked him directly: why does he tolerate this man? Henry admitted that not only would he avoid wasting hard-won political capital on the children of Prospect (who he really doesn’t believe will ever be productive members of society) but he wouldn’t even bother spending money on them if it were politically “free.” So if a Kathleen comes along and creates a fantastic program on a shoestring budget, great. But Henry won’t lose a minute of sleep if Prospect children spend their days carrying buckets of concrete, just as long as they aren’t in “his” classrooms, as long as they aren’t creating headaches in “his” public schools.

While I was the principal at Prospect I missed this pragmatism of Henry’s. I saw him as an ally, a partner in my crusade to “save the children.” But I see now that despite our professional friendship and mutual admiration, Henry would not, and will not, recommend that the School Board “pull the contract” even if the children of Prospect aren’t learning or even being taught.

About a week after the al fresco Boss meeting, I flew to New York for my son’s graduation from Columbia. He graduated on a Wednesday but fearing for my job, I was back at work on Thursday.

I wanted to revel in my son’s success. I wanted to feel proud and happy and be fully present. To use a Verizon training slogan, I wanted “to be here now.” But it was a struggle. Worries about Prospect and The Boss invaded my thoughts. I felt nervous, distracted and irritable. I did have some relief when John (an old college friend of ours) and his girlfriend, joined us. For a few hours The Boss and Prospect vanished from my consciousness as my husband, son, son’s fiancé, John, his girlfriend and I ran around New York City eating edamame (green soy beans) and m&ms while talking about our lives and dreams. John told us about resigning from his corporate job at Verizon, about his trip to Uzbekistan building homes as part of Habitat for Humanity and his future plans: he and his girlfriend rented a house in Italy for July. John couldn’t believe we have a son graduating college, it seems like only yesterday my husband, John and I were doing the graduating. We talk about running. John ran a marathon several years ago. He wanted to hear all about our marathon experience. We share training tips and injury prevention. John’s foot is bothering him, my ham is sore. Too soon the sun sets and John and his girlfriend leave.

That was the last time we saw John. A week later, at age 47, John died of an undiagnosed heart problem.

The Boss gave me permission to attend the funeral but made it clear he expected me to dial into his all-principal conference call the day before the funeral, after I arrived at my motel in Michigan.

Chapter Fifty-Five: The Scores are in and the Loser is...

2008-04-01T06:49:00.000-05:00

Chapter 55: The Scores are in and the Loser is…

FCAT tests are administered in February but the scores aren’t posted until late May.
Unlike the public school scores, the FCAT scores of Herald County’s Alternative Schools are not used to measure the schools by state or federal standards, although some Alternative School FCAT scores can be found on-line. One need not be a statistician to see that Herald County’s alternative schools post the lowest FCAT scores in the county. But Prospect, I am proud to say did comparatively well.

FCAT scores range from 100-500 for each grade level. In 2003, the mean scores for 7th graders in reading, in all nine public middle schools in Herald County, ranged from 285 to 318, with a Florida state average of 297. Prospect scored 255. The Avenue School (a K-12 alternative, contracted school with twice the population of Prospect) posted scores of 178 and 197. (Avenue posts two scores because they divide their students into two groups: special education and regular education.)

For 8th graders, the public school reading scores ranged from 299 to 319, with a state average of 301. Prospect scored 249, Avenue School: 206 and 227. For 7th grade math scores, the public schools ranged from 289 to 316 with a state average of 296 and Prospect posting 263; Avenue: 194 and 179. 8th grade math scores for the public schools ranged from 306 to 331, the state average was 310. Prospect’s score was 263, Avenue: 198 and 200.

An argument can be made, and often is, that the FCAT scores for alternative schools do not necessarily reflect the quality of education at those schools. Obvious questions arise such as: How long have the children been attending the alternative school? What were their FCAT scores when they were in public school? But explanations don’t change the reality. How many parents are willing to send their children to an alternative school that posts the lowest standardized test scores in the county, even if their public school principal recommends it? And if these alternative schools are low performing, shouldn’t they receive the same attention as public schools: more money, more resources and a mandate to improve or close? Additionally, isn’t there a risk that public school principals will recommend transferring low-performing students, who frequently also have behavior problems (since academic failure and misbehavior go hand-in-hand) to alternative schools where their dreadful test scores won’t reflect on a public school? By funding the operation of schools in which fewer than 1/3 of the students pass the FCAT, Herald County is choosing to leave hundreds of students behind. Where is the accountability?

Alas, the fox is guarding the hen house. To understand the situation, begin by asking: why does the Herald County Public School system contract with private corporations to run alternative schools in Herald County? They do it for two reasons: first, both the school board and the principals want the “bad children” out of the classrooms where they prevent the “good children” from learning and secondly, contracting for these services is cheaper than running these “bad” schools themselves.

I ask Henry why he continues to request the school board renew the contracts with these alternative schools when, during candid conversations, he has admitted he knows these schools aren’t doing a good job and moreover, he is aware of other viable options. These highly disruptive students could be tutored at home or students removed from class could receive instruction, in a separate classroom, on their own campus. Henry first cites cost and then tells me that fewer than 2% of Herald County children are enrolled in alternative schools and these children have always existed and will always continue to exist. Translation: there are only a few of these children and we’ve given up on them. Herald County has thus selected the children to be “left behind.”

I ask Henry why he doesn’t get more involved in these schools and insist they meet the same academic standards mandated of the public schools in areas such as class size, updated textbooks and hours of instructional time. He tells me the School Board attorney cautioned him NOT to become involved and that his job is to “manage the contract.” If the private corporation says a teacher is certified but Henry hears that “teacher” hasn’t graduated college, it is not Henry’s business to investigate. It is not in Henry’s job description nor in his best interest (or in the interests of the Herald County Schools) to notice the lack of textbooks, the failure to provide students academic instruction for the legal minimum number of minutes or the oversized classes with some student – teacher ratios as high as 35:1. As the contract manager, Henry’s choice is to either ignore these deficiencies or be forced to “pull the contract.” Pulling the contract would mean overwhelming and dangerously overcrowding the other contracted Alternative Schools, or sending these “bad” children back to the public schools where they can continue to disrupt class and lower the average test scores.

Henry is not a bad person. He is intelligent and cares about children, but he is not going to spend his political capital advocating for a relatively small number of children that both he and his school board colleagues view as lost causes. Prospect children are not an appealing constituency. The powers that be are really not particularly concerned that the unkempt child who curses, takes drugs and carries a weapon isn’t being well educated.

Someone needs to be looking over their shoulders and monitoring these alternative schools. But asking public school employees to be the watchdogs is a conflict of interest. Accountability needs to be shifted to an independent committee of educators, professionals not employed by, or beholden, to the local school board. And when they are asked to evaluate alternative schools, it is hard to imagine they would recommend renewal of most Herald County alternative school contracts.

Chapter Fifty-Four: Based on the Book

2008-03-23T11:01:00.000-05:00

Chapter 54: Based on the Book

When Dana, the Title One Reading teacher, was hired, I shared with her my vision of the entire school reading one book. She recommended Holes, so we used Title One funds to buy over 200 copies of the book so every student, teacher, counselor, bus driver – everybody - could read the same book and talk about it. Dana made a great choice. The book is a big hit with everyone and better yet, the movie is about to be released. In early May we announce that in two weeks all students who haven’t had a major recent misbehavior will go see a matinee of Holes. My desk is piled high with permission slips and envelopes stuffed with $5 for the movie and $5 for popcorn and soda. We pick up the tab for children without money but most manage to find the funds. For two weeks we have almost no behavior problems but on the big day we send an extra bus for any children who misbehave and need to be removed from the theatre. The campus is quiet with only the newest and naughtiest students left behind.

When the movie goers return Shasta reports only one incident: Odis a black fourteen-year-old boy who has been romantically linked to many of our female students and who not only lost the privilege of attending the movie but also was absent from school today, (his Mom called saying he had a fever) showed up at the theatre. His mother dropped him off! The staff had wisely separated girls and boys so there would be no issues in the darkened theatre, but Odis snuck in late and found his way to a seat between Nishonda and Estralitta. Shasta caught him lip to lip with Estralitta and while she wanted to toss him out of the theatre, she wasn’t sure she could legally do that, so she moved him to sit with the boys and there were no further incidents. She said when the busses left, Odis was standing outside the theatre waiting for his mother to pick him up. On a lark I phone his mother to both question her and report the incident. Yes she knew he lost the privilege of attending the movie but she has the right to take him to any movie any time and since he was feeling better, she did. She didn’t know about the kissing and she’ll talk to him….

As the movie goers got off the busses they were bubbling with enthusiasm. Many thank me and several talk about how the movie wasn’t the same as the book - or at least they pictured it differently. For many of my students this was the first time they had read a book and then been to the movie…. The whole adventure is so positive (despite Odis) that we brainstorm how to incorporate this into the curriculum more often next year.

Chapter Fifty-Three: Parents say the Darndest Things

2008-03-18T07:18:00.001-05:00

Chapter 53: Parents Say the Darndest Things

TobyBeth’s father phoned Henry, my public school liaison directly, totally bypassing me. And frankly, that really is okay.

TobyBeth’s father ran into former counselor Ernie in Winn Dixie and Ernie told him to hurry and get TobyBeth out of Prospect before she “gets ruined for life.” Good old Ernie. TobyBeth is a very troubled girl. Between the internet sexual predator and the death of her best friend last year, her suicide ideation and depression this year, having her father bounce her in and out of Prospect and Public school for over three years and all the while growing up in a home with two illiterate and racist parents, TobyBeth could already be said to be “ruined.”

A meeting is scheduled with TobyBeth’s father, Henry and me.

Henry arrives early. We converse easily, enjoying each other’s company. We talk about running, his children and the weather in upstate New York. Neither of us is aware of any specific problems TobyBeth’s father is having with Prospect but we both know TobyBeth’s forays to public school have always ended badly. Our goal for this meeting then is to avoid another unsuccessful and unproductive transfer of TobyBeth to public school. My overriding concern is the emotional and academic damage these school transfers do to TobyBeth. Henry seems primarily worried about the impact on the students and staff in the public school to which TobyBeth is transferring, along with the requisite bureaucratic paperwork associated with such transfers. I don’t linger over these different motivations thinking that as long as Henry and I both share the same goal, I am ready to face TobyBeth’s father. But Henry’s priorities regarding Prospect children keep widening the gap between us.

TobyBeth’s father arrives late and starts the conversation by accusing “that black boy” (Kembrall) of sexually harassing TobyBeth. He is recycling an old accusation, one we investigated months ago, along with the Deputy. Although we found no proof, because there was doubt we moved Kembrall to another class and we’ve been doing our best to make sure TobyBeth and Kembrall are kept apart. I question TobyBeth’s father to determine if there are any new allegations, but he is on a roll and won’t let his monologue get sidetracked by facts.

TobyBeth’s father gets very worked up and loudly proclaims: “I don’t want nobody touching her titties and pussy.” He repeats this statement three times before concluding by striking his fist on my desk for emphasis: “Even I don’t touch her titties and pussy.”

I take detailed notes both for my records and in an effort to keep my face expressionless. I work hard not to make eye contact with Henry during the meeting. At some point Henry must have decided he wanted to end this meeting quickly and that it wasn’t worth arguing about why Prospect is the right place for TobyBeth. So when TobyBeth’s father finally pauses, Henry suggests since TobyBeth’s father is so unhappy with Prospect, he return TobyBeth to public school. TobyBeth’s father is surprised at this response and leaves saying he’ll ask TobyBeth what she wants.

I feel conflicted by this outcome. On one hand it is definitely a relief not to prolong this meeting with TobyBeth’s father. But if TobyBeth is transferred to public school, yet again, it will not help her. I am disappointed in Henry for surrendering so easily, for giving up on TobyBeth without a fight.

After TobyBeth’s father departs, Henry and I both have to confirm we heard correctly. We agree that TobyBeth’s father’s statement: “Even I don’t touch her titties and pussy” is a shoe-in to win Prospect Quotation of the Year. Henry asks about the Kembrall investigation and recommends, if we have any doubt about Kembrall’s guilt, we transfer him to ESAK where he’ll be with high schoolers and won’t have the opportunity to prey on younger girls. I agree and make a phone call to Rocky at ESAK to get the transfer procedure started.

Goodbye Kembrall.

Chapter Fifty-Two - The Price of Bonding

2008-03-11T06:59:00.000-05:00

Chapter 52: TMI - The Price of Bonding

In an effort to start our April in-service day with a positive, team bonding activity, I schedule an all-staff breakfast at Costello’s restaurant. Everyone seems pretty happy with the biscuits, orange buns (Costello’s signature dish), grits, sausages and eggs. The Mime sits between me and Dana, my Title One Reading teacher. The Mime is very animated and starts to talk, unprovoked, about her past. It seems before she was a Mime she traveled across Asia hitchhiking, stowing away on trains and smoking hashish. After she was a Mime she worked for the Mafia laundering money and then worked as a stripper and lap dancer. It is unclear why The Mime has chosen now (or ever) to share this with us. It is sort of freaking Dana out and she keeps trying to change the subject. Knowing the Mime has three sons she tries to ask about the boys, but the Mime is determined to detail her sordid past.

I walk around to mingle, trying to stop at each table long enough to express my thanks for everyone’s hard work. As I circulate I notice all the bus drivers are sitting together at the same table. I had asked transportation coordinator Shasta to have the drivers try to sit with teachers to help develop a rapport, but either she didn’t tell them or they ignored her. The bus drivers also ignored the “mini menu” we arranged with Costellos to save on costs. The drivers scooped up regular menus and ordered from them. Oh well, since they segregated themselves at one table, the rest of the faculty is unaware.

At another table, Stone and PE teacher Billie are whispering conspiratorially. They keep glancing up to see who is observing them. When I approach they stop abruptly and physically separate, moving their chairs apart. I have a hunch this is not good but I am having enough trouble with problems I can see without worrying about possible unhatched plots.

When I stop by the table with the Wrestler he motions for me to sit next to him. While everyone else has ordered a substantial hot breakfast (the drivers more substantial than the rest), the Wrestler has only a glass of milk and a small box of Special K in front of him. Maybe he needs to lose weight for an upcoming match. I think about asking him, but he speaks before I can form the question. In a voice so quiet I strain to hear him, The Wrestler tells me he has accepted another job at an aircraft manufacturing plant and he has to start in a week. He keeps apologizing. I ask whether he can postpone his start date. No he can’t, in fact after breakfast he won’t be able to return with us to Prospect, he has to fill out paperwork for his new job. It will pay him twice what he makes now, he says, but his parents are still mad at him for quitting. They feel he ought to finish out the year. I agree with his parents but don’t say as much – what’s the point?

RitaMae asks me whether I noticed two staff members are missing: Neeley and Buffy. Before I can respond, she launches into the gossip.

After the students left yesterday, Neeley and Buffy went joy riding in The Forest in Neeley’s new 4-wheel drive pick up truck and it got dark and Neeley accidentally drove into a lake and the truck got stuck in the mud and they got out to survey the situation and out of the mist, several Rainbow people materialized and one, a woman, was topless and Neeley and Buffy got freaked out by the them (the Rainbow People) and returned to the cab of the truck where they spent the night, and this morning they walked three miles to a Kwik King gas station where the clerk told them how to get in touch with a guy with a tow truck and the guy towed them out and they are heading back to Prospect now and Neeley took photos because he knew I would never believe this story although he did try to phone me but there was no cell service in The Forest and it is all kind of ironic since Buffy has been stalking Neeley for weeks wanting to sleep with him ever since he slept with her after the Christmas party when he was so drunk, which he regrets but she won’t forget.

When I return to my table Dana throws me a glance that tells me The Mime is still going strong. As I sit down I hear about how The Mime spent last weekend – having sex on the floor of Stephanie’s kitchen with a guy she met at a bar. I am thrilled when I look at my watch and realize it is time to return to Prospect and get to work.

Before we leave Costellos I take a group photo to commemorate the occasion.

Chapter Fifty-One: Another Brick in the Wall

2008-03-04T05:22:00.001-05:00

Section V: Spring & Summer 2003 - the fourth academic quarter
Chapter 51: Another Brick in the Wall

It really is disheartening. Here we are in the fourth quarter of the academic calendar and some key policies and procedures I put into place nearly a year ago still don’t run smoothly, despite having discussed, revisited and reconfigured them with the team during the subsequent months. These include (but are not limited to): teachers writing notes in planners, bus departure and the ever-contentious Activity Period. In the case of Activity Period, I suppose I’ve scored a minor victory: my faculty now recognizes the benefits of Activity Period and, while saying they are enthusiastic might be overstating their feelings, they are supportive. Recent additions include a “Golf Club” run by new teacher Theo, which is inspiring over a dozen children to become Tiger Woods, and Jordan’s very popular Auto Mechanics club. Even Stone is on board, he sent home permission slips last week so he can take his fishing club on their first field trip to actually go fishing (usually they watch videos and engage in fish tales). But despite all this positive energy, Activity Period remains a source of angst.

As teachers recognize the value students place on Activity Period, they want to use it as a privilege that must be earned, or more accurately, can be lost. They feel students who have misbehaved during the day should not be allowed to participate in Activity Period at the end of the day. When we discuss this in our weekly meeting, I express my philosophy that Activity Period should be treated like any other class, but my staff is adamantly opposed, flinging around phrases like “entitlement mentality” and “rewarding misbehavior.” My staff views Activity Period as a rare “carrot” in a world of ineffective “sticks.” Prospect students are mostly unfazed by threats to remove them from class, call their parents or suspend them. But they sure don’t want to miss Activity Period. I surrender to the majority and don’t press my views, although in retrospect, things might have gone better if I had –in fact it would have been hard for things to have been worse, but hindsight makes the muddiest waters clear.

I wonder, is this a recurring theme of my tenure at Prospect? As a leader do I lack the backbone to make hard and unpopular decisions? Perhaps my search for win-win solutions and my desire for consensus building blind me to those situations when I know I am right and must insist on an unpopular course of action. Two problems: what level of certainty do I require before I am willing to demand we adopt my approach in the face of unanimous or nearly unanimous opposition? And, am I afraid of being labeled a witch (a label I may already have “earned”) essentially falling prey to the societal prejudice which views a male leader as “assertive” while the female counterpart is “pushy”?
But I digress….

My staff’s position almost makes sense despite leaving unanswered crucial questions such as: what we do with the students who haven’t “earned” Activity Period? And what defines, in both quantity and quality, the misbehavior that will cause a student to lose Activity Period? These are hard questions and with the unending time pressures, I allow them to be raised but I don’t insist we make time for hashing out options and reaching solutions. Thus they remain unanswered, a mistake that compounds the problems inherent in using Activity Period as a reward: is it appropriate to deny students participation in a segment of the school day which staff has determined has educational value and, moreover, is it possible that those who misbehave the most are also most in need of Activity Period?

It starts slowly, first just a handful, then a bunch and suddenly the floodgates open and every day at 3:00 pm Rusty and Rosie find themselves overrun, their counseling office full of dozens of children who are prohibited from participating in Activity Period. Their portable seems to swell and roll with the waves of angry children. Students claim ignorance at the misbehavior that caused them to lose Activity Period, they protest their innocence, complaining of unfair treatment and of scapegoating teachers. They demand to know since so and so did such and such which is much worse than what they are accused of, why isn’t he (or she!) also missing Activity Period? Suddenly there are so many children the counselors can’t contain them and it isn’t unusual for some escapees to sprint from the portable and rampage over campus disrupting the Activity Period. The atmosphere in the counseling portable becomes unbearably toxic. Rosie and Rusty complain to me about their headaches from the volume of the incessant cursing. We try hard to steer parents away from this boiling cauldron, but we don’t always succeed.

One afternoon Connor’s father comes to school to complain to Neeley, Connor’s teacher, that Connor, the gifted boy who gets along well with adults but not with peers, doesn’t get enough homework. Afterwards, Connor’s Dad comes to see me to reiterate his complaint. By the time he is done, we are in the throes of Activity Period. When I radio Theo to ask him to send Connor to my office, he informs me Connor isn’t in Golf Club today since Conner started several fights at lunch and thus is in the counseling portable. I suggest that Connor’s father wait in my office while I get Connor, but he doesn’t want to further inconvenience me and says he’ll go collect Connor himself. Chicken that I am, I don’t accompany him.

Rusty and Rosie fill me in later.

Apparently, Connor’s father entered the Counseling Portable and was understandably unnerved by the atmosphere. He took it upon himself to chastise some of the children. Although Connor can’t get along with his peers and can be vulgar and violent with his classmates, he is unfailingly polite to adults. Maybe Connor’s father thought all children are like that, but when he began to reprimand the misbehaving no-activity children, they responded in true Prospect fashion: shouting and cursing. Immediately Connor’s father spiraled downward into their world, shouting and cursing back at the students. As the children realized this man was Connor’s father, they ratcheted up a notch and began to personalize the attacks, accusing Connor of engaging in a variety of vulgar and impossible sexual behaviors. Rusty and Rosie then had a very angry and volatile father-son team facing off against over a dozen angry adolescents. A full-out riot didn’t seem unlikely. Somehow they managed to escort/push Connor and his father out of the portable. In full view of many students, teachers and a few parents, Connor’s father stormed to the parking lot screaming curses and giving the Prospect salute (aka “the bird”). It comes back to me that when I first met Connor’s family, Connor’s mother told me her son AND husband would benefit from lessons in anger control.

The incident with Connor’s father prompts Rusty to devise a new procedure: The Wall. Now students who lose the privilege of attending activity period will have to stand and stare at the cinderblock wall outside the school for the last hour of the day. Rusty, Rosie and the Deputy take turns policing this “wailing wall.” It isn’t a good solution but it’s better than trying to confine the angry mobs in the portable. It quickly becomes apparent that the students are not evenly distributed from all classes: Stone sentences the most students to “the wall” and in fact sometimes his entire homeroom has “the wall” for activity period. Having twenty or more students starring at a cinderblock wall is not a scene I’m proud to have parents and other guests witness.

Meanwhile, other aspects of Activity Period start to unravel. Even with Valerie (my Title One Math teacher and former Army Officer) policing the campus during Activity Period, we still have a handful of stray children who prefer chaos to any activity we offer. Some clubs (Running and Volleyball in particular) create the ideal conditions for these wandering (and often rampaging) children. We never have a problem with students “escaping” from Fishing Club, Chess Club, Auto Mechanics, Board Games, Computers or Model Club.

Oddly we also have wandering problems in Clay Creations class. Elementary teacher Midge runs this club and when her artistic brain is focused on one child’s clay vase, she is oblivious to the other children who are making and launching clay missiles, running in and out of class and forming their clay into hollow spheres. My bus drivers ask me to cancel the clay activity reporting that the kids secret these hollow clay spheres out of their activity, fill them with water and throw them at their peers on the bus ride home - sort of improvised water balloons. Prospect kids do the darndest things! Neeley supervises Running club. Supervises might be too strong a verb. His runners often run the prescribed route and then run all over campus bursting into classrooms and disrupting other activities. Then there is volleyball.

I probably should have cancelled volleyball when Daphne left. Thought keeping it wasn’t an oversight, I made a deliberate decision to keep this popular activity because we have an inter-school volleyball tournament scheduled to be played against a similar club at my mentor, Rex’s school in a few weeks. We have a similar chess tournament scheduled as well. The students are very excited – Prospect students have never been allowed to compete against public school students in any activity. Thus I am determined to keep volleyball until the tournament. After Daphne left, Stephanie offered to run volleyball and assured me she could handle her orientation class combined with the volleyball club. Why did I ever think this would work? Volleyball has become a disaster and it frequently degenerates into violence. During Activity Period, the deputy divides his time between The Wall and Volleyball court. One of the bus drivers offers to help Stephanie, but volleyball is still a risky venture. When Elliott joins volleyball, the simmering ingredients are really set to boil over.

My first impression of Elliott is that he is little, cute and quiet. That was before he bit Rosie. In fact Elliott starred in a scene that was unusual even by Prospect standards! A nine-year-old white kid gets off the school bus, dives to the ground and, on all fours, chases our Counselor while snarling and biting at her ankles. Orientation leader Stephanie chases him while Rosie runs, trying to protect her ankles. Meanwhile, dozens of students force their way off the busses for a ringside seat. The teachers are equally mesmerized and I have to remind them to watch their students and not Elliott. Stephanie finally manages to restrain Elliott; she is a familiar face since she met with him yesterday when he registered. He calms down but won’t speak, move or make eye contact with her. I remember Elliott’s intake packet indicated that both his parents are deaf. While Elliott isn’t hearing impaired I have this idea we could try to communicate using sign language. I know one of our bus drivers has been studying American Sign Language so I ask her to try signing to Elliott to find out why he is upset. At first he ignores her but finally he signs back that the children on the bus were making fun of him for being so small. Elliott isn’t small for a fourth grader, but he is small relative to the hulking middle school students. Quick decision: rather than put him in orientation with mostly big middle school children, Elliott can skip orientation and immediately join Midge’s elementary classroom.

A few days later Midge reports Elliot is responding well. He only bites food and he wants to sign up for volleyball.

When the call for help is broadcast over the walkie-talkies, I am able to respond rapidly. I long ago learned to stay outside during Activity Period. I arrive at the volleyball court a step ahead of the deputy. A teeth-gnashing Elliott is chasing a middle schooler. The older child looks genuinely frightened as he realizes the growling Elliott means business. The Deputy and I are able to pin Elliott, making sure his teeth are a safe distance from our suddenly very vulnerable flesh. Stephanie hustles the other volleyball players toward the busses for departure. The Deputy threatens Elliott – if you don’t stop squirming I’ll handcuff you. Kneeling in the sandy volleyball court in my yellow skirt I wish the Deputy would cuff this biting boy. I’m tired of holding down his limbs. But Elliott doesn’t respond at all to the Deputy; it is as if he can’t hear him. Transportation coordinator Shasta radios to ask me whether she should hold the busses for Elliott. I want to say yes since I don’t want to spend the afternoon with this Hannibal waiting for who knows how long for his parents, but Elliott is clearly still too agitated to ride a bus. The busses leave. Stephanie returns to the volleyball court with Stone, Rosie and Rusty in tow. The Deputy looks at his watch, mutters something and walks off. We all assume he is getting the squad car for Elliott and he does get in his car, but instead he drives off campus! I don’t really want Elliott arrested, but neither do I want to be stuck with him. Each adult thinks he or she can soothe this small child and get him calm enough to walk back to the school buildings. We all try and fail. It is 4:30 pm and five adults are kneeling on a volleyball court taking turns restraining a snapping fourth grader.

Stephanie decides to get her mini-van. She drives across the field and parks next to us on the volleyball court. We physically and forcefully have to move Elliott into the back seat. We each take an appendage and hold him by his hands and feet as he twists, squirms and spits trying to get free and bite. He struggles and strains violently and we find ourselves dancing a demented Hokey-Pokey as we take turns retreating in fear of his biting teeth. We manage to make it to the counseling office without any wounds. In the counseling office Elliott squirms free of us, crawls under a table and stays there whimpering for an hour until his parents come get him. Stone and Rusty stay the whole time. I am thankful for their company and support.

Epilogue:

Prospect’s Chess team plays Rex’s team and wins the tournament! Sam, who runs our Chess club is proud and the public school kids are impressed. Our volleyball team plays three games against Rex’s. We win one and lose two, but Rex makes sure we all feel like winners when he presents all my students with t-shirts saying “Prospect Volleyball Team.” On the bus back to Prospect you couldn’t find a prouder group of “losers.”

As for Elliott, we never have another problem with him -no biting not even a playful nip. In fact, he becomes a model student, the best in Midge’s class. Although I am happy with this outcome, I am also somewhat perplexed by Elliott – how did he go from being extremely bizarre to being normal? Was he testing us? Did he find the atmosphere in Midge’s class comforting? Curious, it is easier for me to explain and understand why my students misbehave, than why they behave appropriately. In the class photo, while the other children make faces and assume strange poses, Elliott stands with his hands behind his back and his chest out, a serious look on his face. I can’t help but smile when I see that picture.

Chapter Fifty: Uncomfortably Numb

2008-02-26T08:53:00.001-05:00

Chapter 50: Uncomfortably Numb

I am either numb, jaded or both. Although I continue to write in my journal, my sense of awe and shock is gone and at times my entries border on flippancy and sarcasm even when events warrant a more serious tone. Admittedly the Extortion Ring and off-campus AWOLs were new challenges, but as matter-of-factly as one might write, “It rained this morning,” I write: Perry and Mulchaey lit firecrackers on the bus. I suspend both boys from the bus for a week. It is only when I send my out-of-state friends emails cut and pasted from my journal, and their replies come back littered with exclamation points and disbelief, am I reminded how far removed we are from normal.

My new shell-shocked state allows me to weather the usual Prospect excitement without hand wringing, and it would now take a seriously cataclysmic event for me to feel like there was a crisis. But what have I lost? As I get more numb to the stress, am I also less concerned with the lives of my students? What am I becoming? I see Midge ill, passed out on her floor and I feel like I am looking at a scene from a movie. I shrug off rumors of pregnant girls and barely flinch at the sight of a fourteen-year-old girl who happens to be a mother and an amputee. One of my teachers is abusive but I treat him the same way I treat my tardy teachers: I write him up. What is happening to my energy, my passion, my enthusiasm, my hope?

January 29th
Darla’s father phoned RitaMae to say Darla was high when she got off the bus this afternoon and she was “unable to hold a slice of avocado.” (Is this a standard measure of drug consumption?) Darla admits she took pills from Curtis on the bus ride home, but she says she doesn’t know what the pills were. RitaMae phones me at home asking what she should do. I haven’t a clue. I’m just making it up as I go. But I don’t say that to RitaMae.
Speaking of drugs, during a random drug test today, Marcus tested positive for 4 drugs including marijuana.

January 30th
Coby and Tyrell fought at dismissal. Coby took off his sneakers and threw them at Tyrell. Coby was livid and literally foaming at the mouth. Stone restrained Coby and witnesses say he was pretty rough about it. I don’t let either boy ride home on the bus. When Tyrell’s grandparents came to pick him up they took him outside for a “whuppin.” Coby’s father said he must have forgotten to take his medication before school or maybe he took the wrong medicine. (I have this image of a countertop covered with amber prescription bottles and Coby selecting which pills to take each morning.)

February 3rd
Darla was back in school today after several days absence post pill popping. She told RitaMae she took the pills because she wants to kill herself because her mother keeps saying she wished she’d killed Darla when Darla was a baby and her stepmother hates her (RitaMae says this is pretty close to the truth) and her father wants to kick her out (at least he keeps telling RitaMae he plans to “put Darla on the streets.”). Darla said there is no point in talking to a counselor since her mother took her to counseling before and Darla saw a counselor three times but she stopped going because her mother said it wasn’t working. We Baker Act Darla. When RitaMae called Darla’s father to tell him about the Baker Acting he suggests she adopt Darla.

February 4th
The Mime was in my office crying again. Today she was crying because she cried in front of her class and between choking sobs tells me she worries they’ve lost all respect for her. Should I tell her this is impossible – they have no respect for you? Her bawling stops as suddenly as it started and she sniffles that she has a plan: she will teach her students to juggle. Oh fine, I am sure that’s a splendid idea….

February 5th
I have to fill out repair paper work because a switch plate in Neeley’s room is broken. Neeley says a child’s head hit it during a “wild time.” Rosie reported to me that all the computers in Neeley’s classroom are destroyed because it is always “wild time” in Neeley’s room.

February 6th
At lunch time, Corinna, the Title One liaison, showed up out of the blue and started to tell Lynne she is doing “everything wrong.” Corinna and Lynne got into a screaming match in my office. I missed the opening rounds, but I saw the end: Corinna storming out the front door of my portable, shouting, “Your Title One money is now in jeopardy” and Lynne exiting almost as quickly out the back door to sit on the stoop sobbing.

February 7th
Chloe is back in Cressler House. She’s been there for over a week, ever since she made allegations of child abuse against her mother. Her mother called today to say she is happy to be rid of Chloe and that some social worker at Cressler is threatening to have her arrested for child neglect because she refuses to bring Chloe’s clothes down there. Mom says Chloe was going to run away and maybe the people at Cressler can keep her from doing that. Rosie calls Cressler House to let them know Chloe has been depressed and might be suicidal.

February 11th
Tony’s mother told me Tony’s teacher, Neeley, drinks alcohol during class from a plastic cup mixing it with apple juice and orange juice. Tony told her Neeley jokes about it all the time. I sent Neeley for a “random” drug test. He came back clean. I think I remember reading that alcohol leaves your bloodstream pretty fast, unlike marijuana.

February 12th
Henry stopped by to tell me I’m supposed to be doing a “POP” on all my new teachers. “POP” apparently is part of the Florida alternative certification program. I had no idea I had a role to play in the certification of my “non-traditional” teachers. Henry left me with arm loads of files and packets and says I should have attended a two-day training on this but for now I must read the material and implement immediately.

February 13th
Rosie confided in me that three of our girls are pregnant and they are identifying the fathers as either Prospect students or older men.
The Mime squealed into the walkie-talkie today “SHANDON IS IN THE CLOSET SHOWING HIS GENITALS TO DURON!”

February 17th
Two Bus drivers arrived upset. Public school students threw eggs at their busses, some eggs went inside the bus and hit kids. Busses are sticky and eggy inside and out.

February 18th
The Mime cried in our morning meeting today. She cries so much I don’t even remember why she was crying this time. Stone, who was sitting next to her, reached in his pocket, removed some change and, turning to the Mime, said “Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.” Stone’s sarcasm: it’s not just for students anymore.

February 19th
United Way called today, we were denied the United Way grant. Despite the hours of work I spent applying for this, I feel relief. The money was earmarked to transport students to Prospect all summer so we could run school 12 months a year. It would have been great for the students, but right now I would like to have a couple student free months.

February 21st
Estralitta and Selma, two of the three pregnant girls Rosie told me about, are not pregnant. Chloe is the third and the rumor mill says that is why her mother forced her into Cressler house. Valerie, my new Title One Math teacher told me Karla told her she was absent yesterday because she was having an abortion. Actually Karla told Valerie it was “Marla” who had the abortion. Marla is Karla’s imaginary evil twin. Karla’s mother still hasn’t refilled the lithium prescription….

March 3rd
Midge was absent from the 8:00 morning meeting. I just figured she was late but after the meeting, Buffy reported that Midge’s car was parked on campus. We found Midge unconscious, sprawled out on the floor of her classroom. Lynne called 911. Buffy and Rosie sat with Midge stroking her and calming her. Two firefighters appeared just as the busses were pulling in. Two ambulance workers also appeared shortly thereafter. Midge was given oxygen and examined. Vital signs normal. Midge told the paramedics she had been spraying the bathroom with disinfectant and that was the last thing she remembered. The paramedics said she was fine but she decided to go home to recover. She was crying. Rosie got her a cup of tea. Midge drove home after an hour with the tea. I threw away the disinfectant.

March 5th
Henry phoned to say the School Board ruled against Edgar returning to public school. Henry said we’ll try again and next time Jordan, Edgar’s teacher and I will “testify.” When I gave Edgar the news, his lip quivered, but he put on a brave face.

March 6th
Chloe says the father of her “baby” is a thirty-year-old man who is a friend of her mother’s. Rosie called DCF.

March 12th
There was a toxic aroma in four classrooms this morning. Various staff identified it as either: dead animal, hair chemicals in a bad beauty salon, old burnt rubber or the NJ Turnpike (that was my professional assessment). Teachers refused to go in their classrooms. By the end of day the mystery was solved: the toxic smell was a burnt plastic sheathing on a light fixture.

March 13th
Stephanie invited me to visit her classroom today to hear Zoë, her newest student, introduce herself. All I knew about Zoë was that she is a white fourteen-year-old girl who had a baby last year. As I watched, Zoë removed her prosthesis and told the class about the dump truck of sewage that ran over her leg three years ago, Zoë is surprisingly articulate.

March 14th
Henry stopped by to tell me we’ll have to find a new location for Prospect next year because the School Board wants to use this property for a project of their own: a school for dumb good kids (as opposed, I suppose, to my students: dumb bad kids). The purpose is to raise FCAT scores.

April 8th
Billie radioed for me to help her with “something suspicious” today. She always wants to be the “good cop.” When I got out to the ball field she told me to look in Dante’s jacket hanging on the fence. I found a computer mouse. Billie said Marcus (hair braided today) was part of the theft and she wanted me to have both boys sent to the deputy. I do, but his investigation turns up nothing. Later Billie radioed for me again this time she believed there was some sort of cigarette scam involving Karla and Mimi. We know both girls smoke, so Rosie searched them but turned up nothing. When she heard this, Billie claimed they transferred the cigarettes to another girl but she wasn’t sure who.

April 9th
Chloe finally had a pregnancy test, she is not pregnant. She is still living at Cressler House.

April 10th
A new student arrived today, Rafael. He tried to fight with Kareem in the parking lot early this morning, but new teacher Theo broke it up, cutting his finger in the process. Then at breakfast Rafael again attacked Kareem and was punching his face when the Deputy separated them and handcuffed Rafael. The Deputy turned his back and Rafael went around him and, despite the cuffs, started kicking and spitting at Kareem. The Deputy dragged him away shouting “What are you, an idiot?”

April 11th
Hannah didn’t have a good day. Her students rioted and she threw a framed picture at them and the glass broke. She went to Rosie’s office for confession and a shoulder to cry on. At least she didn’t cry in front of class like The Mime does.

April 15th
We got a new elementary kid this week, Jojo. His mother said she doesn’t know why he keeps doing wrong especially since every morning before school they have a prayer circle and light aroma therapy candles. Today Jojo’s mother was late to pick him up, again. He waits for her outside Jana’s classroom. When Jana was busy in the bus circle talking with a parent, Jojo snuck inside her classroom and stole Jana’s walkie-talkie from her desk. Although she couldn’t prove it, Jana was sure Jojo was the culprit and told his mother as much. His mother refused to believe it and in fact was angry and rude to Jana. But then at home when she found the walkie-talkie and the belt clip for it, which Jojo broke, she phoned to tell me. She became upset when I told her she would have to pay for a new clip. Here is what I didn’t tell her: I think you’re using the wrong aromas.

April 16th
Billie and The Mime were both late again today. They are late a lot. When we talk they act like I’m making much ado about nothing and then they spew excuses. I wrote them both up. Neeley, on the other hand wasn’t late! After a spate of tardies with excuses ranging from: “I fell asleep drunk with a bottle of wine in my hand on the couch and didn’t hear my alarm” to “A guy parked behind my truck and I couldn’t back out” we had a serious talk and I put him on a PIP (performance improvement plan). He’s been on time every day since and I make a point of quietly acknowledging his success daily.

April 17th
I got a call today from a school principal in Savannah Georgia doing a reference check on Yvonne. Big question: would she be eligible for rehire at my school. Hmmm let me see, lame lessons, no classroom management and resignation by fax – I’d have to say “NO!” I’m still laughing over Hannah’s comment in our morning meeting: she said it’s getting easier for her to be tough, harden her heart and maintain control in the classroom. “I’m so mean now, I’m even mean to my cat!”

April 18th
A long kitchen knife was found under Sam’s portable today. Jeremiah found it and gave it to Mookie who then turned it in to Title One Reading teacher, Dana. Rumors are rampant: Calymont, Kembrall…. Will our investigation yield any findings? How long has the knife been there?

April 22nd
The Mime found a note Kembrall wrote to a new girl saying, “I want to fuck you.” The Mime promised him she would keep this information to herself – unclear why, more poor judgment. Some of the other students told Rosie who grew alarmed since Kembrall has been accused of molesting some of the girls. Why did I hire The Mime?!

April 23rd
Stephanie lost a stack of orientation in-take packets and is trying to blame others. She has been very scattered lately. Lynne says Stephanie’s sort-of-ex-husband has been trying to reconcile with her while her new love-of-her-life is deployed in the Middle East.

April 24th
More excitement with Midge today. She radioed for help and reported pain in her arm and blindness in one eye. 911 all over again. Midge spent all day in the ER, no causes, no diagnosis. They admitted her and are running more tests. I phoned the hospital and spoke with Midge’s daughter. She said the doctors think it is either her heart, a pinched nerve in her arm, sleep apnea or the fact that Midge has been upset about the death of a friend.

April 28th
Rafael, who was arrested on his first day at Prospect, returned today. Billie was covering the orientation class as they ate breakfast. Rafael started throwing milk. Billie sounded pretty hysterical on the walkie-talkie and Stone, who was right outside the cafeteria with his class, came to her aid. Witnesses say Stone manhandled Rafael causing Rafael to bite Stone and then spit a huge gob in Stone’s face. Stone responded by choking Rafael until he nearly lost consciousness (Rafael not Stone). Two plainclothes detectives were on campus to question Curtis about a recent crime spree and they rushed to the scene and handcuffed Rafael. I’m pretty sure Rafael won’t be back, but what to do about Stone? Billie was in the best position to observe the encounter but she and Stone are thick as thieves and she denies he did anything but “rescue” her.

Are numbness, sarcasm and flippancy symptoms of “job burn-out”? And what role does this numbness play in my new sleep habits? As the fourth quarter starts, I find it is easier to sleep, but harder to get out of bed in the morning and I feel tired all the time? I try to channel my thoughts on specific plans and projects in an attempt to regain my energy and focus, but I find it hard to care and even harder to hope. Cynical thoughts cloud my brain and my inner voice starts to sound frighteningly like Stone’s. I’m hurtling toward the dark side. I try to think of something I’ve done that has been a success, something that has helped my students. I think about Activity Period and for a moment, I recapture my passion and enthusiasm. It is to be a short-lived moment.

Chapter Forty-Nine: When Numbers Don't Count

2008-02-19T11:32:00.000-05:00

Chapter 49: When Numbers don’t Count

We spent a lot of time preparing for the standardized tests known as FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests). Most public schools are able to dedicate one staff person, usually a counselor, to focus almost exclusively on FCAT for the months leading up to testing. We don’t have this luxury. This year Rosie volunteered to project manage FCAT but since she still had classes to run and children to counsel, it fell to me to attend many of the training sessions and then train the faculty. The additional workload kept expanding and as the testing dates approached we found it necessary to work on weekends. I joined several of my staff members in my office on a Saturday morning to bubble in the labels on score sheets for all the students who arrived after September and thus lack pre-printed forms (most of our students!).

As the FCAT week approached I grew increasingly concerned about my staff’s ability to correctly administer the tests as well as my students’ ability to perform. The FCAT test prep isn’t just about how to take the test, but how to behave during the testing. My faculty spent a long time going over the rules and citing the misbehaviors that would result in a zero on the FCAT. Amazingly, I need not have worried. With only a couple rare exceptions, the Prospect students followed the all FCAT rules. While testing was underway the school was silent. I actually heard a bird chirping when I walked across campus. The walkie-talkies didn’t squeal, students didn’t go AWOL or shout profanity. All was quiet on the Prospect front. The week of FCAT testing was the calmest week of the year and it makes me wonder how often could we administer standardized tests and still get this level of compliance!

Why were the students so compliant, so well behaved? Did the rigid structure of the testing situation comfort them? Did they find the simple rules -start, bubble in, no questions, no talking, no grey areas - to be a relief? Prospect students have demonstrated time and again their lack of respect for, or fear of, parents, teachers and police officers, yet they seriously follow all the rules for FCAT’s. Could it be they feel the tests are fair and objective in ways all those “authority figures” are not?

In Florida, scores on the FCAT are used to determine not only which children are failing but also which schools are failing. One of the provisions of the federal education law “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) is that failing schools will be taken over by the state or turned into Charter Schools and in some instances, the children who attend these failing schools will be given the opportunity to transfer to another school.

Although the students at Prospect take the FCAT, their scores are have never been used to evaluate the quality of education offered at Prospect. This surprises me since Prospect is a Title One school and the law states if a Title One school fails for two consecutive years, parents must be given a choice of schools to which their child can transfer.

When Prospect students take the FCAT, their individual scores count and are entered into their “permanent school records” with failing scores often used to justify retaining them. But, unlike public schools, the score that represents the entire Prospect student body is not reported. This intentional omission reminds me of the cliché: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Shortly after I became the principal of Prospect, I started asking how to make the school score for Prospect count. My liaison, Henry, is mystified as to why I would want to do this. If Prospect was given a letter grade, Henry explains, we wouldn’t do better than an “F.” I know this but I also know that schools that receive an “F” are given additional funds and resources to help them improve and schools that do improve (move from an F to a D for example) are awarded money to reward their progress. I want this money for my school and I also want another tool to gauge my success in improving academics at Prospect.

Henry advises me to call Deirdre, the person in charge of guidance for Herald County Public Schools. Deirdre says not counting Prospect scores isn’t an omission, it’s the law. She explains that she can’t count Prospect scores because we didn’t meet the legal minimum required number of students taking the FCAT. I tell her I am looking at the numbers and that actually we did. She agrees, then says we can’t count Prospect scores because those students who took the FCAT weren’t also on the rolls the prior October . I don’t have that data at my fingertips to refute or support her claim, but I suspect we might meet that criteria as well and I tell her even if we didn’t meet it last year, with the increase in our student population, we’ll surely meet it this year. Whereupon Dierdre tells me we’ll have to meet it for two consecutive years. My conversation with Deirdre makes it clear to me that Herald County does not want to include Prospect data in the county’s NCLB profile. Herald County has gone two years without an “F” school and they don’t want one now.

As Dierdre and I conclude our discussion, I realize I have neither the facts to successfully argue my case, nor the time to investigate and gather the necessary data. The provisions and criteria of NCLB are complex enough that few people have a thorough understanding of how the scores are computed let alone all the loopholes and nuances of this law. Principals and other administrators believe they have a handle on the subject until they attempt to reassure perplexed parents at which point they realize they too are unclear on many of the provisions of these state and federal education measurements. Like the state certification laws, often a school district has one person who has attended all the training sessions and read all the memos and is the resident expert. In Herald County, Deirdre has that authority and is frequently called upon to answer questions, clarify and demystify. She is the FCAT gatekeeper and it appears her marching orders are to interpret and use every regulation to keep Alternative School test scores from “polluting” the public school numbers. Deirdre is good at her job; Prospect scores will not count against the district.

Free-market driven, measure-by-objective, professionals look at my students as dandelions whose presence prevents an otherwise beautiful lawn from producing the desired result for all to see. The weeds must be pulled. This is their moral imperative. To allow the weeds to remain blights what otherwise would be pristine, productive yards. To leave the weeds weakens the whole, lowering the overall effect of a fine lawn. In the rush to pull, my students are transferred from the classrooms in which they were reducing productivity, and transplanted to Prospect – a weed farm. Separated, segregated and ostracized from the beautiful lawns, they are shut away and forgotten. The weed pullers point to the improved results coming from their newly weed free lawns, and point out the resiliency of weeds as proof that all parties are doing well. In fact the folks who objectively judge beautiful lawns (with the gardening tool of choice: FCATs) can tell us how much better those lawns are now than they were before. The shame is they can’t seem to find the weed farm to judge how it’s doing. Curious how the well intentioned weed pullers don’t see the value in judging all the lawns, but only those which they’ve spent time and money working on, while they hide the weed farm behind the fence.

I look at the dandelions and see not weeds, but flowers. Fragile flowers, in serious danger of wilting. They need at least as much support as the beautiful grass lawns, and as anyone who can really see, knows, they need a lot more.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Darius Drowning

2008-02-12T11:23:00.000-05:00

Chapter 48: Darius Drowning

Not too far out in the water a child is floundering. On the beach people are watching: people who are good swimmers, people with boats and life preservers, people who know the child. But no one moves to save the child. The people watch as his cries for help weaken and his head slips under the surface. Over and over he manages, with splashing and struggling, to rise above the crashing waves only to be dragged under again. Finally he doesn’t resurface.

Later many of the people on the beach say they knew all along he was going to drown, it was just a matter of time.

Confession: I am one of the people on that beach. I watched the boy drown and did nothing. While the boy was drowning, I was preoccupied with building castles in the sand. Worse yet, I really liked the drowning boy, but like the rest of the people on the beach, I was unwilling do what was required to rescue him.

Darius remembers a time when he had a real family – a mother, a father and two younger brothers and they all lived together in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was four years old when the “social workers” took him from his parents, but his memories combined with his imagination paint an idyllic picture of those halcyon days. He grasps tightly to this story as life swirls about, choking and drowning him.

Nine years and fourteen foster homes later, Darius rarely sees one brother (therapeutic foster home - multiple physical handicaps), never sees the other brother (adopted) nor his parents (“My mother did something really, really bad to me”). At times Darius has been nourished by the rare and always temporary love of a teacher, counselor, social worker, therapist and long ago, a foster mother who died. These injections of love help keep Darius afloat with his chin quivering and dripping just above the water line.

The staff has been watching the sinking of Darius for weeks and we’ve made several phone calls to his foster mother. She tells us she thinks the psychotropic drugs Darius takes aren’t working properly or that the dosage is insufficient, but, she explains, his doctor is on vacation for a month and no one is covering his patients. This seems unbelievable to me and I call her more than once begging her to pressure someone: DCF, the clinic Darius attends, his therapist; to see Darius and alter his prescription. I tell her we are all worried about Darius. My words fail to persuade. Meanwhile Darius’s behavior becomes stranger and more volatile.

Neither Darius nor Ethan is a popular boy. They aren’t scapegoated, mostly they’re just avoided as one might steer clear of an unshaven homeless man talking loudly to himself. Misery in this case does not love company, at least not the company of another miserable outcast. In an effort to be accepted, Ethan seeks out opportunities to taunt Darius. His efforts are usually rewarded. Darius can pretty much be counted on to overreact to minor teasing and Prospect students thrive on such theatrics. Lately Darius hasn’t even required much of a catalyst, he is permanently armed for bear and he’ll lock and load with minimal provocation.

Of course it happened in the Mime’s class and it involved the Mime’s water bottle. It is surprising, or in retrospect maybe not so surprising, that the Mime still leaves her water bottle within reach of her class, especially in reach of Ethan, although for this prank Ethan doesn’t spit in it. Instead, after secreting the bottle off the Mime’s desk, Ethan walks up to Darius and quietly says his name causing Darius to look up from his worksheet at which point Ethan squirts Darius directly in the face with nearly the entire contents of the water bottle. Darius loses all control. He morphs into something approximating a cross between The Hulk and the Tasmanian Devil. Screeching, he throws chairs, desks, books and tears writing from the walls as he chases after Ethan. Saliva oozes down his chin as he lashes out – Darius is literally foaming at the mouth. Ethan’s initial laughter fades fast when faced with the reality of the Darius Demon. The other students flee the classroom, the Mime screams incomprehensibly into the walkie-talkie.

The Deputy and Counselor Rusty arrive in seconds with the Deputy determined to arrest Darius and Rusty just as determined he not be arrested. I take the Deputy aside to plead Darius’s case. He agrees, no arrest, but a long suspension. I call the foster mother and tell her Darius is suspended for fighting, that he was nearly arrested and that he can’t come back until he sees a doctor. She is not pleased. She tells me I should have let the Deputy arrest him, that would have taught him a lesson.

I have become really annoyed by that now all too familiar sentiment, it is like the refrain from some eerie chorus that keeps singing dirges to the future of my students.

My attempt to pressure the foster mother backfires – she knows her rights. The next morning Henry, my public school liaison, stops by my office to tell me I can’t suspend a child pending a doctor visit. I have to set a specific number of days in accordance with the severity of the misbehavior. Henry suggests five days. I try to explain my rationale, but to no avail. I may know Darius, but Henry knows the rules.

After five days, Darius returns and is so sleepy and disoriented in English class, the Mime decide he needs to “sober up” and she sends him to Shasta who is dispensing meds in the “clinic.” Shasta has Darius lie down and when she talks with him she learns he is now taking twice as many pills as prescribed. His doctor is still on vacation, so did Darius decide to increase his dosage on his own or did his foster mother? Shasta tells Rosie, Rosie tells me and I plan to phone his foster mother but I neglect to make it a priority and two days go by before I remember and by then it is too late.

Darius is wild. Absolutely wild. He starts his day by pounding the cafeteria table at breakfast chanting, “Give me my damn ice cream.” Later he dashes out of math class, removes his shoes and starts to run around the ball field in his socks. I walk out to the pitcher’s mound and call his name. At first he ignores me until I remind him I am a fast runner (Darius has seen my running trophy and believes the hype about my superhero speed) and that I can tackle him and restrain him (neither of us has forgotten his first days at Prospect – Darius eating dirt with me pinning his legs). He is still flailing but he follows me to my office. I see the Deputy watching us, shaking his head. In my office I tell Darius I’m going to call his foster mother.

“You know her number?” He asks, sitting shoeless on the edge of the chair, swinging his legs and fidgeting.

“Of course, if you recall I’ve called her a few times before.” Darius smiles at that but tells me: “Bet you don’t know her number today.” When I ask why, Darius explains:
“She’s on vacation. I’m staying at Cressler House.”

Cressler House – the shelter for homeless and abused children in Herald County.

I call Darius’s DCF caseworker. I’m told his case has been contracted out to a private faith-based agency. I call that agency and talk with Darius’s new caseworker. Yes, he is aware that Darius is living this week at Cressler. “Like leaving your dog in the kennel,” I sarcastically quip. He tells me this arrangement isn’t unusual – foster parents often don’t want the foster children around on vacation. The caseworker agrees to come pick up Darius. When the caseworker arrives, Rusty escorts Darius for a walk around campus to locate his missing shoes. In my office with Darius’s caseworker, I share my concerns about his behavior, his medication, his stay in the shelter. The caseworker listens, then says “Obviously you care for Darius, would you be interested in adopting him?” I stammer something by way of a reply as the caseworker continues, “Well I asked his foster mother, but she doesn’t want him. We got the youngest brother adopted but the middle brother has physical handicaps so no one wants him. Darius has an aunt, she’s 23 and in the military in Iraq. She says she might want Darius when she returns…. Oh and next time he behaves like this, my supervisor says you need to have him arrested. With my caseload, I don’t have time to pick up every kid who misbehaves.”

I meet with Rosie, Rusty and Darius’s teachers to talk about strategies to help Darius survive until his foster mother returns from vacation. Sam, his math teacher, says a friendship of sorts has started to form between Darius and Paxton.

Paxton, like Darius, is a very thin, twelve-year-old white boy. Unlike Darius, Paxton lives with his biological mother and his new step-father. Paxton is fairly unique in that his school did not recommend placement at Prospect; last year his mother and step-father decided Paxton lies too much and requested placement here. The public school agreed. Paxton wears glasses and elastic waist cotton twill pants and his shirt is always tucked in. He is very calm and polite. Unlike Darius, he is not teased by his peers, possibly because he doesn’t respond. However he is never picked for teams or groups and doesn’t have any friends at Prospect.

Both Darius and Paxton are very bright and play chess together in chess club. Sam has seen Paxton speak quietly to Darius in an effort to calm him when Darius starts to go haywire. Sometimes it even works. Armed with this valuable information, we agree to make an effort to keep Paxton near Darius. We plan to remain vigilant with Darius and try to remove him from class before a riot occurs, however we are not optimistic about our chances for success.

As she leaves the meeting, Rosie says she thinks about adopting Darius. “Don’t tell him.” I caution. “Oh he already knows. We’ve talked about it” She replies. Darius’s dreams deferred: “Hey kid, any minute now I’ll swim out and rescue you, hold on, I’ll be along directly.”

The following day I have an off-campus curriculum meeting to attend. I inadvertently depart for the meeting wearing both my sneakers (I usually change back into my shoes for meetings) and walkie-talkie (which I at least remember to leave in my car during the meeting). While driving back to Prospect the walkie-talkie starts to crackle even before I turn into Prospect’s long driveway. Theo’s voice sounds hysterical, Sam sounds calm but his tone is edged with urgency. I am too far from campus to hear clearly, but one word keeps coming through loud and clear: Darius. I race up the driveway and leap from my car sprinting across campus to Sam’s portable. I arrive in time to see Theo, Sam and Jordan trying to restrain a screaming, punching, kicking, writhing Darius. Students from three classes have spilled out onto the walkway between the portables and like spectators at the coliseum they cheer the action. Paxton is kneeling next to Darius trying desperately to calm him while simultaneously dodging his thrashing fists, but Darius is too far gone. The Deputy arrives seconds after I do and in an instant handcuffs Darius and stuffs him into the back seat of the squad car. The Deputy then takes a moment to talk with the three sweating, panting teachers. He’ll need an official report from each of them, and he wants them (and me) to know he will be arresting Darius for a felony assault on teachers. I ask Theo, Sam and Jordan if they are hurt and need medical attention. They all say no but admit Darius did hit them although, as Sam says “It was like he was punching at ghosts and we got in the way.” What set him off? Someone, maybe Ethan, made fun of his math poster…. After the milling students are herded back in their classrooms I start to walk back to my office when I hear a voice behind me: “Ms. Smee?” It is Paxton. “Ms. Smee I’m sorry. I tried to mentor Darius but I couldn’t. I couldn’t help him.” Then Paxton hands me something. “This fell out of Darius’s pocket when he was fighting. I think it is his prescription bottle. He told me this morning that he ran out and his foster mother is away. He was planning to ask Miss Shasta if she could get more since she gives out meds.” Thank you Paxton. It’s not your fault Paxton.

Well meaning adults peered into the crystal ball and saw this future – maybe not the particulars, but we knew Darius was spiraling downward and yet no one could or would help him. We busied ourselves with other things and waited for the inevitable. I avert my eyes as the patrol car pulls away. I let Darius drown and here is a secret: Darius was one of my favorites.

Chapter Forty-Seven: And now for something completely different

2008-02-05T07:59:00.000-05:00

Chapter 47: And Now for Something Completely Different

It is difficult to stay ahead of the students. When I think I have sampled every dish on the menu, the students add a chef’s surprise. Sometimes I feel they actually plot schemes with the goal of making me and my staff crazy. I know such paranoia isn’t justified, which isn’t to say the students aren’t plotting, just that their objective isn’t to make the staff insane. If that happens, as it often does, it is just icing on the cake as far as my students are concerned. My two new challenges for 2003 are: AWOL and Extortion.

The AWOL problem seems ordinary at first. The walkie-talkie crackles with RitaMae relaying the news that Victor is AWOL. Victor, the gifted Hispanic thirteen-year-old who has been relegated to last place in RitaMae’s “favorite student club” often bolts from the classroom. I listen for Rosie or Rusty to confirm they see Victor and they are intercepting. But instead I soon hear Stone saying Arthur is also AWOL. If Neeley had been semi-alert he might have noticed Curtis was AWOL as well. Arthur and Curtis are both thirteen-year-old white boys. Curtis has been arrested several times and has spent time in two “programs” with no positive impact on his behavior. He isn’t nearly as sharp as Victor, but far more conniving. Arthur, on the other hand, is completely out to lunch. Arthur plays football and is tall and big and tough and strong but he appears to live on another planet. Actually he lives with his mother and grandmother – Lynne calls them the clown ladies. They both shave their eyebrows then paint them on in, well a clown-like fashion. So Victor-the brains, Curtis-Dr.Evil and Arthur-son-of-clowns are all AWOL. Coincidence? I think not.

Staff members who aren’t teaching are soon searching the campus for the missing boys (at this point we only know about Victor and Arthur since Neeley still hasn’t realized Curtis is missing). Lynne radios that I have a phone call. It is the front-end manager of Albertson’s grocery store. He tells me he caught three of our students wandering the store with two pounds of ground beef and a box of cheese crackers stuffed in their navy blue uniform shirts. The Deputy on Duty jumps in his squad car to pick up our AWOL boys.

Victor, Curtis and Arthur walked over three miles to get to Albertsons. They tell the Deputy they planned to climb on top of the roof of Scotty’s Hardware. It is unclear what they planned to do there and whether it involved the raw meat. RitaMae is certain Victor, her least favorite student, was the ringleader. The Deputy lectures, but doesn’t arrest the three boys.

The following day, Victor and Arthur are again reported as AWOL along with Mimi. Mimi is often AWOL so initially her departure from class doesn’t raise any red flags.

Mimi, a gifted thirteen-year-old white girl, was recently placed in a foster home. At the end of last semester her mother decided Mimi had done so well in school they should celebrate. Their celebration included going to parties at the homes of friends where Mimi and her mother smoked marijuana and drank alcohol together: mother-daughter bonding. In the wee hours of the morning, as they were making their way back home, Mimi walking, Mom on a bike, a Deputy drove up and told Mom to get off the bike. He said her repeated swerving into the middle of the road was liable to cause an accident. Mimi’s mother became belligerent and began to argue with the officer. She punctuated her verbal abuse by throwing a punch at him. The Deputy started to arrest her and she tried to fight him off. Assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, public drunkenness, I think there was even a possession charge. On top of that Mimi’s mother was already on probation for a previous drug charge. She was arrested, convicted, sentenced and is currently serving time in prison. Mimi likes to say her mother was arrested for BUI – biking under the influence.

Mimi is allowed to phone her mother every Sunday. Sometimes when she phones, her mother asks all about Mimi’s life and tells her she loves her, she misses her and she can’t wait until they are together again. But more than half the time when Mimi phones, her mother tells her she is no good as a mother, wishes she never had Mimi, doesn’t plan to get Mimi out of foster care when she is released from prison, doesn’t want to see Mimi again and then hangs up on her. On Monday mornings when Mimi gets off the bus, it is immediately apparent which sort of phone call she had with her mother the day before. In fact the tenor of these phone calls usually determines how Mimi will behave for most, if not all, of the week. Mimi’s bad weeks have caused a major rift between her teacher, RitaMae and counselor Rosie.

RitaMae takes extra time to design lessons and assignments that will challenge the gifted Mimi, and when Mimi is stable and having a good week, RitaMae is quick to acknowledge and praise her behavior and school work. But when Mimi is not having a good week and focuses her energy and powers on being vulgar, disruptive and in a word, bad, RitaMae has zero tolerance, insists Rosie remove Mimi and wants Mimi punished.

If Rosie has a favorite student, it is Mimi. Rosie finds it hard to discipline Mimi and of course Mimi is never as awful around Rosie as she is in RitaMae’s class. Rosie feels RitaMae should have some compassion for Mimi and try to understand her situation and cut her some slack on her “off” days. RitaMae, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family and overcame adversity though personal determination, believes Rosie is not doing Mimi any favors by coddling her. Both RitaMae and Rosie frequently share with me their frustrations about each other. Mimi sees it all, hears it all and revels in the discord. Sometimes before RitaMae gets on the walkie-talkie requesting a counselor to remove Mimi, Mimi bolts from the classroom in search of Rosie. Thus on this day, when RitaMae reports Mimi is AWOL, we assume that Mimi has done her usual and is hunting down Rosie.

Tashanna, one of our eagle-eyed bus drivers, breaks the story. She was gassing up her bus when she spotted Mimi, Victor and Arthur about a mile from school sprinting down 35th street. She thinks they might be headed for a nearby park. Lynne and I jump in my car and find them just past Publix. When they see me I expect them to run, but they hop in the car with Mimi punching her fist in the air shouting, “BUSTED!” As we drive back to school they are silent except when Mimi asks how long we were looking for them and Victor asks to open the window. Later in the cafeteria, I overhear the three runaways telling their classmates they were going to run when we pulled up, “but since Ms. Smee won that medal for running that race we didn’t have a chance.” The “medal” to which they refer, is hanging my office and I did get it in a race, but it was for simply finishing the Marathon, not for achieving any particular speed. However I see no point in correcting this misconception. On my way home I find the three “runners” left some contraband in my car: two lighters and half package of cigarettes.

Up until now, when students went AWOL, they left their classrooms but they didn’t leave the school grounds. This off-campus AWOL is a new twist and like the water balloons and elastics it quickly becomes a hot fad. I’m frustrated and perplexed. What is the protocol? What is my responsibility? This wasn’t in the education classes I took. I know about truants, not runaways. Word travels quickly and soon Prospect students and staff are buzzing about “the great escape.” Day after day more of them leave, three or four at a time. They head toward the grocery store, the park, the woods, away. Do I call the police? Should I send our Deputy to chase after them? Do I call their parents? Should I chase them in my car? At first teachers don’t even notice that several of their students are missing – that is troubling in itself. But after I discuss the problem in our morning meeting, teachers are more aware, but are now in panic mode, shouting into their walkie-talkies the names of the children who are running away.

Ironically, the Mime quickly becomes the prime example of how not to use the walkie-talkies. Her piercing voice, bordering on hysteria, announces every actual and possible AWOL. Since all staff members wear a walkie-talkie and they all operate on one frequency, any transmission is equivalent to a PA announcement: the whole school hears every missing student alarm. Like fleas on rats, this causes the AWOL epidemic to spread rapidly. Kids are running around campus hiding behind trees pretending to have run off campus. It is complete chaos. I cancel Activity Period until we get a handle on the situation.

When Victor runs away for the third time in a week, the Deputy sees him leave and shouts for him to stop, but Victor keeps running and the Deputy has to chase him down. Sweaty and angry, the Deputy decides to arrest Victor. He is in the process of filling out the paperwork when the walkie-talkie buzzes that Glenn is running. (Glenn is the small, academically challenged middle schooler who was in Midge’s elementary classroom for a while.) The overwrought Deputy decides to arrest Glenn with Victor. He handcuffs Glenn to the table leg while he finishes up the paperwork. Glenn tells the Deputy he ran because he heard that if you run and get arrested you get sent to a Youth Camp. Apparently poor confused Glenn thinks these “youth camps” are like summer camp rather than a prison camp.

At our 4:00-5:00 meeting the staff is really hostile and negative. I promise we’ll get a handle on these AWOL’s and suggest we start the meeting with everyone mentioning something that has worked well for them. Amazingly this works and my staff becomes a little more enthusiastic and positive. We brainstorm solutions to the AWOL problem. Stone wants us to use a code on the walkie-talkie and shows me a code sheet he has developed based on codes he used in Vietnam. I commend his effort, but his scheme is so complex the staff would need to consult decoder sheets before every broadcast. The team decides to use a simple code, instead of saying AWOL we’ll say, “Put so and so on the list.”

This procedure backfires almost immediately as some teachers, okay mostly the Mime, first scream about the runaway then use the code thus nullifying the code. The Mime shouts “URGENT URGENT Curtis is AWOL and running for the road, I mean, I mean PUT CURTIS ON THE LIST.” My students catch on immediately: “put on list” = AWOL.

Shasta has a better idea and I immediately approve it and kick myself for not taking action sooner: we order head sets for everyone. Even before the AWOL crisis, I’d been uncomfortable with students hearing and knowing about every walkie-talkie communication. “Walkie-talkie protocol” is on the agenda of our morning meetings at least once a week: Don’t talk about who needs meds, don’t use foul language, don’t use sarcasm. Stone has frequently been guilty of this last offense: “If someone doesn’t come remove Arthur from my class I’m going to dip him in honey and tie him to an ant hill.” More than once, parents and other visitors to our school have heard Stone’s “colorful” broadcasts and I’ve had to speak to him on this topic. As a team, we’ve talked about headphones before but so many teachers were opposed and I was insisting they do so many other things to which they were opposed, I decided to back down on this, but now the time has come to enforce the wearing of headsets. Everyone complies except RitaMae and Midge. RitaMae says she finds it distracting and Midge says can’t wear her walkie-talkie due to her obesity.

Looking back it is amazing how easy it was to solve the off-campus AWOL problem. After the headsets we don’t have another occurrence. I resolve to work hard on looking at trees rather than getting lost in the forest.

The AWOL problem was very visible, unlike the extortion ring.

Right or wrong, in public schools, teachers and principals know who the “good kids” are and who are the “usual suspects.” Clearly this prejudging is unfair and often leads to incorrect conclusions, but at Prospect where all the children are “bad”; trying to separate the wheat from the chaff is impossible. Case in point: five boys, some of whom turn out to be extortionists, while others are their victims.

Exhibit A: Manny, a student in Midge’s elementary classroom. He is the tiniest Prospect student and features an x-rated mouth. His repeated vulgarity and violence have caused him to be kicked off the volleyball team and he spends as much time sitting in the corner of the counselor’s office as he does in the classroom.

Exhibit B: Shandon, the boy with the overprotective mother who wouldn’t let him ride the bus after the false masturbating incident.

Exhibit C: Bernard, a thirteen-year-old black boy who isn’t new to Prospect but this rail thin child is often absent due to a serious medical condition requiring frequent hospitalizations. Bernard is on a list for a heart transplant. He lives with his mother, who holds a secretarial position in the local public schools, and with her boyfriend. Bernard’s bus driver reports that she wonders whether Mom’s boyfriend is abusive since the driver overheard Bernard telling his peers he needs to work out more so that “next time” he can stop his mother’s boyfriend. Bernard was recently involved in a minor shoving match which I broke up. I took Bernard and the other offender to my office and had them write down what happened. Bernard’s ability to express himself in writing was shockingly poor. Beautiful penmanship, but the spelling, sentence structure and organization were on a second grade level.

On a barely related matter, when Bernard was in the hospital recently, Jordan asked his class to make cards for him. Jordan shared the cards with me before mailing them to the hospital. Claymont, whose grandfather died when he was arrested wrote: “Get well my African Brother.” Tyryona who is now living with an optimistic cousin wrote: “I’m praying for you.” Karla, whose mother lives with the Rainbow People in The Forest, created a card with a beautifully drawn woodland scene on the front, inside she wrote a poem: “when you’re feeling down, look around at the shrooms on the ground.” Jevon, the elementary child who brags about his ability to pick pockets, was visiting Jordan’s room so he made a card too. He wrote: “Smoke Weed Forever.” Jordan did not send Karla and Jevon’s cards to the hospital . . . .

Exhibit D: Ethan, in the Mime’s class. Ethan is a white twelve-year-old boy living with both biological parents who are concerned and upset about his behavior, but at a loss as to what should be done. We’ve called them in twice in three weeks. First Ethan was observed masturbating on the bus. Unlike the “false masturbation with hand cream” incident in which Ethan was not involved, it appears this was the real thing and that Ethan was performing the act with pride to a very attentive audience. The second time we held a conference with Ethan’s parents was when he took the Mime’s water bottle during class, spit in it and returned it to her desk. Ethan and the class waited patiently until The Mime took a sip then several students felt duty bound to inform her of the saliva. The always emotional Mime began sobbing and gagging, tried to use the walkie-talkie but was unintelligible and ended up running from her classroom (AWOL teacher!). She headed straight for my office where she informed me she would have to go home for the rest of the day because she was wracked by “dry heaves” every time she thought about what Ethan did. She thought about it a lot.

Final exhibit: Garrett, a new student. Garrett is a tall, muscular fourteen-year-old black boy. I’ve seen him play football on Saturdays at Berke Jungers field, but unlike the rest of my student athletes, he is not interested in discussing this with me. When he first started at Prospect he wore an expensive jacket every day even when it was hot. I took him aside, explained the uniform policy, making the apt analogy to football, and told him if he wore the jacket again I would confiscate it. He did, I did. He was very angry and later that day he went AWOL, came to my office and stood over my desk demanding his jacket. I re-explained the policy: I will only release confiscated items to a parent or guardian. Garrett clenched his fists and narrowed his eyes. I ignored him and returned to my work. I feigned surprise when I looked up a few minutes later and saw him still standing there. I told him he was dismissed and free to return to class. He did.

Manny, Shandon, Bernard, Ethan, Garrett and the extortion ring….

The Mime’s homeroom had just changed classes and as the students entered Sam’s room for math, Sam caught a glimpse of a $10 bill in Ethan’s hand. Money is contraband at Prospect. The only time students are permitted to carry cash is when they need it to buy meals and even then they can possess only enough for the day’s meals. Since most Prospect students are eligible for free meals, there are few who can legitimately claim their cash is for lunch. Sam called Ethan up to his desk and quietly asked for the money, reminding Ethan the cash will be locked up and will be returned only to a parent. Ethan jams the ten dollar bill into the pocket of his shorts and refuses to hand it to Sam. Sam insists and Ethan refuses. Sam radios for a counselor.

Rusty takes Ethan to his office but Ethan won’t talk or give up the money. When Rusty picks up the phone to call Ethan’s parents, Ethan starts to cry. He can’t give Rusty the money or he’ll get beaten up. Ethan refuses to elaborate. Rusty takes the money and in our morning meeting he suggests teachers make “extortion” a vocabulary word and see where class discussions lead. Transportation coordinator Shasta also asks the bus drivers to keep their ears open. Almost immediately the students start to snitch on each other and as usual, confusion reigns. In Midge’s class, after learning the word “extortion”, little Frankie says, “Hey Manny does that.” But a hard look from Manny stops Frankie mid-sentence. Several students request to speak with Rusty and Rosie. They are afraid to say much, but they suggest the counselors question Shandon and Bernard.

It takes many tips and several days but we finally sort out the facts and learn that Sweet Shandon was intimidating Ethan-the-spitter, demanding more and more money each week or else he, Shandon, would be unable to protect Ethan from Garrett. Meanwhile our sickly Bernard had been similarly extorting funds from elementary student, Manny-the-mouth. Shandon and Bernard paid a percentage to Garrett.

Manny’s mother is furious and curses at me for running such an unsafe school where her son feels he must pay to avoid getting hurt. Ethan’s parents are relieved that this time Ethan is a victim rather than an instigator and they thank us for solving the mystery of the money that has been disappearing from their wallets and purses. Shandon and Bernard’s mothers are shocked and upset, but realize, now that we mention it, that they have seen their sons with a lot of cash recently. Bernard’s mother cries. Shandon’s mother says she has never hit him but feels it might be time to start. Garrett’s mother withdraws him from Prospect and returns him to public school. He makes sure she picks up his confiscated jacket before leaving.

Rusty and Rosie believe many more children besides Ethan and Manny were paying for protection, but they are too afraid to come forward. My counselors do, however, feel confident that Garrett, Bernard and Shandon complete the extortion ring.

I can add to my list of appraisal accomplishments: put an end to off campus runaways and broke up an extortion ring.

Chapter Forty-Six: Nightmares and Dreams Deferred

2008-01-29T08:13:00.000-05:00

Chapter 46: Nightmares and Dreams Deferred

It isn’t the most creative of assignments: “Think about Dr.King’s I have a Dream speech and write down your dreams for the future.” I grudgingly give Jana and RitaMae credit for at least acknowledging the holiday. Last week I printed up, discussed and distributed MLK celebration lesson plans from a few web sites to generate some enthusiasm for the holiday. Unfortunately my staff was more focused on the fact that MLK day is a day off from work. I know I should be happy that at least Jana and RitaMae are devoting some class time to Dr. King.

Aeron misbehaves during the writing assignment and is sent to my office. Aeron is a white fifteen-year-old boy the height of a nine-year-old with a mouth full of decaying, twisted teeth. He could be a poster child for the effects of poor nutrition and lack of medical care both pre and post natal. First Aeron tells me he acted up because he was bored and this is his second time in eighth grade and he already did this assignment last year. Then, after some discussion he says the real reason he is upset is because his dream is wrecked. He won’t divulge his dream to me or tell me what “wrecked” it, but I make a guess since I know his house burned down last week. Aeron tearfully admits fire is what wrecked his dream. I talk to him about Dr. King and how at times he felt his dreams were wrecked but he kept going. After a while Aeron returns to class and writes about his dream of becoming a cab driver.

RitaMae sends Ian, a white fourteen-year-old blond boy, to my office to share his essay about his dream. Actually Ian chose to illustrate his dream rather than write an essay. He drew a headstone bearing his name with the caption: “For my dream to come true I’ll have to be dead.” When RitaMae asks him about the drawing all Ian says is that he wants to make everyone happy and that to accomplish this he must die. RitaMae tells me when she saw his drawing she immediately called Ian’s mother. Ian has a history of depression and has been prescribed drugs for his condition. Has he been taking them? His Mom doesn’t know and told RitaMae that recently Ian has been living with the neighbors since he gets along better with them than with her. I ask our Deputy to Baker Act Ian and radio for counselor Rusty. If Rusty has a favorite student, it’s Ian.

When Ian first arrived at Prospect, he used to go AWOL several times from every class. It was not unusual to see Ian standing outside a classroom, fists clenched starring at his feet muttering “I’m not going back in there and you can’t make me.” Then Rusty began to meet with him regularly and Ian thrived. Ian began to make phone calls to Rusty every evening, “just to talk.” He began to stay in class and even to participate. When I tell Rusty Ian’s dream is to die, Rusty is crushed. He sits and talks with Ian until the deputy arrives to take Ian to the hospital.

Mookie refuses to write an essay about his “dream” and asks Jana if he can be sent to my office. Looking at Mookie sitting across the desk from me, I remember the last time he was in my office. It was the morning he created a major disturbance during a talk by one of our Career Day speakers who annoyed Mookie by repeated references to the future.

Today when I ask him why he won’t write about a dream, he replies with a question: can anyone make dead people come back alive? He tells me his only dream is to have his mother and father alive again and he knows it can’t happen so why write about it? I radio for Rosie telling her we could use her counseling expertise.

Julio, a quiet, Hispanic fourteen-year-old boy who lives with his father and is frequently absent for minor maladies, writes about his dream. Julio writes about how he wants to become a lawyer and sue the people who sent him to Prospect.

Now Darnell is in my office telling me he has no dreams. Darnell is a fourteen-year-old black boy who mostly wears his face frozen in an expressionless mask. He is very good looking and many of the girls flirt with him, but Darnell shows as little interest in them as he does in his assignment – Darnell is the picture of apathy. In the beginning of our school year, Darnell’s mother came to our open house with Darnell and his younger sister. His sister has cerebral palsy and Mom was pushing her in a wheelchair/stroller. Darnell gets his good looks from his mother. She came to the open house straight from work and was professionally dressed, her face calm and wrinkle-free, not revealing one iota of the heartache and turmoil I now know has rocked her life.

Last June, after I came to Prospect but before I met Darnell, he had been living with his sister, mother and step-father. For over a year his step-father had been physically abusing Darnell (in relaying this story, his mother says, by way of an explanation, “I didn’t know until after how bad the beatings were, but he put food on the table and paid the rent.”) However, the beating he gave Darnell last June was the worst ever. He beat Darnell until he lost consciousness. His mother witnessed the beating but even when she tells the story it is unclear how hard, if at all, she tried to intervene. She didn’t call the police for two weeks. Her call was the catalyst that ultimately landed step-father, now also ex-husband, in prison. Since June, Darnell has been angry at, and unforgiving of, his mother for allowing him to be beaten. He has openly stated his goal: to get his mother arrested so she too can go to jail. His method – be so bad she beats him then call 911 about the abuse.

Darnell’s plan is partially effective: he can usually inspire his mother to beat him with a belt. We have counseled Mom saying especially given Darnell’s history of beatings, she should never resort to physical punishment with him. We’ve offered suggestions for sanctions and revoking privileges but when Darnell provokes her, she instinctively goes for the belt. Part two of Darnell’s plan hasn’t worked as well – when he dials 911 the police only sometimes come and when they do and see this mother with a handicapped girl and stone-faced Darnell, they usually lecture Darnell and threaten next time they’ll give him a whuppin themselves.

But today Darnell is sitting in my office saying he doesn’t have a dream. I think of Langston Hughes poem about what happens to a dream deferred, but I share a different Langston Hughes poem with Darnell: Mother-to-Son that begins “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Darnell and I read and reread the poem talking about what Langston Hughes meant and how he wasn’t really describing a staircase. When we’re done, Darnell still says he doesn’t have a dream to write about but if nothing else, he got a language arts lesson from me although I’m fairly certain our analysis of the poem was more than an academic exercise.

A few nights later, about 8:00 pm, I’m working late when Darnell phones to say he wants me to call the police on his mother because they won’t listen to him. He tells me how he intentionally disobeyed his mother and refused to wash the dishes and start dinner so that when she came home from work and from picking up his sister at day care, the kitchen was filthy and there was nothing to eat and Darnell goaded his mother saying he didn’t feel like cooking and cleaning and what was she going to do about it? She beat him with the belt, then went out with her daughter to McDonalds leaving Darnell home alone. He asks me again to please to call the police to arrest her. I do make a phone call for Darnell, but not to the police. I call Cressler House.

I later learn that the staff at Cressler counseled both Darnell and his mother by phone that night and then had Darnell stay at Cressler House for a week and got him and his mother enrolled in a group counseling for parents and adolescents.

Life for Darnell, Aeron, Ian, Mookie and even Julio, ain’t been no crystal stair, and I can only hope they keep climbing.

Chapter Forty-Five: A Mime, A Wrestler, A Soldier, A Sailor and an Officer

2008-01-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Chapter 45: A Mime, A Wrestler, A Soldier, A Sailor and an Officer

I start 2003 much the way I started at Prospect last May, with a flurry of hiring – six new teachers to be exact.

I went into Christmas Break knowing I’d have to hire three teachers: the two Title One positions and another I’d budgeted for based on enrollment projections. I was actually pretty excited about hiring those three teachers since the “vacation” provided me the time to focus on reading resumes and interviewing without the daily stress of running the school. I found three candidates I felt very positive about. I used the interview tip provided by my mentor, Rex. He told me it’s not the specific questions or answers that are key, it is more the sense you get as you converse – do you feel a bond, chemistry? For this approach, I have to use the other side of my brain, but I think get it. When I think back to my interview with “Doctor” she aced all my questions and had all the qualifications and then some, but when we spoke, she sort of “creeped me out.” I remember feeling annoyed and irritated by her. My discussions with my three new candidates are just the opposite. After conducting enough phone interviews to wildly exceed my mobile minutes for the month, I find them: two black women and one white man, all veterans, two Army and one Navy. I so enjoy talking with them I don’t want the interviews to end and I sense they feel the same.

One of them is Frank, but he wants to be called Theo. He is an experienced and recently retired math teacher from Scranton, Pennsylvania, an Army veteran with experience teaching urban poor students. He sounds tough but with a compassion for children – when he talks about his former students and his grandson (who he and his wife are raising) Theo’s voice lights up. Theo isn’t as creative as former math teacher, Noreen, but he seems far more honest and trustworthy. I can encourage and develop creativity in a teacher. I don’t know how to teach honesty and morality.

Dana has a Master’s Degree in English and grew up in Jamaica. She and her husband are both retired Navy and they are now raising four school age children here in Lakeboro. Dana is bursting with wonderful, creative ideas for our Title One reading program. She is familiar with children’s literature and is passionate about working with at-risk children. My cell phone battery almost dies we talk so long.

Valerie was an Army brat who grew up to become an Officer. A single parent raising a kindergarten-aged son, she loves mathematics and science. Valerie would rather work with poor, challenging middle school students than with “typical” children. She is a computer whiz, no nonsense with a sense of humor. I want her for my Title One math teacher.

I was patting myself on the back for finding, recruiting and hiring Theo, Dana and Valerie, though my self-congratulatory moments were tainted by the end-of-Christmas Break departure of Daphne. But I rallied with two “back up” resumes: The Mime and The Wrestler. Neither The Mime nor The Wrestler gave me that same warm feeling I got with Theo, Dana and Valerie, but at least I didn’t get that skin crawling feeling I got when I spoke with Doctor. The Mime is a bit too effervescent and emotional which sort of annoys me while The Wrestler is laconic, shy or just really quiet which sort of unnerves me. I will count on Jordan and Sam to give me feedback and their preference for working with The Mime, The Wrestler or neither.

I feel like the hiring situation is under control, but at Prospect there is ALWAYS another shoe waiting to drop.

It is 7:10 am. I am driving to work and answering cell phone calls. Teacher Yvonne calls to tell me she is sick and won’t be in today. Stephanie, the orientation leader calls next. She was in the hospital over Christmas Break having a kidney stone removed, but they couldn’t get it so now she has a shunt and she starts to give me more details about having to urinate into a strainer to “pan” for the elusive kidney stone, but I stop listening for fear of losing my recently consumed yogurt. Then I become suspicious, I have learned that when employees call in sick and give me TMI (too much information) they are often lying. It crosses my mind that Stephanie may be taking a sick day not due to physical pain, but for emotional pain regarding the departure of Rufus, her new “love-of-her-life.” I read in the morning paper that Rufus’s Army reserve unit just got called up and will be heading to Kuwait today. No time to ponder, the cell phone rings again. Before I can stop her, my PE teacher, Billie launches into a long and very disgusting story about her dog. Yesterday her dog had some wound that was “squirting blood” so, Billie explains, she put a sanitary napkin on the wound but she wanted to keep checking it and like a perverse child picking a scab, Billie kept unwrapping the sanitary napkin from the wound and every time she did the blood would start to “squirt” again. So last night she took the dog to the vet and he cauterized the wound and bandaged it (presumably not with a sanitary napkin) but Billie decided to “check it” before work today (naturally) and guess what, it started to squirt blood so Billie is taking the dog back to the vet and she’ll be late today. I am too busy gagging to ask her for an ETA. But wait, one more phone call to round out the morning. Ruth, the cafeteria manager, has a dear friend who is dying somewhere near Miami. She calls to tell me she is driving south right now to care for her. I hang up and walk in the office where Lynne greets me with a fax that just arrived. I nod absently, strategizing how to configure my team to cover all these absences, but Lynne insists I read the fax immediately.

The fax is from North Carolina, from a bank, from a man with the same last name as my sick teacher, Yvonne. Oh, it’s from Yvonne’s father’s office. The fax is Yvonne’s resignation. I am momentarily baffled. Less than an hour ago she called in sick but now she is faxing from North Carolina to say she quits?

I forget about strained urine and Kotex covered canines. Yvonne’s departure means I need to hire yet another teacher. I jump on it and set up an interview with a teacher candidate who tells me he was a principal at a charter school in Michigan but left because he “got bored.” As we talk I realize this guy isn’t passing the “Rex test”, but I am desperate for teachers so after he departs, I do a reference check. When I call one of his former supervisors, she tells me he was a slob and threw chalk at his students. I decide I’m not that desperate. Strangely, before I can call to tell him thanks but no thanks, he calls me to say he just got a better position and he must resign. How can he resign before I offer him the job?

Jordan and Chris tell me they like The Mime but that The Wrestler isn’t bad either. Fine, teacher shortage solved: I hire both The Mime and The Wrestler. The Mime will replace Daphne, The Wrestler will take Yvonne’s class. Neither one can hold a candle to Theo, Dana and Valerie, but they are both “certifiable” (possibly in every sense) and I do need teachers. I make another decision as I shuffle staff to cover for my absent employees: I decide it is imperative to have some substitute teachers I can call on when needed.

With teeth-gritting determination I take home the eight-page list of approved substitute teachers for Herald County public schools and start calling. I skip no one. I offer ten dollars more per day than the public schools. It makes no difference. No one wants to work with my student population. After going through all eight pages I have only three tentative “yeses.” They are coming in tomorrow.

The first sub candidate brings her husband to the interview. She says she was afraid to come on campus without him. This is not promising. After a brief interview in which it is clear she is not interested, she offers this advice: “you should find a big, strong man to substitute.”

The second potential sub is very upbeat and talks a tough game. I give her a quick orientation and a walkie-talkie and ask her to cover Buffy’s elementary class while Buffy takes orientation. Lynne bets she’ll only last until lunch. Lynne is wrong. She lasts just over an hour and leaves in tears saying she never heard such language “in all her born days.”

I find myself trying to convince the third substitute to quit before she starts. Her lip quivers and she says she can handle it. I put her in Buffy’s room and check on her every 30 minutes or so. She lasts until dismissal but at 4:00 she hands me the walkie-talkie, tells me she will never be back and wishes me luck.

Three strikes and no more batters on the roster. But I am not easily defeated. I shred the approved substitute list and call the local unemployment office. Substitutes don’t need to be certified or certifiable. The unemployment office has two candidates to send me, both already drug tested and background checked. One was a prison guard the other a probation officer.

The Prison Guard is a screamer. When she isn’t yelling at the students she is in my office shouting on the phone. She calls her lawyer and social worker and a judge and her x-husband spewing out details on her child support and custody arrangements. Lynne doesn’t have to eavesdrop, all the phone conversations are conducted at the same earsplitting volume. At the end of her first day The Prison Guard approaches Lynne to demand her pay. Lynne explains we have to send a voucher to Tampa and the pay will come in about two weeks. The Prison Guard loses any semblance of sanity and starts screaming at Lynne, at me, at strangers who walk in the office. Lynne offers to try to expedite payment and after several phone calls she tells The Prison Guard the check will arrive in two days, on Friday, by UPS. The Prison Guard continues to substitute teach the next two days. She is awful, but she is a warm body and with our current teacher shortage we need her. On Friday the UPS man drops off some parcels but no check. As the brown truck drives off and The Prison Guard realizes there is no check she takes off, on foot, waving her arms, chasing the truck screaming. It is a strange sight.

That was the last time we saw The Prison Guard. When her check arrives the following Monday, we mail it to her.

The other substitute from the employment office is too good to be true. Marci, the probation officer, has only completed two years of college so I can’t hire her as a teacher, but her rapport with the students combined with her enthusiasm, flexibility, creativity and tough demeanor make her one of my most valuable staff members. I hire her as a full-time substitute teacher. Her pay is low and the budget is stretched but it is such a relief to know when a teacher calls in sick I have a plan B. Of course when more than one teacher is absent I am still in a bind, but hiring Marci is one my smarter moves!

When cafeteria manager Ruth phones to say she will stay with her dying friend until the end, Lynne and Shasta pick up the slack and scramble to make sure our students have food to eat. Having to take on this responsibility in addition to their regular jobs is stressful. Empowered by my Marci experience, I make a call but this time not to the unemployment bureau, but to Kelly Temp services. They promise me a trained cafeteria worker within a week. They do and she is fantastic, in many ways she is better than Ruth. For example, I never hear Lenora say “nigger.”

Staff math: on one side of the equation I added Theo, Dana, Valerie, Marci and Lenora. On the other I have The Mime, The Wrestler and for a few days at least, The Prison Guard. When I add it up, I’m not sure, but I think I'm ahead.

Chapter Forty-Four: The Disappeared

2008-01-15T08:18:00.000-05:00

Section IV: Winter & Spring 2003 – the third academic quarter
Chapter 44: The Disappeared

Prospect students don’t return from Christmas Break with tales of holiday gatherings, new games, toys, bikes, books, or even new clothes. In fact this morning, despite the cold, (48 degrees at 9:00 am) many of my students are bare armed, lacking jackets or sweaters. A couple shiver hugging threadbare blankets around their shoulders. For many Prospect students, Christmas Break is a time of hunger, cold and unsupervised misbehavior. The end result is that some Prospect students don’t return at all. Rusty and Rosie explain it to me: every time we have a school vacation, we lose kids.

At 9:00 on our first day back after Christmas Break, the first day of the third quarter, the busses arrive, but Trey doesn’t. Apparently Nine-year-old Trey is still in the Juvenile Detention Center. Midge, Trey’s elementary teacher, bites back tears as she realizes Trey spent Christmas in jail. Counselor Rusty promises to pay him a visit after school today.

RitaMae is upset when she learns Nora isn’t on the bus. She calls Nora’s aunt from her cell phone as she stands by the empty school bus. The aunt explains: just before Christmas, Nora’s parents, who were living in a car, upgraded to a welfare motel and insisted Nora join them. Nora’s brother, Noah, is still in a boot camp in Jacksonville, but Nora is thrilled to be back with her parents, older sister and sister’s baby. After all, that was her Christmas wish. Nora’s aunt isn’t sure Nora will make it to school today, she tells RitaMae Nora’s parents are pretty disorganized and when Nora last lived with them she was absent more than she was present. RitaMae is furious. She vents to me: “Nora was doing so well! She had safety and structure with her aunt. She was thriving emotionally, academically and behaviorally. Remember, we were talking about sending her back to public school but now… Why couldn’t her parents see she was in a better place?” Counselor Rosie volunteers to call the welfare motel this morning and tell Nora’s mother she needs to bring her to school.

Football players Tayshaun and Eli are not on the bus. Our Deputy on Duty knows the details of their story: “On December 26th, the day after Christmas, Tayshaun stole a “three wheeler” (all terrain motorized vehicle) and deputies found it in his possession and reported he had stripped it. Eli was an accomplice. Eli was released and his court date is next month. Tayshaun is still locked up. Both boys can expect to be sent to a program.” I want to ask the Deputy dozens of questions, but I know he can’t really answer the one I most need answered. In fact even if Tayshaun and Eli were here they probably would just shrug and stare blankly if I asked them the question directly: “What were you thinking?!”

All the students, especially the girls, seem to already know about the arrests of Eli and Tayshaun. Their names are on everyone’s lips and various theories are proposed to explain why they would do it and who was the ringleader. Selma is crying and asks to speak to Rosie about Eli. Eli was Selma’s boyfriend and after the murder of her brother and getting kicked out of her house, Eli was the one constant in her emotional universe.

Tayshaun, who spent some time with Jillane on a bus during our Fall Festival, was also romantically linked to Estralitta and Nishonda. We‘ve had several girls fighting over Tayshaun. Today Jillane, Estralitta and Nishonda are united in alternately grieving for, and being angry at, Tayshaun. Later in the morning, Eli’s mother calls. It is hard to understand between her tears and Spanish accent but she is calling to thank us for trying to help Eli and to tell us he won’t be back – by the time he completes his program he’ll be in high school.

Midge tells me she received a call from Jaysen’s mother last night. Mom decided this school is not a good place for Jaysen since Midge allows him to get beaten up and never teaches him anything, so she is enrolling him in public school. Midge is more relieved than insulted. Jaysen was difficult and his large size made her worried he’d hurt a smaller child in a tussle.

Jaysen’s mother isn’t the only one who decided to return a child to public school. Business manager Lynne tells me she just took a call from Ruby Lakes Elementary School. DerMarr has been reenrolled! His mother told the principal that DerMarr’s probation officer suggested it. The Ruby Lakes principal told Lynne he is not happy to have DerMarr back, especially since he knows DerMarr didn’t return with my blessing. The principal makes a self-fulfilling prediction that DerMarr won’t last long at Ruby Lakes. I head to Jana’s classroom to share this news with her. I know she’ll be upset. She worked extra hard, really we all did, and along with DerMarr’s aunt we made some real progress with him, but public school at this time seems a stretch. We were excited about presenting DerMarr the “Most Improved Student” award at our next assembly. Receiving such an award would probably be a first for DerMarr and he, his aunt and maybe even his mother would be proud and pleased. Jana tells me she’ll say a prayer DerMarr can cope and survive. I think she is praying for a miracle.

Amidst all the departures, there is one unexpected arrival: Lorayne, the girl with the tongue ring whose relationship with a forty-something man resulted in her placement in a foster home in another county. She is back and living now in a foster home in Herald County. She looks healthy and happy, but Rosie’s rumor network tells her we need to do a search on Lorayne. Lorayne asks Rosie if this will be a strip search. Rosie didn’t intend on it, but bluffs and puts on plastic gloves to show she means business. Lorayne then pulls from her underpants a package of cigarettes and retrieves from her vagina, a lighter. As she hands them to Rosie, my counselor is glad she is wearing gloves.

At the end of the day, after the students and most of the staff leave, two people are waiting outside my office to see me: one is a teacher, Jordan, the other is a woman I’ve never met. Jordan says he just wanted to tell me Daphne stopped by the classroom this afternoon and she did a wonderful job explaining to the students why she is leaving and she made sure they understood it isn’t about them but she wants to learn more. There were hugs and tears but no anger or acting out. For a moment I think it is odd Daphne didn’t seek me out to say goodbye, but then I guess she was embarrassed knowing her last minute “notice” was less than kosher.

Jordan hesitantly asks whether I have found a new teacher to replace Daphne. I tell him I have two potential candidates and I want Jordan and Sam to spend time with both and give me their input. Since they will be working closely with this teacher, I will give great weight to their opinions. One teacher is a former mime, the other a wrestler. The wrestler will spend tomorrow morning at Prospect, the mime will arrive after lunch. Jordan raises his eyebrows and looks carefully to see if I am joking. I’m not. He shrugs and says he appreciates my speed in finding a replacement teacher. I assure him it is not necessary to pick the mime or the wrestler, and if he and Sam don’t feel comfortable with either, I will keep looking. Jordan goes on to say he is really sad about Daphne’s departure. He describes how incredible she was with students and tells me how much she helped him. We agree Daphne will be difficult, impossible, to replace.

After Jordan leaves, I introduce myself to the patiently waiting stranger woman. She tells me she is Tyryona’s cousin and Tyryona will now be living with her. The family friend with whom Tyryona was living had a tough time with Tyryona over Christmas Break. They threw in the towel and were ready to put Tyryona “into the system” when they made one last effort and called some contact numbers and found Tyryona’s cousin. The cousin is a teacher, young and very upbeat and optimistic. I bite my tongue when she says, “I know Tyryona and I will get along fine and she is really no trouble at all.” I am happy Tyryona is with this cousin and not in foster care, but I’d feel better if this woman had more realistic expectations. She says she’ll continue to take Tyryona to her play practices at the art museum saying she knows about Tyryona’s starring role and is supportive of this extra-curricular activity. The cousin leaves my office with a smile and a bounce in her step. I am scared for her and for Tyryona.

We do see Nora again. After two weeks and two days of unsuccessfully trying to get in touch with her, Rusty finally makes a late night stop at the welfare motel and threatens Nora’s parents with truancy court. The next day Nora’s father brings her in late saying she has been ill. Nora is thin, pale, not in uniform (she has on a dirty white, too tight, t-shirt) and is back to wearing Goth makeup. After her father signs her in and leaves, Nora stays in my office a minute. She hugs me, tells me she is happy to be back and she can’t wait to see her teacher. As she turns to leave she adds, “You know he was lying Ms. Smee. I wasn’t really sick.” And with that she dashes off to RitaMae’s class.

It is good to have Nora back and eventually Trey too will return. But as for Eli, Tayshaun, DerMarr, Jaysen and Daphne - goodbye and good luck.

Chapter Forty-Three: The First of Three Epiphanies

2008-01-08T09:17:00.000-05:00

Chapter 43: The First of Three Epiphanies

Christmas break provides me with some much needed R&R, but the best thing about Christmas break is that it gives me a chance to think and plan. Not just my usual thinking about how I coped with the disaster de jour and an emergency plan on controlling the damage, but to really ruminate about essential questions to guide me going forward: How am I different now than I was when I began eight months ago? What do I know now that I didn’t know then? How will I change my behavior in light of this knowledge?

On the flights from Rochester to Orlando, my holiday reflections take the shape of what I come to view as my first Epiphany, my Christmas Epiphany:

I wasn’t sure before but I am certain now: it is wrong to put the misbehaving children together in one school, no matter how well funded (which Prospect isn’t) and wonderful the school (again, not Prospect). This is a flawed concept. I am not ready to say my participation in this school is wrong, but I now know the theory behind the school is absolutely wrong. The fact that nearly all my students are poor and score poorly on standardized tests makes their ostracism more offensive. I do not believe Herald country principals and Henry, my liaison, intentionally target children who fit these demographics, but it is the reality and has the potential for abuse.

The reason Herald County contracts with Ebencorp to run Prospect is because it is cheaper, plain and simple. As a rule, the Herald County School Board does not want to spend taxpayers’ money and that goes double when the money is earmarked for poorly behaved, poorly scoring, poor children. (This insight potentially leads to a series of related questions I am still too afraid to ponder: Does the Herald County School Board believe and expect the children of Prospect can learn? Does Ebencorp care at all about teaching Prospect children the academics? Does the Boss? Does Henry? Am I the only one who believes the primary goal of Prospect is to educate children? These queries threaten to unravel my reality and must be saved for a future epiphany)

My Christmas Epiphany has the power to change my behavior and view of my work: I realize I must accept that I will not be able to buy the materials I need, hire the quality and quantity of teachers I need or give the children what they need. I must accept these unmet needs and do the best I can, provide the best educational environment possible and know that any given day can be horrible and bizarre and unbelievable and I just need to roll with the punches and try to do better tomorrow.

So I return to Lakeboro rested. Despite Daphne’s abrupt departure and my lock box ruminations, I feel renewed and full of energy. My new view of my role at Prospect has the unintended consequence of making the next three months feel like weeks and weeks like days. I feel as though during the first semester I was running at marathon pace (slowly to conserve energy) and now I am sprinting in a 5K. Speaking of marathons, shortly after Christmas my husband and I run in our first (and so far only) marathon. Running 26+ miles is a pretty unique experience about which I could write extensively. In the interest of brevity just the facts:

On a cool Sunday morning In January 2003 my husband and I ran in the Walt Disney World Marathon. The good news: we ran the whole race and finished in under four hours. The bad news: The Boss “forgets” he approved time off for me post-race and demands I return to work. (Yes I have a copy of the email he sent approving the time, no he does not want me to send it). When I am forced to leave my husband, son and son’s fiancé in our hotel suite, I permit myself to open the lock box a bit, crying as I drive north, back to Prospect.

Chapter Forty-Two: Christmas Break

2008-01-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

Chapter 42: Christmas Break

Daphne keeps calling it “Winter Break.” I am usually pretty sensitive about political correctness, but clear communication trumps PC and “Winter Break” can be misconstrued to mean the week school is off in March, so I use the designation the rest of Herald County employs: Christmas Break. My husband, son and I spend the first half of Christmas Break in Florida after which my son returns to his college dorm to work at his part-time job, my husband returns to his job and, so I can be near him, I spend the remainder of Christmas Break doing Prospect work in Rochester, New York.

Alone in the tiny Rochester apartment while my husband is at work, I attack two front-burner projects: spending the Title One money and hiring more teachers. Just before Christmas Break I received formal approval to hire two Title One teachers for January through June and an okay to order books – literature to supplement, not supplant. I am making a list of books I want to order with the Title One money. I was finally able to get a few suggestions from staff including, surprisingly, several from Stone. I want to order most of the items from Amazon but I can’t just order them, I have to print out the desired order on Title One forms including title, author, quantity, price and publisher, get final approval from Corinna, the Title One liaison, then place the order. The joys of Federal funding.

To find new teachers, I gather scads of resumes and conduct dozens of phone interviews. I line up several face-to-face interviews for January with some good, strong candidates, I hope.

Over Christmas break, my husband and I drive from Rochester, through Syracuse to Cazenovia, to visit friends. From I-690, I can see my old Verizon building. I find it hard to look these days, my Verizon job feels like paradise lost.

Once upon a time, when I was working at Verizon, as a senior manager in the training and education department, I had a corner office. It was in downtown Syracuse on the third floor of a landmark art deco building. It was this great spacious office with a wall of windows and a door that closed and locked. Outside the office, in a large room, were secretaries and receptionists and then along the exterior walls were more offices like mine along with a huge conference room. In one office was my friend and coworker, Mack. At least once a day we stopped by each other’s office to share news and views.

In my office I had a radio/cd player so I could listen to NPR’s morning edition and later in the day, to soothing classical music. Music to help me write reports, design multi-media presentations, analyze spreadsheets, conduct conference calls and meet with coworkers and employees. I remember standing by the window, sipping hot tea from a ceramic mug, looking at the snow falling on the park across the street while children bounced about to keep warm in the bus shelter waiting for the school bus.

When my computer had a problem, Sandy came and made it right, joking and talking about his motorcycle and his plans for lunch at Dinosaur BBQ. When people spoke with me their voices were mostly muted, quiet and calm. Even the angriest union steward was unlikely to shout loudly, at least not very often. Mostly my boss, my coworkers and employees liked me and complimented my work. And even when things went wrong, politeness prevailed. Most days I took a lunch break: went to the library, met my husband for a sandwich or just took a walk. I usually arrived at work by 7:30 and left by 4:30 permitting me to run in the morning or evening depending on the weather and my mood. I had time after work to read, write, laugh. I didn’t take this life for granted. I knew it was good.

I knew I’d take a substantial pay cut to become the Prospect principal. I knew I would give up many of the material, tangible perks of my corporate life. I didn’t know how much I would have to sacrifice. I never expected abuse would come so often, so harshly and from so many people – even from a boss who I expected to be an ally. I didn’t know that “doing the right thing” would hurt so much.

Mack tells me our co-worker, Norm has my office now. He got it when he had an affair with rising Verizon star, Natalie. That affair ended her second marriage (or was it her third). So my office is gone, my Verizon job is gone. The woman at the window, tea in hand, is gone. Driving by the Verizon building, I am painfully aware of what I lost, what I gave up and what I left behind.

Christmas Break also provides me with much needed space for reflection. When Al Gore was campaigning for the Presidency, he made references to an imaginary “lock box” into which he planned to put Social Security. I have a similar lock box, but mine is for emotional security. I work hard at squelching emotion, especially at work. Wrapped up now in sweatshirts and blankets in the chilly (to me, of thin Florida blood) Rochester apartment, I read through my journal entries from the past seven months thinking about where I’ve been and where I am going. I allow myself to open the lock box a crack to take some of the pressure off.

Some of my sadness comes from being apart from my husband. When we’re apart I ache for him. Sometimes my arms want so much to hug him they twitch at the unrequited urge. We talk on the phone at least once a day, often more, but it is not the same. I miss him when we’re apart and when we wave goodbye at the airport security line on Sunday nights, often some of the sadness leaks out of the lock box and drips down my face.

During this past half year, there have been many, many days when I wanted to cry. I rarely permit myself the luxury of tears. But so many times I was so frightened, so angry, so incredibly sad. Displaying these emotions at work does no good and has the potential to result in real harm since I don’t want my staff or students to think I can’t cope. I know I need to be tolerant when these emotions spillover in others, but I don’t accept them in me, at least not in school and not in public. Sometimes at night, alone in my apartment, when it is so late that neither my boss nor my staff is likely to phone, sometime after my nightly call with my husband, the tears flow. And flow and flow.

Sadness isn’t the only emotion in the lockbox. I also trap that emotion for which Emily Dickenson said she had no time: hate. It pounds on the lid and bulges the seams. The Boss is the most common catalyst. His lack of support and frequent harassment are breaking me down. Sometimes when he talks to me I wonder if he can see the hate in my eyes. It takes some conscious effort to keep my face blank.

I know it is wrong to hate The Boss. I have lectured myself on the pressures I imagine he faces and the life experiences that made him what he is today. But what sounds logical in my mind has no effect on the boiling emotions in my lock box. I use my journal to try to ease the pressure on the lock box. I write what I can’t admit or say aloud.

But it really is mostly sadness that fills my lock box, it flows from the gap between the tragic horror of my students’ lives and my very limited power to change it. I can’t give their parents well-paying jobs. I can’t cure the mental and physical illnesses from which so many of my students suffer. I don’t have the resources to make a dent in the drug, alcohol, physical and sexual abuse that have damaged them and continue to do so. I don’t know how to take away the hunger, anger and violence my students consider a part of normal, everyday living.

When I let down my guard, when I loosen the latch on that lock box and imagine what it would be like to be one of my students, to be Karla, Darius, Perry or Tyryona, I feel searing pain and profound guilt. If I took them home, just a few of them, I could keep them safe and warm and fed. I could rescue them. Karla, Darius, Perry, Tyryona and all my other students are not merely names on a spreadsheet. Every day I see them, touch them and then return them to their lives of hell. Is being their principal really enough? Am I making any difference at all? If I didn’t have the lock box, I would cry every day like Rosie, my counselor, who is often in tears as the reality of her students crushes her.

But my lock box is not just for the empathy and concern I feel for my students. I am also worried about me. I often feel overwhelmed and scared. I try to project confidence but I feel vulnerable and unsure. Have I bitten off more than I can chew? What kind of leader am I? Have I become what my disgruntled employees call me: a witch, a jerk? Sometimes I look around and feel surrounded by incompetence, but is it them or is it me? These self-doubts are disturbing. I shove them deep into the lockbox knowing they will slither out in the dark of night when my guard is down to steal my precious sleep.

On the second to last day of Christmas Break I stand up to stretch and gaze out the sliding glass door at snow blowing sideways on I-490 . I am thinking that when my husband finishes work we should go to dinner at that new noodle place. Then my cell phone rings. It is not The Boss. It is Daphne. She almost sounds drunk as she spins out fragmented thoughts stringing together paragraphs without topic sentences:

a graduate program University of Florida some night classes but day classes can’t get into program college picks classes for you no control of schedule was your grad school like this education classes landscape design student loans classes full only one car mother says husband’s job roommate gone money classes money job

Finally I interrupt and take a stab at her meaning, rather like I do with some of my less articulate Prospect students.

“Daphne are you planning to take some graduate classes?”
“Yes I…”
“Will these classes impact your teaching?”
“I can’t, I mean some are day classes and…”
“Would you be able to teach at Prospect at all, even part-time?”
“No I…”
“How soon do classes begin?”
“Monday and I…”
“Monday as in two days from now?”
“Yes.”

I tell Daphne she needs to come to school to say goodbye to her students, she owes them that. She reluctantly agrees.

I am pretty angry at Daphne. My best teacher is quitting and giving me 60 hours notice. In part I blame myself. I recall once telling Daphne I needed her to stay at least through Christmas. I guess she took that as a hard and fast deadline, while I expected her to give me more warning, perhaps two week’s notice. If she had told me BEFORE Christmas Break, I could have been searching for her replacement. I open the lock box and toss Daphne in. There is nothing to be gained now from fuming. I go through the resumes I collected over Christmas Break. I look for teachers who might be able to teach English and could work well with Jordan and Sam. Another item for Monday’s to do list.

Chapter Forty-One: Christmas Partying and Parting

2007-12-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

Chapter 41 – Christmas Partying and Parting

I am not good at hosting parties, but as principal I feel it is my obligation to arrange a staff holiday party. I put up a food sign-up sheet and reserve the party room at my apartment complex. I buy every staff member a coffee mug and gift certificate from Books-a-Million. The question of alcohol always stymies me. I don’t drink and I worry if I sanction an event with alcohol and someone is hurt, I will be liable. But most of my team can’t fathom a party without alcohol. Compromise: I won’t supply it but they can bring it. They do.

Lynne, my business manager and counselor Rosie are the first to arrive. They set out the food then retire to a sofa and start drinking. They are perfectly happy to talk to only each other all evening.

Stephanie, the orientation leader, comes with Rufus, her new “boyfriend.” He works in the farm feed store up in Micanopy, but is in the Reserves and just got called up to report to Fort Stewart, GA. He is very chatty and personable. He and Stephanie station themselves at a small table by the window. Stephanie calls out to people to come join them and meet her boyfriend. Holding court, Stephanie wants to show him off to her coworkers. Her message: see how much better he is than that abusive, dirtbag man to whom I was married. . . well still am legally.

Buffy the elementary teacher arrives with her roommate. Her roommate attends University of Florida and wants to be a doctor. She talks and talks and talks about herself. Buffy keeps looking at the door, she seems eager for someone special to arrive or maybe she just wants to escape Ms. “enough about me.”

Ruth the cafeteria manager brings her husband. He appears far more educated and polished than Ruth. He is a manager at a local company. As we talk I wonder whether he knows that his wife says “nigger.”

Yvonne, who lives in my apartment complex, arrives with a tray of meat stuffed olives she just baked in her oven. She seems lost and like Buffy keeps looking at the door waiting for someone else to arrive.

Stone arrives with his wife. Unlike Stone, she is gracious and charming. They can only stay a short time, their church has an event tonight.

Jordan comes with fiancé Abby; Daphne brings husband Devon. These two couples have gotten together socially before. They sit together in a corner and pick up where they last left off.

Rusty arrives with his portable musical keyboard and sets the mood by playing Christmas carols.
Shasta brings her son Quinn. Quinn is thrilled by Rusty’s playing. Quinn pulls up a chair by the keyboard and joins Rusty in singing carols.

Midge arrives late, flustered and out of breath. She got lost. Lost?! She lives a block away!

Neeley arrives very late and very drunk. He proceeds to drink more. Buffy and Yvonne swarm around the young Adonis. What do they see in this scrawny, unkempt, unwashed guy?

For the most part, no one mixes, mingles or socializes. I work hard at moving around the room and talking to every guest, thinking all the while, I’d rather be at home. I am relieved when people start to leave. Yvonne takes drunken Neeley – to her place or his, not my business.

I am just not good at hosting parties.

Christmas is coming

Staff and students are starting to think about Christmas. RitaMae’s class writes essays on what they most want for Christmas. Nora writes that she wants her brother, Noah, to get out of his program and for her whole family to live together again. Twelve-year-old Nicholas writes that he is too old for Christmas. His mother got $125 from his stepfather to buy toys for his three stepbrothers. Nicholas and his mother went shopping together. It’s okay though, he writes again, I’m too old for Christmas.

The elementary students want to sing Christmas carols for the whole school. They don’t really know the words, so Midge helps them practice. We don’t have an auditorium so they decide to do it on the ball field. They sing while the older students walk to class. The elementary students all huddle on and around the pitcher’s mound and serenade the middle schoolers with jingle bells and Rudolph. The middle schoolers look befuddled and confused, a few smile tentatively but no one pokes fun or makes a rude comment. Although the children begin singing hesitantly, their confidence grows and so too does their volume and their pride.

My first Florida Christmas and the scenes are surreal. This morning when I was running I noticed more houses with elaborate holiday decorations than I remember from the northeast. Maybe in this land without snow, it is more important to make it look “a lot like Christmas.” It is disconcerting to see Santas and reindeer next to green grass and flowers in a world that looks like June. Now I see children in shorts and t-shirts squinting in the bright sun under a cloudless sky, standing on a grassy field surrounded by green leafy trees, singing about Dasher and Dancer as classes file silently by.

Stone as Santa Claus? Not since the drunk played St. Nick in Miracle on 34th Street do I worry, has there been a more inappropriate role assignment. But Stone has the body for it and agrees to do it. I rent the costume, and buy and wrap books for all the elementary students. Santa/Stone comes in Midge’s classroom ho-ho-ho-ing. Even the most cynical children are suddenly cuss-less. Several run to hug him. Stone passes out the gifts. I didn’t put name tags on them, but Stone acts as if there is only one right package for each child. The students don’t seem to recognize Stone and they are overjoyed with the presents. They all want to hug him before he leaves. Stone does the same thing in Buffy’s elementary classroom.

Later he comes in my office to change back into his clothes. Stone the curmudgeon, Stone the cynic, Stone who has made jokes and formal requisitions for a cattle prod, Stone the “I hate all of you and you’re all goin’ to hell”, this Stone has tears in his eyes. He forgot there was any innocence left in our students. He tells me more than once, “They were hugging me.”

On the last day of school before Christmas break, many teachers bring gifts and cards for their students; a few students come with gifts and cards for staff. Midge is upset that Trey is absent. She bought the budding writer a hard covered journal for his stories. Keith has a card for Jana. More surprisingly, DerMarr has a hug for her. Marcus, his hair tightly braided, brings a gift to RitaMae. Nora has a gift for RitaMae as well, and a big hug. Darius has a card for Rusty. Ruth, the cafeteria manager, uses her own money to buy candy canes and toys. She puts a candy cane and a number in every lunch bag and has a drawing. Ruth awards the special presents, stuffed animals and toys, to students holding winning tickets. In the parking lot at dismissal, the lucky recipients of Ruth’s gifts run to show me their prizes. I wonder whether these will be the only Christmas presents they receive. All of Daphne’s students hug her; a few look like they are going to cry. The busses start to depart, Eli, the football player I never saw play football, sticks his head out the window and shouts “Merry Christmas Mrs. Smee!”

After the busses leave, Trey’s mother comes in my office. She asks me to sign a card for Trey who will be spending Christmas in JDC (juvenile detention center). Yesterday Trey’s aunt came over to take Trey and his two younger siblings shopping. Trey was misbehaving and his mother decided she would not permit him to go along. His aunt put the two other children in the back seat and prepared to drive away. Trey was upset that he was excluded from this outing. He grabbed a loose brick and threw it at the rear window of the car. It smashed the window just above his baby brother’s head. Fortunately the brick did not go through the window and no one was hurt. But Mom decided to call the police. Mom was convinced that the brick would have killed the baby if it had broken through the glass. The police agreed and arrested Trey. They told Mom he is going to be in jail for a long time.

Mom says she needs my advice on something: What should she do with all the toys she bought for Trey? Her coworkers at Wal-Mart are telling her to return them, get her money back and buy more presents for her two other children - her good children. But Mom is unsure. Fighting my own anger, frustration and sadness, I tell her to save Trey’s gifts and give them to him when he is released. Mom nods her head. Trey is nine years old. Merry Christmas Trey.

Chapter Forty: Hey Bus Driver (Christmas Version)

2007-12-18T14:03:00.000-05:00

Chapter 40: Hey Bus Driver

I am almost half-way through the school year, and the hiring, firing and quitting of bus drivers continues at break-neck speed.

Transportation coordinator Shasta reports Quentin, a bus driver, is overdue for his required physical and is dragging his feet on getting it. I ask why. She obfuscates. Is it the cost? She says she does not know, but she will ask him. I am still not proficient in Shasta-speak and wonder what she is really trying to tell me.

Shasta returns to my office an hour later. She thinks Quentin is reluctant to see a doctor because he has a heart condition and he is afraid he won’t pass the physical and if he doesn’t pass the physical he won’t be able to drive and since this is his livelihood... I translate. In Shasta -speak she is asking me to overlook the medical requirement for Quentin. “How will we feel when Quentin has a heart attack driving our students home and we have not one death but 50?” Shasta agrees to tell Quentin he must have the physical.

Shasta returns to my office at the end of the day. She tells me that Quentin told her he is going to quit. No, she doesn’t know why. I speak with Quentin. He tells me his aunt died and she was a pastor and now he has to take over her job as preacher. Being a pastor is a full-time job and, no, he can’t be a preacher and a bus driver.

Quentin is off the bus.
We hire bus driver Kelli’s friend, Quaneshia to replace Quentin, the driver cum preacher.

Bus driver Audra has been screaming and cursing at her students. Parents and students are complaining; the children often confess they cursed at her first, but they are indignant that the driver should “cuss” back. Shasta talks to her, but clearly Audra is losing her grip. She tells Shasta she and her husband want to start a business selling vending machines and she gives her two weeks’ notice.

Audra is off the bus.
We hire new bus driver Quaneshia’s friend, Tashanna.

Ellie is missing-in-action. She doesn’t phone and doesn’t show. Shasta knows something but she isn’t saying. On a hunch I phone Rocky, the director of ESAK, the other local Ebencorp program. Yes, Ellie is driving for him. Didn’t she tell me? He is so sorry she didn’t tell me. He takes full responsibility. Good ‘ole Rocky, so unctuous, and so well liked by Henry and the community.

Ellie is off the bus.
We hire new bus driver Tashanna’s friend, Erika.

Erika informs Shasta her other part-time job will require her full-time for at least thirty days, maybe longer.

Erika is off the bus.

Shasta interviews Bill to replace Erika. She has him ride Kelli’s bus, incontrovertibly the worst bus. He not only survives, he is upbeat and amused. His background check is clean, we hire him. He will start tomorrow.
We never see him again. Shasta leaves voice messages.

Bill, who was never really on the bus, is off the bus.

Shasta and I analyze the BBB (bad bus behavior) referrals and find Kelli’s bus has the most referrals while Carolyn’s bus has the fewest. Kelli’s riders throw more objects out the windows and at the driver, they bring more lighters to set fires or, in one case, to try to light a peer’s neck on fire. The boys on her bus are more often out of their seats grabbing girls, and her girls are out of their seats kissing boys. Shasta believes the problems are due solely to the children who ride the bus: Kelli has the bad kids. I am skeptical and I suggest we swap routes. Shasta refuses. She is adamant, Kelli must not drive Carolyn’s route in the Fort McCoy neighborhoods. Why?! Shasta explains:

Last year Quaneshia found a house she loved in Fort McCoy. She walked around the property, left, then came back with her real estate agent. She stepped out of her car to a black faced dummy hanging from the oak tree in the front yard of her dream home . Scrawled on the shirt were the words: “Nigger go home.” Carolyn, my only white driver, will keep the Fort McCoy route.

Sometimes my school bus anguish “leaks out” into the community. Late one evening in late autumn, a man I don’t know phones to tell me his profanity-riddled tale of woe. After some therapeutic active listening (“I can tell you are very upset sir”), I learn about a pothole in the parking lot of his business. He kept filling it in but it kept reappearing. He didn’t know where it came from so he “played Dick Tracy” and stayed late one night. He spotted one of our busses using his driveway as a turn around. He informed Shasta weeks ago but, according to him, she has been less than prompt about returning his calls or making restitution. I guess he hasn’t mastered Shasta-speak. I ask, “What will it take to make you happy sir?” I agree to pay for gravel to fill the hole and ask the driver to turn around elsewhere.

A few months later, bad bus behavior gets us in trouble with more than just one neighbor. In early December Rosie called Interfaith (a charity organization) to ask for food donations. Many of our children survive on only the breakfast and lunch we serve. They arrive at school starving and leave hungry. The two-week winter break portends raw hunger for these children. Interfaith, like so many charitable organizations, has more need than donations. But they are able to give us some canned goods. Karla’s mother admits she has no money for, or plans to obtain any, Christmas gifts or holiday food. We buy Karla some clothes and shoes we know she wants and put together a box of food for her. Mom can’t or won’t come pick up the items, so before Christmas break, we hand the wrapped gifts and box of food to Carolyn, the bus driver, asking her not to give it to Karla until she gets off the bus.

Enroute home, Perry spots the canned goods and reaches to take one. Carolyn admonishes him “hands off, those are Karla’s.” This is news to Karla who leaps from her seat to check out the situation. The other students on the bus are shouting and angry, “How come she gets food?” Karla decides the fair thing to do is to divvy up the canned goods. Mission accomplished, she returns to her seat. Perry, suspended several times this year for throwing paper and pencils at the driver and from the bus, can’t resist. Out the window goes his can of cooked carrots. Before Carolyn can stop the onslaught, canned goods are flying out the bus windows. Cling peaches in heavy syrup, French cut string beans, tuna fish, pearl onions in cream sauce all are bouncing along the highway, one can hits a car, another lands in the back of a pick up. One can, I believe stewed tomatoes, smashes the mirror on a public school bus unlucky enough to be idling next to our bus at a red light. By the time Karla arrives home there are no canned goods left. My phone is ringing. Citizens want to report dangerous projectiles. Strangers curse at me. We owe the public school for the broken bus mirror.

The canned food is off the bus.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Faculty Meetings

2007-12-11T08:50:00.000-05:00

Chapter 39: Faculty Meetings

Both Sides Now

I stand in the cafeteria at 4:00 on a Tuesday afternoon in early December. Today our weekly staff meeting will begin with food, based on my belief that people are happier when they are eating. Lynne, my business manager, ordered a variety of sandwiches, salads, chips, cookies and sodas from Publix. Everyone takes a plate and chooses quickly except Daphne and Stone. Although Lynne ordered some vegetarian sandwiches, Daphne doesn’t know what is in the bread, so she won’t eat any (could be milk or eggs, anathema to a vegan). I ask Stone why he is hanging back. I worry he is ill and encourage him to take his turn. Stone explains to me he is on a diet and he wants others to make their selections first. He says what is left is what God means him to have. There is quite a bit left.

The faculty sits down in what has become an established pattern. Counselors Rosie and Rusty are on the right side of the cafeteria along with Lynne, the business manager, Shasta the transportation manager and Stephanie the Orientation leader. On the left side of the cafeteria, on the other side of a six-foot aisle, sit the teachers.

Clearly a schism has developed between the teachers and the counselors. The counselors complain to me that some teachers don’t have classroom management skills, are inconsistent in chastising students and depend on the counselors to control their classes.

In some ways the counselors are right. With the exception of Daphne and Jordan, my teachers’ classroom management skills range from fair to pathetic.

The teachers, in turn, complain to me that the counselors are too soft, too nice and don’t “support” them. They want counselors to yell and frighten students. They want to be able to threaten students with “If you don’t stop I’ll call a counselor.”

In some ways the teachers are right. Rosie and Rusty are better at counseling children than disciplining them.

When Rosie and Rusty respond to a teacher’s request to help with a disruptive student, frequently the child calms quickly in their presence. They may gently chastise the student, but in doing so the child often confides in them about personal problems. They regularly talk to parents to report disruptive behavior. Some of the students actually get quite a bit of one-on-one time and counseling with them. If they don’t have too many disruptive children in their office, they might have a child pick up trash, scrub graffiti off a wall or write a letter of apology or an essay on correct behavior. The trouble is, none of these activities is punishment to our students, most of whom have been physically beaten for misbehavior. Our punishments pale in comparison. Moreover, our students long for adult attention so while they are scooping up garbage or scouring a wall, they can chat with Rosie and Rusty. The dilemma is, we need people in whom the students can trust and confide, and if going to the counselor is seen as punishment, then we lose this important resource.

Of course some days, being a counselor is not the cushy job the teachers imagine it to be. Some days the walkie-talkie chatter is non-stop “I need a counselor to remove Luke, Roxanne, Darius, Victor, Aidan, Warenita. . . ” On those days the counselors are running and misbehaving children are either returned to class or taken along to pick up the next misbehaving student. Rusty does hit upon a sanction many students dislike – sitting on a hard bench, facing the wall without talking, but this punishment works well only when you have a few misbehaving students.

And so the teacher-counselor tension persists. I spend extra time in Neeley and Buffy’s classrooms since they seem to call on the counselors the most. Often Buffy’s entire class is in the counseling office. Rosie and Rusty ask whether they can have Buffy’s paycheck! I counsel and coach Neeley and Buffy on classroom management techniques. I have them observe other teachers. I arrange for speakers on our “in-service” days to discuss effective classroom management and behavior modification techniques but Neeley and Buffy continue to have chaotic classes, to have the most children removed and to be vocal about placing the blame on Rosie and Rusty.

If you can’t say something nice…
.
If I’m not careful, our Tuesday afternoon meetings degenerate into black holes of negativity. Teachers are desperate to share horror stories; each subsequent speaker tries to one up the others. “Well if you think Marcus’s bad….” Stone can always be counted on to interject his solution to all student misbehavior: “Get a cattle prod.” Today I open the meeting with a request for each teacher to tell one success story; one student who we might “save.” I encourage the teachers to indicate whether this child is a candidate for returning to public school at the end of the semester.

RitaMae picks Nora. Freckle-faced Nora, who used to live with her family in a van, is now living with an aunt and cousin in another county, and is doing splendidly. She completes all her work on time, aces tests, smiles in class, wears her uniform and no longer wears Goth make-up. Nora looks well-rested and… well, she looks “like a normal kid.” RitaMae hasn’t seen Nora lose her temper or even look angry in weeks. Nora uses profanity occasionally but more and more she catches and corrects herself. RitaMae plans to select Nora for second quarter academic honors when we meet after Christmas to determine award recipients. RitaMae believes Nora will be ready to return at the end of the semester if her aunt approves the move and assuming Nora continues on her current trajectory.

Daphne talks about Edgar. Edgar, who fought so often and so brutally that he was formally expelled from public school, has made huge strides in controlling his anger. He is also learning to read. We talk about the complicated process for returning a student who was formally expelled rather than one who was “voluntarily” removed by a parent. It isn’t impossible but…. We all agree Edgar is worth the hassle.

Jana, looking quite pregnant and very tired, speaks next. She says her nominee is not ready for public school, but his improvement has been incredible. His name: DerMarr. Stephanie, the orientation leader, is visibly shocked. Could this be the same DerMarr who threw wastebaskets, could only speak in vulgarities and who defied every adult? The boy who never spoke but always SCREAMED? The same DerMarr who caused Stephanie to temporarily resign? Apparently it is. DerMarr, the fifth grader we put in middle school to protect the other elementary students, is doing better in Jana’s class. We had to call his Aunt to school about four times before DerMarr realized Auntie, unlike Mom, would support the teachers and hold DerMarr responsible for his behavior. Jana says she will advocate hard to make sure DerMarr receives the award for “most improved student” for this quarter! But, she emphasizes, he isn’t ready for public school, yet.

The Trouble with Tony

Neeley wants to talk about Tony. Tony has no anger problem, he doesn’t curse, he is never truant, he is always polite. But he will need a public school with more ESE (special education) resources, because his academic skills are very low. He is very slow to learn new material and it is unclear whether he can even read. Tony appears to be a normal 13 year old white boy, says Neeley, adding that Tony also has a crush on classmate, Stacey. Neeley wants to know why Tony is still here. Before I can craft an answer, Rosie asks whether Neeley has read Tony’s file. He hasn’t. I encourage teachers and counselors to read the student files. Most don’t, but Rosie always does. She recites from Tony’s file: Tony was removed from public school two years ago on a felony charge. He served time in jail and in a program. Legally he can return to school now, but his mother is afraid to have him return to the middle school he previously attended. When he was arrested, it was big news and all the students and teachers at his former school knew about it and remember it. Mom doesn’t want Tony at Prospect but until she moves to another neighborhood, in another school district so Tony can attend a different middle school, she feels stuck. Every couple of months Mom decides she’ll homeschool. She pulls Tony out, homeschools him a couple weeks, then returns him to Prospect.

Neeley wants to know what possible felony Tony could have committed; this kid is a Boy Scout.

Tony sexually molested a four-year-old girl.

Tony has never shown an inclination to talk about this incident to anyone at Prospect. Rosie once asked him directly about the molestation during a one-on-one conversation, but he just shrugged, sighed and refused to discuss it. Since Tony rarely misbehaves, he doesn’t often see Rusty or Rosie individually and, honestly, Rosie and Rusty don’t really have the time or specialized training to work with sex offenders (who may also be victims of sexual abuse). Tony does receive sex offender counseling from a hospital in Gainesville as one of the conditions of his parole. Tony’s mother feels the “incident” was blown way out of proportion. She has also been adamant that the details of Tony’s crime be kept private, fearing, with good reason, ostracism for Tony if his peers learn the truth. His cover story for attending Prospect involves a knife. Tony’s mother does comply with the court order to take Tony to the hospital for the sex offender counseling where once a year he is subjected to an extensive battery of tests after which his mother receives a detailed report on the findings. She brings one of these reports to me asking me to explain it to her so she can explain it to Tony. For over an hour we go through it page by page. I offer to help her explain it to Tony. She thanks me, but says she’ll do it herself. She never discusses it with Tony.

I end the “history of Tony” lesson by asking Neeley whether he has any other students who look like potential candidates to return to public school after Christmas break. Neeley looks disoriented, he is clearly unnerved by what he just learned regarding Tony’s background. He slowly shakes his head no.

Bibliophiles?

I end the Tuesday afternoon meeting with the news that we have $15,000 in Title One money to spend on books! It immediately becomes clear I am far more excited about this than is my staff.

Prospect has a room called “The Library” but in it there are no books save for a few outdated textbooks. When I first saw this, it shocked, upset and then depressed me, especially since Prospect students are so literature deprived.

Most of my students were behind from the beginning. Many years ago, when they first started school, they started without having met Pat the Bunny, Little Toot or the Pokey Little Puppy. They never joined the rabbit in saying Goodnight Moon. They sat in kindergarten classrooms with peers who had been read over a thousand books, while my students had heard fewer than a hundred. Growing up poor with uneducated parents put them behind long before they were divided into reading groups.

Through the years, their teachers, with varying degrees of success, taught them “decoding” and reading “skills.” They were tested and retested and taught and retaught. Many were held back when they failed to perform on these tests. But literacy is more than achieving a set of skills and passing standardized tests. My 100 book children are missing an awareness that books make sense and tell stories. They’re missing the rich vocabulary of literature; they are missing the joy of adventure, magic and silliness found in books.

I don’t know how, or if it is really possible, to compensate for literature deprivation. When I was the principal at the maximum secure prison for juvenile male felons in upstate New York, I found a way to provide an intensive remediation on the missed stories of childhood. We planned for the adolescent boys to do a series of story hours with the children of the prison staff. To prepare, the boys had to read stacks and stacks of children’s books. We didn’t have enough money to buy as many children’s books as I wanted, but the grant money I obtained bought us many of the classics of childhood. Watching Albirio, (armed robbery) and Jumaine (attempted murder) reading aloud The Little Engine that Could, was surreal – innocence and joy on the faces of tough, street savvy criminals.

I want to replicate this project at Prospect but I can’t get the teachers on board. They think that since Prospect students are so behind, we need to use our very limited time to instruct them using age appropriate material, not baby books. This opinion is not without merit, especially if one is FCAT focused. When I place my Title One book order, in addition to high-interest chapter books for my middle schoolers, I plan to purchase dozens of classic children’s books. I figure I can justify these purchases given that I have two elementary classrooms. Maybe then I can get some of the middle schoolers to “help out” by reading aloud to the younger children. It makes me sad to think of a childhood devoid of Sam pushing those pesky green eggs, Corduroy searching for his missing overall’s button or worrying that the Color Kittens’ clumsiness will have dire effects.

I try to generate enthusiasm for book buying and ask for suggestions – titles of books teachers would like me to buy. I stand poised, marker in hand ready to write titles on the easel. Nothing. I write down a few titles to get their neurons firing: Holes, Maniac Magee, atlases. I explain I want them to brainstorm, give me your wish lists – books you want for a classroom library, books for a school library, multiple copies of books for literature-based reading lessons, we can’t buy text books but most other books are permitted. Nothing. In defeat I finally ask the teachers to go home, think about this, research some titles and submit these suggestions to me before Christmas break.

I wonder, has this meeting run too long and made my team weary and do they hope their silence will end our meeting sooner? Are they worried that if they offer suggestions, someone (Stone) will poke fun? Or, are my teachers unfamiliar with children’s books and can’t think of titles off the top of their heads? I can easily generate a list of books and spend all $15,000 myself. I thought my teachers would be excited to be part of the selection process. Maybe I’ll get a lot of “wish lists” in my mailbox, but I suspect not; I don’t have a team of readers. Last month I was finally able to arrange for the public library’s bookmobile to make regular stops at Prospect starting next school year. Stephanie, my orientation leader, volunteered to arrange this six months ago, but when she lost interest and dropped the ball, I began to work on it. For the last few months the librarian and I have played a lot of phone tag, and I’ve done a lot of begging, but now the bookmobile will visit Prospect biweekly (I’d prefer weekly visits, but I’m just happy to be in the bookmobile’s schedule). We’re working on getting library cards for all our students and I keep encouraging my staff to get library cards as well. As far as I know, only two adults at Prospect currently have library cards: me and my business manager, Lynne. Alas, my faculty does not share my passion for books.

No Simple Solutions

As the meeting breaks up, RitaMae is holding a conversation with Neeley. She doesn’t intend for us all to hear, but because her volume is always set to “megaphone” no one misses a syllable. RitaMae is discussing Victor, her least favorite student. He is brilliant but refuses to follow any directions and curses at RitaMae constantly. Today when Victor began screaming obscenities in class, rather than calling for a counselor to remove him, RitaMae used her cell phone to call Victor’s mother. She held the phone up to permit his mother to hear Victor’s ranting. Mom jumped in the car, drove to school and removed Victor from class to holler at him.

The team is impressed with RitaMae’s creativity but they all want to know, did Mom’s visit make Victor better?

Not really.

This was not how I wanted our meeting to end. I look at the faces of my staff. They are discouraged and defeated.
Nothing works.
The students are evil.
See? Even their parents can’t control them.

I had such high hopes for this meeting. I wanted my staff to feel full of food, proud of our success stories and excited about buying books. What went wrong?

Well to start, there is the animosity between counselors and teachers, which I see as a function of not having enough staff. I really need both counselors and “disciplinary deans”. My students have so many problems ranging from substance abuse, sexual abuse and anger control to dealing with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, no parents, death of parents. . . the list goes on. Two counselors aren’t enough and those I have aren’t fully trained to deal with the myriad of problems my students present. Then I need different people to take on the discipline functions. Of course there is overlap - students often misbehave because of counseling needs, but I need at least two people dedicated to removing naughty children from class and designing meaningful punishments to fit the offenses.

I need a Curriculum Specialist and an Assistant principal. A Curriculum Specialist could effectively drive cross-curricular projects and themes while monitoring lessons and lesson plans as well as working with the staff on appropriate books for our students. An Assistant principal could deal with the double load of bureaucracy and paperwork that flows both to and from Herald County Public Schools and Ebencorp.

I need teachers who are trained to teach and love learning and who want to teach challenging students. I need a teacher’s assistant in every classroom with the teacher. Then teachers would be able to concentrate on teaching and not be quite as distracted by behavior problems. The assistant could immediately remove a poorly-behaving student from the room without waiting for a dean or counselor. An assistant teacher would allow my teachers to go to the bathroom and grab a glass of water when necessary.

Now in this dream world, imagine a Tuesday afternoon staff meeting. My Deans could talk to teachers and assistant teachers about effective discipline. My Counselors could share with staff some strategies for helping children cope with family trauma. My Curriculum Specialist would give a rousing presentation on literature based reading and all my highly educated teachers would be leaping out of their seats to make sure their favorite books were purchased.

While I’m wishing, why not add a library complete with books and a librarian, an art teacher (with art supplies), a music teacher (with at least a piano), a school nurse and a receptionist. Maybe then everyone wouldn’t look so harried, downtrodden and hopeless. Maybe then the children would start to heal and behave and learn.

But who will spend that kind of money on Prospect kids? When I wish aloud for more funding and resources, Henry, my liaison, has pointed out more than once: “We don’t spend that kind of money for our good kids how could we justify giving it to these kids?”

Sitting in my office in December, I know there is no point in creating a wish list for Ebencorp, Herald County Public Schools or even for Santa Claus. For poor children in Florida, it’s kind of like Narnia, but here you say: it’s always Summer and never Christmas.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: You've Got To Be Taught

2007-12-04T08:34:00.000-05:00

Chapter 38: You’ve got to be Taught

Before I moved to Central Florida, friends shared pithy sayings:
“…The further North you go in Florida, the deeper South you get.”
“…Northern Florida is LA…. Lower Alabama.”

A friend of mine who was born and raised in South Carolina regularly defends the racism of the south saying it’s no worse than New York -- people in the south are just more open about it. She presumably sees this openness as a positive thing.

Shortly after I arrived in Florida, I was confronted with this “openness.” A cover story in the daily newspaper described a high school freshman petitioning the school board to lift a ban on wearing to school any clothing depicting a Confederate battle flag. The student planned to speak formally on this topic at a February School Board session. She chose February because it is black history month and she and her mother both feel that during this month “there is little attention placed on the history of whites in the south.”

It is difficult to write about race. I do not subscribe to the fashionable liberal notion that all people are racists at some level. But while I view myself as an outsider observing the strange world of racial politics in the Deep South, I am after all, a white American and I don’t expect or pretend to always see or understand racism. And while I may miss racial overtones or subtle racist language or behavior, there is no mistaking much of the racism I witness in Herald County. All that openness. . . .

The racial dynamics in my new town are not helped by the demographics. In Herald Country, 84% of the people are white, 12% are black and the rest are Hispanic, Indian or Asian. In Herald County public schools, where 11% of the students are black, there is a diversity goal to have 11% of the teachers at every Herald County school be, as they say down here: “non-white.” In some schools this is difficult to achieve; in the northeast section of the county (where Brock and Timmy live and the football team is all white) black teachers are rare.

Herald County has not achieved “unitary status” meaning it is still operating under federal court ordered desegregation. In 2004 The US Department of Justice chastised Herald Country for its hiring practices and cited one elementary school here that, despite serving 551 students, 39% of whom are black, only employs two “minority” teachers and hired only white teachers for all six recent vacancies. Actually the school did hire one black male teacher, but according to the daily newspaper, he quit because he was tired of being harassed by parents for his dreadlocks.

At Prospect roughly 50% of my students are black, (45% are white and 5% are Hispanic). Despite my efforts to hire a staff that reflects my student population, by November of 2002 my teaching faculty is only 13% black (although by January 2003 it will increase to 23%) and my non-teaching staff is 37% black (by January 2003 it will be 50% primarily due to hiring black bus drivers).

Nevertheless, saying I am no worse than the public schools in regard to my diversity goals, is not the same as saying I am doing well and it doesn’t change the reality for my black students and their families. I am frustrated by how difficult it is to achieve a multi-racial staff but I don’t stop working on this objective.

No one from Ebencorp or Herald County public schools ever makes a suggestion, states an expectation, defines a quota or puts any pressure on me to hire a diverse staff. Nonetheless, I am strongly committed to, and know the value of, a diverse faculty. I was supposed to start the year with a black, male teacher, LaRon from Palm Beach, but he never arrived. I desperately want to hire some black, male teachers to reflect the racial and gender make-up of my student population, but I am having so much trouble just finding competent people, if I hold off on filling a position until I find a candidate of the right race and gender, I’ll be desperately short staff. I try to lure some of my talented black, male teacher and counselor friends from New York and Michigan to come teach at Prospect, but the pay and location are, to say the least, not particularly enticing. One morning a black man accidentally came to my office for an interview he had scheduled next door at Haven High – I tried to recruit him. I almost succeed, but Haven High offered him more money than I can afford.

I have no money in the budget for advertising and thus limit myself to free on-line job sites (mostly teachinflorida.com) but I do put ads on a couple historically black college career sites such as Florida A&M, and I also try to recruit from the military through an on-line site. A black man in the army in New Jersey calls me, but he won’t be leaving the service for three years. A black airman calls from Italy. He is interested until he hears about my “challenging” students. Rex, my mentor, gives me the name of a black car salesman with teaching credentials, but when I call he has just accepted a teaching position in the public schools.

I think about the black parents of my students and how it must feel to walk onto the Prospect campus and see that nearly every adult has different colored skin from you. At the very least it would feel uncomfortable, but with the racist history of the south and the continuing prevalence of racism in daily life here, it must make my school feel like hostile territory. No black parent has ever commented on this to me, but many white parents make remarks about the racial make-up of my students. It usually starts with a seemingly innocuous statement like: “My child doesn’t belong here.” I quickly learn to recognize this euphemism and counter by asking why. Depending on the sophistication of the parent, a few ambiguous comments may be sputtered before the real objection is reveled: “But all your students are black.” Fifty percent black is hardly 100%, but for parents accustomed to 11% or less, my student population does look very black. These white parents usually continue with “I’m not ‘prejudiced’ but…” and the “but” is followed with: “you know how these people are.” Or “My son/daughter is afraid to come to school.” Or even “I don’t like the language they use on the basketball court.”

It is hard to talk about race. One day, shortly before Thanksgiving, I decide to address race with my staff in our Tuesday after school meeting. I broach the subject by pointing out that in our cafeteria we have a situation all too common in schools across the United States: the white students sit with each other, the black students with each other. My goal in raising this issue is to get the team talking about race in order to increase racial consciousness, generally and help us all become aware of specific race-related problems on our campus so we can work to solve them. These are the lofty goals of a naive principal who hasn’t anticipated potential reactions nor planned a rebuttal. I really thought my statement would be a catalyst for discussion. But Stone, the theology major who wishes he could be a Baptist Minister, makes it clear he doesn’t wish to discuss this topic. “Been there, done that – last year a black kid told me he hated white people. I told him good, white people hate you too and I hate all of you!”

I look around the table at my staff who, except for Jana, are all white. Billie the PE teacher and Sam, the new math teacher on the Daphne/ Jordan team, are clearly amused by and in agreement with Stone’s comment. New hire Hannah looks to Billie to decide how to respond and seeing her laugh, joins with a smile. The rest of the staff looks uncomfortable, or in the case of Buffy and Neeley, confused. Stone’s comment has effectively shut down any chance of a candid conversation and I can’t think fast enough to defeat it and create an atmosphere conducive to open, honest discussion. I move onto the next agenda item deciding in the future when I raise the issue of race I’d better be prepared for Stone and Stone-like responses. Confession: I shy away from racial issues; it is just too easy to put them on the back burner when we have so many fires to control on the front burners.

One morning, not long afterwards, I am again rendered speechless by a racist comment, but this time, not from Stone. After our 8:00 a.m. staff meeting ends, Lynne, my business manager, and Ruth, my cafeteria manager, (both of whom are white) are the only people in the portable with me. Ruth has her clipboard and is preparing to head to the cafeteria to start warming up breakfast. Ruth has one hand on the doorknob when Lynne asks “Could you tell Vince we need more toilet paper in our bathroom?”

Ruth, suddenly annoyed, responds, “You tell him yourself, I’m not your nigger.” And with that she huffs out the door.

I am stunned. I have never heard this expression and I can’t believe one of my employees just used it. Lynne shrugs it off: Ruth is over 60. Ruth grew up in rural Florida. That is just how Ruth talks. Ruth doesn’t mean anything by it. Lynne, non-plussed, sits at her computer and begins to enter attendance data.

I am aghast and still shuddering over Ruth’s words. I stand frozen in the middle of the portable. I am supposed to be the principal here, the boss. What do I do now? Do I sprint after Ruth and escort her back for a formal warning? Her comment is so abhorrent to me that to do nothing seems immoral. A phone rings. I look at the clock, it’s almost time to meet the busses. But what do I do about Ruth?

In the end, I do nothing. I do nothing but feel ashamed.

It isn’t just my employees who are “open” in their racism. I see it everyday in my students and especially in their parents. One afternoon TobyBeth’s father comes to see me. He is wearing shoes this time, but I am still looking at a mouth with more teeth missing than present, and his speech and words are difficult to understand. It seems the boys on the bus have been calling TobyBeth a “fat ‘ho.” I ask Shasta, my transportation coordinator, to join the meeting since she knows about the incident. She enlightens us: yesterday on the bus, TobyBeth was calling the black boys “niggers” and they responded by calling her a “ho.” Shasta said the driver stopped the bus and told the students all name calling had to stop. TobyBeth’s father isn’t satisfied with this explanation. As he sees it these names aren’t equivalent: TobyBeth isn’t a whore, but the boys are, after all, niggers.

Caleb asks his teacher, Yvonne, if she will keep his Michael Jordan poster safe over the upcoming Thanksgiving holidays saying he wants her to take it home to make sure it doesn’t get wrecked. In way of an explanation he adds: “My father hates black people.” A few weeks later, Caleb’s mother withdraws him from Prospect and returns him to public school. She explains her decision telling me she observed a basketball game last week and she didn’t like that the boys were playing “street rules” and that when she went in the counseling office there was a big, frightening boy in there (Rusty was chatting with Marcus and his hair was neatly braided that day) and she fears for Caleb’s safety on the basketball court, in class and on the campus. Caleb’s mother, unlike TobyBeth’s father, doesn’t say “nigger” but she is clearly fluent with innuendos and euphemisms, and the underlying racism is the same.

And from the parents, the children learn. Early one November morning I am observing in Daphne’s room when I see Timmy, who plays football for the all-white Broncos football team, becoming frustrated with a classroom project. He is trying to cut out an article on current events. He starts to cut but struggles with the scissors. He has to keep stopping, readjusting his fingers and starting again. “C’mon scissors!” Timmy implores. Then as his frustration mounts he raises his voice to address the scissors: “Stupid nigger.” Selma, Tyryona and Karla are on their feet bearing down on Timmy before I can process his words. Selma gets in his face. “Who you calling a nigger, white boy?” Daphne swiftly calls for a class meeting. Seth and Edgar moan - they were enjoying the comic pages. But everyone drags a chair to the main area and sits in a semi-circle with Daphne in the center. She starts a discussion on name-calling and racist language. Timmy is sullen and defensive. He thinks it is unfair to point fingers at him, after all he wasn’t calling anyone a name, he was talking to the scissors. Tyryona and Selma try to interrupt him but Daphne makes them stay quiet until Timmy is done, then she lets Tyryona explain how the word “nigger” upsets her no matter what Timmy’s intention was. Daphne continues to moderate the discussion making sure voices don’t pile on voices and asking probing questions such as: does “nigger” evoke the same feeling as “white trash?” Daphne is doing with her students what I failed to do with my staff. I want to stay and listen (and learn!) but as usual, a crisis elsewhere on campus forces me to depart.

Bigotry, of course, is not limited to the middle school students, but it seems even more disturbing to hear elementary children spewing racist language. Late one morning,
I am observing in Midge’s elementary classroom. Jaysen and Bram, who are both white, are working on math problems at the table in the back of the room. Kareem, who is black, wants to join them. Voices are raised in anger. Midge rushes to the scene. “Jaysen, Bram, is there a problem with Kareem working with you?”

“Yes!” Jaysen responds. “Kareem is too racial!”
Midge asks what that means but Jaysen, Bram and Kareem can’t explain, although all three of them seem to understand what it means.

Shortly thereafter, the elementary students are lining up for lunch outside the cafeteria. Before they enter, I announce to the class that a new student will be joining Midge’s class this afternoon. Kareem has a question: “What color is he?”
“What difference does it make?” I challenge Kareem.
“I hate all white people” Kareem replies. Then he quickly adds “’Cept you Ms. Smee.”
Trey, who thus far has seemed oblivious to this discussion looks up now and adds his opinion.
“Well, I hate all white people.” Trey says pointedly, looking directly at me. Jaysen, Manny, Bram, Trevor, Chip and Frankie, all of whom are white, do not say anything.

These are the same boys who take offense and act out both verbally and physically if they are called “shorty” or “baby”, but they show no reaction to Kareem and Trey’s declaration of their hatred of white people. Are they so used to hearing this it doesn’t even register? Are they thinking they hate black people but past experience has taught them they’ll get in trouble for stating as much? Is there a double standard - somehow more acceptable for black students to make anti-white statements than for white students to make anti-black declarations? There is no further discussion as it is time for the students to enter the cafeteria for lunch.

Some of these same boys who stood mutely while Kareem and Trey announced their hatred for white people, are not so silent after lunch. After eating, the elementary students head to the ball field for a kickball game. They divide into two teams. Manny and Jaysen are heading toward the outfield just as Daphne walks her middle school students across the field for lunch. Tyryona is at the end of the line. As she walks by she smiles and waves hello to the elementary students. Manny, tiny but always vulgar, shouts something obscene about Tyryona’s butt. Tyryona rolls her eyes responding “Someone better wash your mouth out you dirty boy.” Manny, always needing to have the last word, calls to Tyryona, “You shut up nigger.” Jaysen jumps on the bandwagon adding, “Yeah nigger, shut the fuck up.” Tyryona leaves the line of middle schoolers and starts to approach the two outfielders at the same time Trey and Kareem advance on them from the infield. Teachers Daphne and Midge scramble to avoid a riot. Kickball is over for today.

Of course, my experiences with racist behavior don’t end when my work day ends. Sometimes on my way home from work, I stop to buy gas at Erikson’s Speedy Mart. Erikson’s is just over a mile from two upscale neighborhoods, but it has a decidedly rural clientele: barefoot children buying ice cream line up behind shirtless, tattooed, roofers hoisting 12 packs of Cokes and Miller asking the clerk for soft packs of off-brand cigarettes.

Mr. and Mrs. Erikson, the owners, often work the register. They are always friendly and unlike every other gas station here in Lakeboro, they don’t make you pay first. The signs on the pumps say otherwise, but I always pull up, give a wave and they let me pump. Once my husband pumped $20 worth of gas at Erikson’s and went in to pay with what he thought was a twenty-dollar bill. My husband was nearly out the door when Mr. Erikson shouted him back. He had accidentally paid with a $100 dollar bill. My husband thanked him profusely. Mr. Erikson joked, “That’s why I’m a poor man!”

Tonight I finish pumping and go inside to pay. Mr. Erikson is working the register. Benny Goodman is playing on the radio and I nod toward the speakers as I proffer my cash saying “great music.” The friendly proprietor nods as he takes my money replying “better’n’ that nigger music they usually got on the radio.”

As I drive home I feel upset and disappointed by my inaction and silence. I feel like a traitor to every black person I know. It even occurs to me that maybe if I were black, I would have to pay before pumping and I wonder, would Mr. Erikson and my cafeteria manager, Ruth have spoken as they did if a black person had been present? And if they had, surely I would have protested, surely….

I keep thinking about Mr. Erikson and Ruth. Both are nice, friendly and racist. They don’t match my mental image of a racist, an image no doubt formed years ago watching television broadcasts of white, ugly, angry, pinched faces screaming at black children in Little Rock and later in Boston. I can’t reconcile their kindness with their racism. How naïve! I’m like a child who has to be warned that even friendly, attractive people can be pedophiles. It feels like an advertising conspiracy, like when automobile manufacturers use pretty women to sell cars. Why, when “good” people spout racist sentiments, does it seem so hard to answer back?

I think about Brock, the Prospect student who left our school but not before he managed to cause a scene when he called his white classmate a nigger, and about Timmy who used this epitaph for his scissors. I think about the Broncos, Brock and Timmy’s extremely segregated neighborhood which has resulted in a football team that unlike the other 25 or so Herald County teams, has only white players. I think about how Brock and Timmy have gown up hearing the “N” word as part of the background chatter of their lives – the openness of southern racism. How many of my students, and staff live in homes where words like “nigger” and sentiments such as “I hate all white people” are freely and frequently expressed? How often does this racist language come from people they love, people they respect, people who are kind, nice and friendly?

During the Cold War I read that the Soviets encouraged children to “snitch” on parents who were not good Communists. Russian schools were seen as tools to be used in part to make children not just question, but become intolerant of the beliefs of their parents. I remember when I read that as a child that it seemed “creepy.” But here I am pondering the same strategy for my students, using my school and my philosophy to make them question the things their parents say. I need these children to learn that the racism of their parents, relatives, neighbors, friends and maybe even their pastor, is wrong. I need to create an environment in my school that not only does not tolerate racism, but helps children unlearn the racism that has been so effectively infused in their souls. I am not sure why it’s so different, but teaching children to think and behave in ways counter to the thoughts and beliefs of their parents is not, in this case, like Communist indoctrination: Hate is not a family value.

But beyond the racial slurs and “openness” of southern racism, there is the underlying racism you can’t see. If only 12% of students in Herald County Public Schools are black, why are half the students at Prospect black? Are principals less tolerant of misbehaving black children? Are punishments for black children more severe than those for their white peers? When black parents are called-in to talk to white principals about their child, is there miscommunication before a mouth opens? Is it a class issue? Most of the children transferred to Prospect are poor and a disproportionate number of black families are poor, thus black children are over represented at Prospect? It seems likely that all these factors play a role. Although I have not seen evidence to support it, and I personally do not subscribe to the belief, I can see why others (especially black people) might feel that the large number of black children at Prospect is the result of an organized conspiracy on the part of the public schools. But regardless of motivation, the results are the same: an inferior education for many black children. The ghosts of segregation live on, assuming new shapes and forms.

I am determined to overcome my failure to confront racism and racist comments when I see and hear them. I must be braver about troubling the waters and giving people pause to reflect. Here in Central Florida I see racism every day and every day I wonder if I can possibly meet the challenge to change so many hearts and minds, or even just a few or maybe, one?

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Don't Be Fooled by their Size

2007-11-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

Chapter 37: Don’t be Fooled by their Size

If you build it, they will come. By mid-November, word is out that we have two elementary classrooms. Most of our new incoming students this month have been under age ten, the youngest just turned seven. These small, appealing children are our most difficult. Have you ever seen those cartoons in which a cute baby is in a carriage under a blanket but then he pops his head up and he has a beard, is smoking a cigar and is really a criminal? My elementary students look as innocent as Popeye’s Sweet Pea, but their gangster personas are just below the surface. Elementary teacher Buffy told me yesterday when she caught tiny Jevon (age 8 but looks 5) taking her wallet from her purse, he laughed and told her “My daddy teached me that!” Oliver minus the musical numbers. . . .

The elementary students who come to Prospect are different from the middle schoolers. The behaviors that resulted in their referrals are similar – disrupting class, fighting, cursing – but they’re different academically and emotionally. The elementary students appear far more damaged and at the same time, more intelligent. With few exceptions, our elementary students are at or above grade level (unlike our middle school students who are, for the most part, more than one grade level behind). I am not an expert in mental illness, but I have done enough reading to suspect some of my elementary students suffer from undiagnosed mental illnesses including bipolar disorder, clinical depression and schizophrenia. Few of the elementary children have even gotten that label so popular with my middle schoolers: ADHD and the requisite medication. At minimum, most of my elementary students need a formal diagnosis, a Special Education designation (ESE in Florida speak).

In a couple cases, the public school started the process to get an ESE designation, but this is an expensive, time-consuming undertaking and it is faster, easier and cheaper to send these children to an alternative school. In public schools, the notoriously slow-moving ESE process is often sped up by assertive parents who stay on top of the process and pressure the school to adhere to the law and help their child. The parents and guardians of my students either lack the necessary knowledge or are too overwhelmed with other pressing concerns like feeding their families to advocate for their children. (Chip’s grandparents are the exception. From the moment Chip arrived at Prospect, his grandparents have been asking when we’ll complete his ESE testing.)

I complain to public school liaison Henry about the number of elementary children who are sent to me with half-completed ESE paperwork, along with the others who surely meet the criteria and have never been evaluated. Henry is sympathetic, but quotes the Federal Special Education law to me advising it is now MY responsibility to complete this process and the clock is ticking. I brush away the sense that Henry is more concerned with process than with outcomes. Counselor Rosie is knowledgeable about, and has a background in, ESE, but she doesn’t have the expertise equal to the people employed by the public school whose sole job is to work on ESE testing and, more importantly, Rosie doesn’t have the time. Henry does tell me he’ll send over a public school psychologist when I need the IQ and other psychological testing done, and Henry offers to send someone to train Rosie to handle these initial ESE referrals. All that is well and good, but the bottom line is that this mess is getting dumped in my lap. My bandwidth is already tapped-out and children who need mental health services, and perhaps even medication, are at Prospect getting fewer resources and no help.

Elementary teacher Midge is usually able to do lessons for most of the morning, but after lunch her goal is simply to keep the children from killing each other. For Buffy, every minute of the school day is a struggle. She doesn’t complain; she calls for a counselor early and often to remove misbehaving children. It is not unusual to find more of Buffy’s students in the counseling office than in her classroom.

Today there are nine boys in Midge’s class. Four have been here for a month or more:

Trey – age nine, great writer, often very moody in the afternoon, always hungry, stepfather sucked pacifier at open house.
Frankie – age nine, both parents in jail, living in homeless shelter, chronic toothaches, has threatened suicide.
Perry – age nine, often carries weapons, raped by cousin a few years ago.
Chip – age ten, living with grandparents, scratches face, injures self.

Trey, Frankie and Perry are very short and thin. They look much younger than they are. Chip is average weight and height. Bram, Trevor, Jaysen, Manny and Kareem are the new kids.

Bram, with flaming red hair, is short for a ten year old. Nine-year-old Jaysen is solidly built with very little hair. Both boys love Harry Potter and carry the books everywhere. It is not unusual to see Bram with a Harry Potter lightening bolt on his forehead. Bram is slow to anger, but when he is upset, he dissolves into uncontrollable hysterics, crying torrents of tears, screaming profanity and throwing things. Bram’s father has a drinking problem and moves in and out of the house. Bram does not like sports and usually refuses to participate. While the other boys play kickball, Bram sits on the grass under a tree, reading.

Jaysen has spent most of his school career out of the classroom suspended or in the Dean’s office. He uses his size to intimidate although both he and his mother are convinced he is always the victim.

Nine-year-old Trevor tests in the gifted range for reading, but refuses to read anything. His younger brother, Trent, is in Buffy’s class. They are two years apart and, except for their heights, could be identical twins. Trevor and Trent are both freckle-faced with puffy cheeks

Trevor and Trent’s mother is an incarcerated drug addict and according to their maternal grandmother, she has been on drugs for years but it took a long time before she was finally thrown in jail. Grandma began calling the police to report her daughter’s drug dealing and using before the boys were born. Now Grandma has custody of Trent, Trevor and their older sister, Muffy. Grandma looks shell-shocked. She admits she gives sleeping pills to the children every night otherwise she wouldn’t get any sleep. Grandma says the doctor prescribed them for her to give to the children. Little Trent has complained about the pills, he says they make him awaken in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep and it is dark and scary and he can’t get back to sleep.

Manny is our smallest student. He is an Hispanic eight-year-old third grader, but he looks like a preschooler. Manny is a brilliant student. He learns rapidly and is a proficient reader. The older students, especially the girls, think he is soooo cute, until he opens his mouth. Manny is fluent in profanity and very informed about sexual matters. The middle school girls like to pick him up and rub his curly black hair, but when he tells them how he would like to force anal intercourse on them (an act which he describes exclusively in vulgarities), the girls drop him and run. Manny’s mother denies any background of sexual abuse and contends Manny learned all his poor language at our evil school. She tells me Manny is a nice boy who used to attend a private Christian school until, after her divorce, she couldn’t afford it anymore. He is the oldest of four brothers and takes care of his younger siblings. Manny’s Mother is very pregnant and stops by my office several times a week to complain about the awful influence of my school and the bad role models the students are for her sweet, innocent son.

Kareem, age ten, like Jaysen, is a large, solid child with a round belly. But unlike Jaysen, Kareem can barely read. Bram, Jaysen, Trevor, Manny and Trey are all academically advanced and could be considered gifted. Perry is right on target academically. Frankie and Chip are close to grade level but their emotional problems prevent a reliable assessment of their abilities. Kareem has already been retained once. He is a ten year old fourth grader. He is upbeat and eager to learn, but his knowledge and skills are at least two grade levels behind. Here is what Kareem rarely does: sit in a chair.

Kareem and his half-brother, Raheem, both attend Prospect. Raheem is three grades ahead of Kareem but half his height and weight. Raheem has a bone disease. Staff and students are surprised when they learn the boys are related. Raheem and Kareem do not like each other and they don’t like sharing a father. They live with their paternal Grandmother, but frequently see their father who is an auto mechanic. Kareem can’t wait to quit school and work with his father. Grandma is sympathetic when Midge makes her weekly calls and mentions Kareem’s energy level.

This is how Grandma describes the typical evening in their home: Grandma and Raheem sit on the couch watching television. Kareem runs through the room shouting or singing. Kareem dances in front of the television so Grandma and Raheem can’t see it. When Grandma yells at him, Kareem unplugs the television set then dashes outside. Kareem takes medication for his ADHD but he is still wild. Kareem is rarely angry, although he is an expert at angering others. Kareem loves to draw pictures; several adorn my office walls. Between Trey, Frankie, Perry, Chip, Bram, Trevor, Jaysen, Manny and Kareen, Midge has her hands full.

A Reading lesson in Midge’s room

Every morning Midge tries to devote time to both independent reading and teacher-instructed reading.

It is 9:45 am. In Midge’s elementary classroom, the desks are arranged in a semi-circle; each student has his reading book open to a story about baseball. A friend of mine who teaches fourth grade in Central New York gave me ten copies of an outdated fourth grade reading book, so for now, every child has his own text. At first glance, this could be a typical reading lesson in any classroom. But look again.

Kareem is not sitting in his chair. Despite the warm weather, he wore his winter parka to school today. He spreads it out along two chairs and lies down. While his classmates read, Kareem kicks his legs in the air, tries to write on the underside of the desk, makes strange noises and plays hide-and-seek with his coat. Bram and Jaysen have their reading books open, but they are clearly reading other books; Bram is reading book three in the Harry Potter series; Jaysen is rereading book one. When Midge calls on them to read they have no idea what the story is about or where they should read, but once guided to the correct page, they read fluently. Perry is reading ahead in the reading book. He finished the baseball story, moved on to a tale about Paul Bunyan and now is reading a story about squirrels. It is Frankie’s turn to read aloud; he reads haltingly with many errors and looks like he is about to cry, but then Frankie always looks like he is about to cry. Chip refuses his turn to read aloud; he has one finger in the book following Frankie’s reading while his other hand holds a pen he is using to scribble hard on his forearm. Trey has a notebook “hidden” in his lap and when he isn’t called on to read, he is writing a story in the notebook. Manny is using colored pencils to color a picture of Rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer in a Christmas coloring book. Trevor has been slowly moving his desk out of the semi-circle and back toward “his” corner of the room. He doodles while he listens to his peers. Midge interrupts Frankie’s reading to correct his pronunciation and to ask comprehension questions about the story. She also admonishes Trey, Kareem, Manny, Trevor, Bram and Jaysen to pay attention. They ignore her or, in the case of Kareem, scream and kick. Midge ignores him.

Midge is uncomfortable addressing “off-task” behavior or misbehavior. Jaysen looks up from Harry Potter to make a comment to Manny, “Only babies believe in Rudolph and Santa Claus.” In an instant, Manny is out of his seat racing up behind Jaysen and punching him between the shoulder blades several times. Jaysen jumps out of his seat, knocks over his desk and, fists balled, shouts curse words at Manny. Manny laughs at him. Jaysen looks around and spies a bucket of crayons. He slings a fistful of crayons at Manny. Several crayons miss their mark and hit Trey. Trey grabs Manny’s green pencil, holds it like a spear and threatens to stab Jaysen. Frankie runs to the art table and curls in a ball and starts to moan and cry. Kareem jumps on the desk, swinging his coat in circles screaming “Manny started it.” Perry yells for everyone to “shut the fuck up.” When they don’t, Perry stomps into the bathroom, locks the door and begins to kick and punch the wall. Chip scrawls lines into his arm shouting “I’m telling.” Bram continues to read Harry Potter. Midge is rummaging through her desk looking for her walkie-talkie. Her desk is piled high with books, papers, half-eaten breakfasts, wrapped candy treats and confiscated items. She is supposed to wear her walkie-talkie but due to her obesity she can’t find a way to do so comfortably. It is not unusual for one of her students to grab the walkie-talkie and shout profanity before Midge can intercept. Midge finally finds the walkie-talkie under a glob of clay; she calls for a counselor.

This isn’t a bad morning in Midge’s elementary classroom, this is a typical day and, as I said, mornings are better in Midge’s elementary classroom; in the afternoon it is complete chaos.

Jaysen’s Mother phones the Principal

“When I made the decision to send Jaysen to your school I was told he would have smaller classes and counseling. Instead he is in a class with animals. He is beaten up daily and comes home with bruises. Now I know Jaysen can run his mouth. I asked him why he is running his mouth and he tells me he has to or the other kids will think he is a wimp. All that goes on in that class is fighting. No work, just fights. Jaysen is complaining that he is bored because he never gets any work, just fights. I know Jaysen cusses. What are you doing about his cussing? I don’t see consequences for cussing. Jaysen tells me his teacher has no control over the class. Jaysen says when he asks her for something, she forgets. Jaysen tells me he has no respect for his teacher. He has no respect for Lenny, his stepfather either. Jaysen is very angry that I married Lenny. Jaysen is smart, he loves learning; you need to keep him challenged. Right now we’re living in a one-bedroom apartment. We partitioned the dining room to make Jaysen’s bedroom. There isn’t much privacy. We’re on a waiting list for a two bedroom place. I know Jaysen needs counseling but his real Dad won’t help pay the $500 deductible so we need to wait. I know Jaysen has a real bad temper.”

As I listen to Jaysen’s mother’s monologue, I write a note to Midge asking her to be sure Jaysen is given challenging work, especially homework. I write notes to counselors Rosie and Rusty asking them to talk to Jaysen about his feelings toward his stepfather. As a team we have discussed the topic of profanity many times. We have a point system which is somewhat effective with our middle schoolers, but not with our elementary students. The elementary students need behavior modification that is concrete and immediate. Manny, who is desperate to play volleyball, has been told he needs to go one day without using profanity. So far, he can’t last an hour. We need to do better. . . .

I can see what needs to be done with our elementary students, and I even have ideas on how to do it, but so far my ideas are not really working. I’ve observed and coached Buffy and Midge. I’ve taught model lessons in their classrooms and debriefed them post-lesson. I’ve given them hand-outs and books on classroom management and interactive lessons. We’ve met to discuss challenges and how to overcome them. We’ve reworked the schedule and behavior reinforcement schemes. None of this seems to be making a difference or, if it is, the changes are too small and slow. I’m not sure Buffy could cope with a classroom of regular education students despite her degree in Elementary Education and Midge is doing her best, but she’s really an art teacher, and isn’t able to provide what these children need.

What I need are experienced elementary teachers certified in Special Education. I have spoken with Special Education teachers, but they are in high demand in public schools and, at a minimum, require at least twice the salary of my current teachers. Even then, they really aren’t particularly interested in teaching at Prospect. Midge’s daughter has a degree in Special Education and is teaching in a public school an hour’s drive north of Lakeboro. Midge picks her brain asking for ideas and suggestions. Her daughter once paid a visit to our campus and, at my urging, Midge asked her daughter if she would like to teach at Prospect. Suffice it to say she won’t be joining us in my lifetime.

So how do we do better? True Buffy and Midge don’t have the training to teach these children and although I’ve tried some interventions, this hasn’t made a difference in their approach. I could send them to a teacher training but is there one that would help? And how much does it cost? And what do I do with the students left behind? And given that Buffy just graduated college without learning the basics of classroom management, would it make a difference?

My counselors, Rosie and Rusty share my concerns about Buffy and Midge and together we devise a plan: Rosie, Rusty and I will try to spend some time every day in both Buffy and Midge’s classrooms. We will give immediate, specific feedback on what is going well and how to improve. Rosie and Rusty will focus on behavior management techniques while I focus on helping choreograph exciting, energetic, hands-on lessons. Our discussion and plans make us feel very optimistic. Rosie says her first feedback for Buffy will be to hang something on the walls of her classroom. Buffy’s walls are bare, no posters or student work. This is in sharp contrast to Midge’s room. Midge the artist has a few commercial posters but mostly her walls are covered with her students’ art: paintings, collages, murals. Rosie gathers some posters to take to Buffy.

Chapter Thirty-Six: The Walkie-Talkie is Calling Me

2007-11-20T09:52:00.000-05:00

Chapter 36: The Walkie-Talkie is Calling Me

6:30 a.m.

At least once a month Rex Stewart, my mentor, and I meet for breakfast before school.
Rex’s advocacy for children in our community and his energy in working on programs to help them is superhuman. King Middle School is in the poorest neighborhood of Lakeboro. Rex is the principal there as well as the chair of the County Children’s Alliance and involved in many of the committees associated with it - such as anti-bullying, pro-active fathering, stopping child abuse etc. When we meet for breakfast, I pepper him with questions and ask for his advice. Rex not only answers my questions, he gives me feedback telling me how he and others in the community perceive Prospect and the changes I am making. Rex tells me he has spoken to Prospect students and they appreciate that I am making Prospect into a “real school” as opposed to a boot camp. In addition to inspiring, these talks always have tangible benefits. Today I talk to Rex about my fledgling Activity Period and he suggests my chess team and volleyball teams play his teams. (Rex has over 40 after school clubs at his middle school). Later, when I bring this news to my students, it’s met with great enthusiasm.

7:30 a.m.

I email all the Prospect principals to remind them of our conference call today. Last week we determined a mutually agreeable time and date and I called Fred, the business manager of The Boss, to set up a conference bridge. The idea came from a recent conference call with The Boss during which all the principals wanted to talk about dilemmas and solutions. The Boss cut us off saying he scheduled this call and side conversations were not appropriate. At the end of the call I suggested we have a separate call so the five principals can share success stories and challenges. The Boss told me to set it up with Fred. He reminded me the cost will come out of each school’s budget.

8:00 a.m.

In our morning meeting I talk about “best practices.” Teachers should not struggle in isolation. Very often a peer has developed procedures or techniques to make difficult jobs easier. I encourage my team to brag about successes, talk with each other and visit each other’s classrooms during their prep periods.

My newest teacher, Hannah gets her class today. I am very excited about this young white woman with an MA in counseling and a longing to be a teacher. She has been on campus for a week observing teachers, counselors and students. She is enthusiastic and ready for her class. I team her with Yvonne, my quietest teacher.

Billie, the PE teacher, puts her arms around the shoulders of RitaMae and Hannah and announces she, Billie, will be their mother. I am uncomfortable with this move, but I’m not sure why.

Midge phones during the morning meeting. She’s sick and won’t be in today. This is the fourth day in a row she has called in. I’m not very friendly or sympathetic on the phone. We’ve been scrambling to cover her class. When I hang up, Sam asks: “So, is the fax machine on?” I laugh with the team at this reference, but I worry maybe Midge doesn’t plan to return. I also worry about covering classes. Jordan is off today (he requested this day weeks ago for medical tests) and now with Midge sick, we are very short-handed. I ask Buffy to take her class and Midge’s thus combining all the elementary students. I ask Daphne and Sam to divide up Jordan’s students. Meeting adjourned.

8:30 a.m.

After the meeting I remind Yvonne that today I’ll do a formal, planned observation in her class. She asks to radio me once she is ready, sometime around 11:00. I agree.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. Lynne, my business manager, tells me I have a call from Jordan. Even though Jordan is off for his medical appointment today, he wants to talk to me about Seth, the boy who believes his future is in jail. Jordan recognizes Seth’s giftedness and has developed an independent study program to keep Seth challenged. He left the proposal on my desk a week ago and wants my feedback. I already read though the proposal and I now tell Jordan I approve it. Jordan is quickly becoming as wonderful a teacher as Daphne. Jordan, Daphne and Sam are on the same team. Now this team is truly the dream team. Jordan tells me Seth feels he ought to be in 8th grade but somehow last year, while in seventh grade, he didn’t earn enough credits to pass. Jordan did some research on this by reading through Seth’s cumulative folder. He shares his findings with me. Last school year, Seth was at Prospect from August to early November, he was then sent to JDC (Juvenile Detention Center – jail) for two weeks. Seth returned to Prospect for a month but right before Christmas he was returned to JDC and then sent to a boot camp until June. No wonder Seth is repeating seventh grade. I thank Jordan for his work on Seth’s behalf, especially on his day off.

8:45 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. RitaMae asks to speak with me but not in my office where there is no privacy. We stand near the pitcher’s mound where she tells me she is losing patience with Neeley. When they switch classes, his homeroom is so out of control she can’t teach; Neeley’s students have fallen many chapters behind RitaMae’s homeroom. I suppose when I teamed up RitaMae and Neeley, I was hoping for a miracle. RitaMae is a certified teacher who screams and yells too much, but she knows how to teach lessons and has good (not great) classroom control. Neeley is still so scattered not a day goes by that a counselor isn’t called to his room to quell an uprising. I promise to work with Neeley but I warn RitaMae, it probably won’t be today.

8:55 a.m.

I give my email one last check before the students arrive and the real excitement begins. There is an email from The Boss. I have to read the email twice; The Boss’s writing style is muddled and confusing, but the intent of his message slowly becomes clear: although he approved the conference call between all the Prospect principals, The Boss has become uncomfortable thinking we would hold such a call without him and he has changed his mind – approval for conference call revoked. I send an email to the other principals to cancel the conference calls. Then I race outside to help with bus arrival already in progress.

9:20 a.m.
The walkie-talkie is calling me. Lynne asks me whether Adoncia got off the bus this morning. No she didn’t, and come to think of it, I haven’t seen Adoncia for a couple days. Lynne divulges that a public school in Lake County just phoned and requested Adoncia’s school records because she is enrolling. Adoncia went from her family in Brownsville Texas, to her uncle and his girlfriend in Lakeboro, to some friends of the girlfriend in Lake County who need a babysitter. SBAA had agreed to consider both Adoncia and Alexia/Pilar. I ask Lynne to call SBAA to let them know Adoncia is gone. Goodbye Adoncia.

9:30 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. It’s Counselor Rosie. She says I should call her office. When I do, Rosie tells me she didn’t want to blab over the walkie-talkie but I really ought to go observe the chaos outside the cafeteria. It is Neeley’s and RitaMae’s classes….

Every day after breakfast and lunch, teachers Jana and Stone make their students line up outside the cafeteria on the far edge of the sidewalk by the trees. They must stand there until they are absolutely quiet, then the line will move toward the bathrooms. Typically they don’t have to stand more than a few minutes before the students quiet down.

It looks so easy. My morning meeting talk on best practices inspired RitaMae and Neeley to adopt Jana and Stone’s silent line technique with their students. Their first mistake is to line up the students right next to the cafeteria rather than on the far edge by the trees. As the students talk and roughhouse and curse and poke, they also scrape the new paint from the building and secretly scribble graffiti onto the pale yellow cinderblock walls. The cafeteria windowsill is now a collage of missing paint and loose paint chips.

Neeley and RitaMae’s students don’t care that they have to stand in line until they are quiet. A few complain about having to stand up in the hot sun, but mostly they enjoy the free time. RitaMae and Neeley drag chairs out of the cafeteria so they can sit while the students don’t get quiet. These teachers are convinced the failure of the Jana/Stone procedure is due to their student population: clearly I have assigned them “worse” students than Stone and Jana have. Neeley seems to have forgotten that when I teamed him with RitaMae, in an effort to increase his chances for success, I let him pick which students he would have in his new homeroom.

What RitaMae and Neeley don’t know is that Stone and Jana tell their class they will have one 15 minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon. Every minute Stone and Jana have to wait for the line to become silent, is a minute lost from those “recesses”

As far as RitaMae’s and Neeley’s classes can tell, the longer they talk and play, the less math and reading they’ll have. No problem.

I watch and wait for RitaMae and Neeley to see their experiment is a failure. They don’t. After fifteen minutes I tell them it isn’t working and they need to stop or add the recess incentive.

9:45 a.m.
Boyd is sitting in my office. I smell him before I see him. Boyd is a chubby, strawberry blond, white boy who looks (and behaves) younger than his thirteen years. Whenever I see the phrase, “working poor,” I think of Boyd. His mother works nights in a hospital. I’m not sure what she does there but I do know they don’t pay her enough. Mom’s long hours mean no one makes sure Boyd gets dinner, takes a shower or has clean clothes. Boyd reminds me how much I want a shower and laundry facilities here at Prospect. Boyd, like most of my students has serious anger control issues, but unlike his peers, he responds like a tantrumming two year old. When Boyd is mad, you almost want to laugh but there is something so pathetic and sad about him, you don’t. Boyd is kicking my desk, scowling, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists when I enter my office. His dirty shirt is dirtier than usual with a huge wet looking dark stain just below his sternum. He catches me looking at the stain and becomes more agitated. Sometimes I let Boyd kick and curse until he is calm, then we talk, but I am in a hurry today, so I press ahead – not usually a wise approach when dealing with upset youths but today it works.
“What’s with the stain Boyd?”
“That’s why I’m so mad; it’s my mother’s shirt. She doesn’t know I have it. She’s gonna kill me.”

Boyd is crying now and his shame at crying makes him even angrier. I’ve had the displeasure of observing Boyd’s mother when she is angry with him. On more than once occasion she has come to pick him up – face slapping, ear pulling and lots of loud, sarcastic profanity.

“Take off your shirt.”
“Huh?!”
“Take off your shirt and we’ll wash it in the sink.”

Boyd does and stands bare chested in the bathroom in my office scrubbing his mother’s shirt with a bar of soap. When he is done I hang it on the back railing to dry. I hand Boyd a few books and tell him to sit and read while his shirt dries. I have extra sneakers but no extra shirts. He pushes his chair close to the table trying to hide his chubby white stomach. Fortunately the shirt dries fast in the hot Florida sunshine.

10:00 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. It’s Ruth, the cafeteria manager. She calls me and the counselors saying there is a riot involving the elementary students. Buffy and her class arrived at the cafeteria in time to see the RitaMae/Neeley debacle but apparently it was not clear to her that their silent line approach was not working. Buffy decides she will try it too, despite her double sized class today (she has her students and Midge’s since Midge is ill). The elementary students don’t just talk and poke, they start fighting, almost immediately. The Counselors and I are called and over half the elementary students end up in the counseling room.

I learn that sometimes teachers try to adopt a technique they understand only superficially, with predictably bad consequences. I must be careful what I advocate in the morning meeting.

10:15 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. Daphne asks me to come to her classroom to observe Karla. Karla lives in The Forest with her mother in a single-wide trailer with a large hole in the roof. Karla’s moods are erratic, on Mondays she is often sick and exhausted. She falls asleep in class or, if we allow, on the floor in the library. She denies she is hung over but admits she doesn’t sleep all weekend; she just drinks coffee. RitaMae has seen Karla selling flowers outside a local bar on Saturday nights. Her mother, Karla says, stays with the Rainbow People in The Forest and leaves Karla on her own. According to her records, she is supposed to be taking Lithium, but the prescription ran out and her mother won’t renew it. Daphne is concerned about Karla. Today Karla’s eyes are red and wet; she has been crying and sleeping in class. She tells Daphne she hasn’t seen her mother in more than a week. Her mother is with the Rainbow people.

Karla begs Daphne not to call DCF. Someone called DCF on her oldest sister and they took away her sister’s three-year-old baby. Karla cries as she tells Daphne this. Daphne and I have two phone numbers for Karla’s mother, one is a neighbor’s house and one is the home Karla’s mother cleans on Thursdays only. Daphne will try Mom on Thursday. If no luck, I will try leaving a terrifying message with the neighbor. We decide to do this before we throw Karla to DCF.

Despite my concerns about Karla, being in Daphne’s classroom is a pleasure. It is a comforting place. She has the last portable on the left on south campus (previously used as a time-out location for severely mentally handicapped children in another school). It is divided into three small rooms and one larger room; the doorknobs are at the top of the doors (to keep the former occupants from leaving). The walls are painted in high gloss lime green and lemon yellow. The non-traditional paint matches Daphne’s non-traditional outlook. When I enter, the students are finishing breakfast, reading the daily newspaper and cutting out articles for their current events lesson. Tyryona and Selma are in one of the small rooms. Seth, Edgar and Shandon are in another small room. Darrin is alone in one room. Karla, Timmy and Darius sit in the main area. The portable is fairly quiet. Daphne walks around answering questions and helping pronounce unfamiliar words in the newspaper. I sit in the main room. Karla shows me a photo on the front page of the paper of some people living in The Forest. “I know them,” she proudly declares. “They’re Rainbow people like my Mom.” Before I can make further inquiries, Karla continues. “My birthday is on Thanksgiving but we aren’t doing nothing since my Mom will be with the Rainbow people all day.” Karla gets up, throws her milk carton in the trash and takes her newspaper into the room with Tyryona and Selma.

Daphne has also asked me to observe Edgar who is doing really well. She wants to work on returning him to public school at the semester break next month. He is still behind academically, especially with his reading, but he has avoided all fights, even when provoked. I promise Daphne I’ll make a call to Henry.

10:30 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. It is Stone. He regrets to inform me he just vomited in the parking lot. He is going home. I am short Midge, Jordan and now Stone. I ask Billie, my PE teacher to cover Stone’s class. She is not pleased.

11:00 a.m.
The walkie-talkie is calling me. It is Yvonne telling me now is a good time for me to observe her class. The students are fairly quiet. Yvonne is reviewing for a test using an overhead projector and an outline of topics recently covered during a unit on Florida history. As I walk around the room I find that few students are on-task. Jillane is eating a bag of cool ranch Doritos. Caleb is drawing pictures of knives. Tayshaun, like three other boys, has a hat on and is sleeping. Several students are wearing coats inside the room.

I tell the hat and coat wearers to remove the outdoor apparel. They grumble and protest that Miss Yvonne said it was okay. I tell Jillane to put away the Doritos. She does and just as quickly takes out a bag of cheese popcorn that I just as quickly confiscate. I remove elastics from wrists and hijack paper airplanes. Attack of the mean principal. Yvonne’s class maybe orderly, but like Neeley’s students, few are learning.

11:30 a.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. Lynne informs me a DCF caseworker is here to see Alexia/Pilar. The caseworker tells me she wants to take Alexia/Pilar to lunch, tour SBAA, discuss attending SBAA and talk about moving Alexia/Pilar from her Grandmother’s home to a foster home. Caseworkers rarely take students off campus. Alexia/Pilar is excited to go. I wonder how she will feel when the caseworker discusses a foster home.

12:00 p.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. It is Rosie. She tells me to phone her office. When I do, she tells me Hannah, my newest teacher, is crying. She met her first challenge: Tayshaun and Owen. Tayshaun told Hannah he and Owen made Crystal quit and they made Doctor quit and they can make her quit too. Hannah was warned about these two and she is feisty. She tells Tayshaun she won’t quit even if he shows her his boxers! Tayshaun and Owen, work hard at unraveling Hannah, they partially succeed; after Hannah drops her students off for their group counseling session she goes to Rosie’s office crying. I go see her there. I try to provide support, advice, encouragement. At least she didn’t cry in front of the students.

12:30 p.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. Lynne tells me public school liaison Henry is on the phone and doesn’t sound pleased.

Henry has a complaint. When he sends us a fax on an incoming student, we need to contact that student within 24 hours. I know this. Henry says we failed to do this with two students this week and he reminds me if we can’t get in touch with a student, we should contact his office and they’ll get social workers involved. I know this too. I apologize to Henry. A lot of bucks stop here and some of them just fall off the plate somewhere.

I know the procedures Henry describes and I thought they were being followed. For some reason Stephanie has dropped the ball. I make a note to speak with her and print a new copy of the intake procedures to review with her. Lynne defends Stephanie saying she is going through a difficult time right now; her estranged husband (Tappy Gonzales the bus mechanic) is pressuring her to come back home. Her new “boyfriend” is afraid he’ll be shipped out to Iraq and she has been thinking a lot lately of her son who died in a car crash two years ago. She has also had some kidney problems.

Why is it that so often people who are drawn to “helping” professions, need so much help themselves?

I call Henry back a few minutes later to raise the question of returning Edgar to public school. This is a major undertaking because Edgar was formally expelled. We need to go before the school board if we want him to return. Is he really doing that well? The soonest he could return would be the end of January. I want him back at the start of the second semester, right after Christmas, but that isn’t going to happen. Henry promises to get the paperwork rolling. We set up a phone interview for Edgar, Henry and the principal at the public school Edgar will attend.

1:00 p.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. It’s Rusty, he wants me to come to his office to discuss something he just learned. Rusty begins with a review of facts I already know about our students. Kembrall is Claymont’s henchman. If you mess with Claymont, you’re messing with Kembrall. While Claymont is a sharp, bright, articulate boy, Kembrall is not. He is big, slow and lumbering. Kembrall is in Daphne’s homeroom. Then the clincher: Kembrall’s uncle is wanted for the murder of Selma’s brother and Selma is also in Daphne’s homeroom. Oh, and was I aware that while I was Ebencorp’s headquarters in Tampa, three girls accused Kembrall of sexual molestation?

1:30 p.m.

Rex Stewart phones. A few days ago he interviewed one of my teachers for a position at his school. Yvonne. How is she doing? First I tell Rex I was unaware that Yvonne was out interviewing. Then I share with him the story of Yvonne, Caleb and her belief that I was going to fire her. I end with a description of my observation in Yvonne’s classroom today. Rex says he suspects Yvonne wouldn’t do well in his school either, and that he guessed as much from the interview. I only wish I had been as savvy as Rex when I interviewed Yvonne. After I hang up, I make a mental note to ask Rex to share with me his interview procedures.

2:00 p.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. The DCF worker has returned with Alexia/Pilar and she wants to speak with me. Alexia/Pilar is leaving to go to SBAA. Although SBAA is an alternative school, the small size (40 students) and all-girl atmosphere will provide a more nurturing environment for Alexia/Pilar. If she can behave and not get kicked out, she now has a shot at a future! Alexia/Pilar is gathering her belongings and saying her goodbyes. She asks me for the Walkman I confiscated from her months ago. Unfortunately, when I go to get it from my desk safe I see that I can no longer open the safe.

When I arrived at Prospect there was an open safe on my desk filled with prescription drugs. I had Shasta, my transportation manager, destroy them as per policy and for a while the safe sat empty. Stone asked if he could take it home but found it is securely bolted to my desk. The safe has a spinning combination dial lock and a key. When I first began to take contraband from students, I put it in a lock box in a metal cabinet. The lockbox quickly filled up and I began to use my desk safe. When I began to store student items in the safe, I locked and unlocked it using the key. This worked fine until I want to remove Alexia/Pilar’s Walkman. It seems someone spun the dial. Now the key alone won’t open the safe and no one knows the combination. I guess the students’ contraband items are secure. I promise Alexia/Pilar I will find the combination, open the safe and bring her the Walkman.

Rosie and Alexia/Pilar have been close. Alexia/Pilar recently confided to Rosie that she doesn’t have any dresses or skirts and wishes she had some. Alexia/Pilar has always exuded toughness with a swagger and threats of violence (which she regularly proved were not empty threats). She tells Rosie if she is able to go to a school without boys she’ll be able to be more feminine. Rosie’s daughter, Amy, has outgrown some dresses and skirts that will now fit Alexia/Pilar. She leaves us with hugs, hope and a new wardrobe. Goodbye Alexia/Pilar

2:30 p.m.

The walkie-talkie is calling me. RitaMae needs to see me. Did I remember she has to leave early this afternoon for a doctor’s appointment? No. She told me last week. Yes, I see it on my calendar. I weakly ask whether she can reschedule. No, she had to wait weeks to get in.

Activity period is not going to be fun today.

3:10 p.m.

Neeley and Billie suggest we take the students who usually have Stone, Midge, RitaMae and Jordan for Activity period and run one big kickball game. I am skeptical but they are confident it will work, they ask the Deputy to join them on the ball field.

It almost works. But we should have noticed Marcus’s hair is not braided.

Luis comes alive in kickball. He rarely comes to school, but he is here today and pretty mellow in most of his classes. Luis is very athletic. He likes to do back flips, cartwheels, anything gymnastic. He kicks a double and runs to second base. Marcus is the second baseman. On second base, Luis starts to turn back flips waiting for the next kickball player to be up. Marcus starts to boil. He calls Luis “a little fag.” Luis grabs the kickball from the pitcher and kicks it directly in Marcus’s face. A fight starts causing more than the usual chaos given the large number of students on the ball field. The Deputy arrests Luis. We finally get Luis to come to school and he ends up in jail.
4:00 p.m.

The busses have left and Yvonne is in my office waiting for me to discuss my observation of her class this morning. She sits stoned-faced and I wonder whether I’ll get any responses or emotions. I begin with the positives but as soon as I mention some concerns, she becomes defensive, protesting “It’s not like I use the overhead every day.” Wow, at least she communicated! I tell her the problem isn’t the projector. I suggest other techniques to review for a test: a game of jeopardy or small group presentations, something active to get the students interacting and involved. Yvonne is back in her silent mode. I press her for a response. She finally says, robotically, “I do all those things, nothing works.” I ask some probing questions to try to gauge Yvonne’s job satisfaction but she denies she is seeking employment elsewhere and says she is happy here. I decide not to mention Rex Stewart’s call.

6:30 p.m.

Daphne is telling me she is thinking of quitting again. Instead of active listening, being supportive, dispensing advice, showing compassion or any of my usual approaches when she tells me her woes, I become somewhat forceful. “Daphne, your students and I need you. We need you at the very least, to finish out this semester. Let’s talk again before Christmas break. Daphne agrees.

Daphne then asks permission to take off for a few hours tomorrow afternoon. Seth has a court date and Daphne would like to appear in court with him, to speak on his behalf. She hopes to convince the judge not to sentence Seth to another boot camp. She has spoken with Seth’s parents and they are pleased Daphne is willing to go to court. Unfortunately Seth cannot be counted on to show his appreciation appropriately. Whenever Daphne or Jordan compliment or help Seth, his first reaction is to smile and appear pleased, but shortly thereafter he begins to misbehave around the person who advocated for him. Daphne is worried if she does succeed in helping Seth avoid a program, she’ll pay the price as the target of his anger. Given his background, Seth is clearly pushing people away before they can hurt him – he doesn’t trust the staying power of positive relationships with an adult. I’m not sure Daphne understands all this, but maybe she does.

Before she leaves my office, Daphne asks if it is okay for her class to throw a party for Karla before Thanksgiving. Karla won’t get a birthday since Mom will be in The Forest with the Rainbow people. It was Tyryona’s idea. I approve the time off for court and the birthday. I sigh as Daphne leaves, she is such a great teacher and I don’t want to lose her.

On my way home I stop at the Goodwill store and buy every navy blue polo shirt they have. At $3 each they are a bargain and worth every penny when I think of Boyd.

8:40 p.m.

Back in my apartment, I am concentrating on eating a large bowl of romaine lettuce while conducting phone interviews. The trick is to put the phone on mute and crunch while the prospective teacher is talking. I am feeling serious pressure to hire at least one and perhaps as many as five new teachers. I absolutely need a math teacher to replace Noreen and I may need teachers for two Title One positions (Math and Reading) for which I applied but my grant has not yet received approval. And, I have a hunch I may soon need teachers to replace Daphne and Yvonne.

I try to psyche myself up for these interviews saying: do not settle for warm bodies, the students need and deserve more. Nice, noble thoughts, but reality intervenes – I need teachers, and as charming and persuasive as I am, the bottom line is still poor pay, a long school year and extremely challenging students. Convincing good teachers to teach at Prospect is a tough sell.

As I try to persuade others to do what I have done, to take a stressful, difficult, low-paying position in a humid city they’ve never heard of, I wonder: what motivated me? Why was I driven to take this job, in this place? I was raised in a tony suburb of Boston, never seriously wanting for anything, so was it noblesse oblige? Maybe. But my social conscience could also date back to my parents’ divorce, when my father left, taking with him the checkbook and my college funds.

Overnight I was plummeted from upper middle class to poverty. As a college freshman, I suddenly had to learn to live with hunger and cold. I learned to make thick hot cereal to keep my stomach from growling between breakfast and dinner. I learned to stuff plastic bags in my shoes when I had to walk in drifting snow on my way from campus to work. I learned to negotiate the wholly unfamiliar world of financial aid and food stamps. I learned empathy and compassion for people who, up to then, had only existed in a remote, distant place outside the window of the Boston-Maine train.

I was lucky, my residence in the land of poverty was brief. But those few years of deprivation seemed to crystallize my already liberal outlook and social conscience, rendering me unable to be satisfied by simply making money, giving to charity and donating a few hours of my time each week. My conscience, my burden.

Now, how to find other people similarly afflicted….

Chapter Thirty-Five: When the Cat's Away

2007-11-13T09:16:00.000-05:00

Chapter 35: When the Cat’s Away

In early November, The Boss says he wants me to spend a week in Tampa for meetings. When I ask for an agenda, there is none. I explain my dilemma about leaving my school leaderless, but The Boss is unsympathetic. When I tell The Boss I have a meeting with Henry, my public school liaison, scheduled for Wednesday and a Public School principal meeting on Thursday, he compromises and permits me to attend only Monday and Tuesday. I thank him; this is a relief, but even leaving my campus for two days is a frightening prospect. I decide to stop briefly at school on Monday morning before driving two hours to Ebencorp’s headquarters in Tampa.

At 7:00 a.m. Monday I find an email from The Boss. He is angry because we haven’t been inputting all our test scores, grades and attendance on the database Fred, his business manager, created. We’ve discussed this topic before; each time it comes up The Boss seems to have forgotten our past conversations. We’ve discussed that Lynne, my business manager, already records this information in the public school database as mandated contractually. The Boss has access to this database, but he wants Lynne to put the information in Fred’s database. Lynne isn’t opposed, she just wants to know what tasks she can safely eliminate since she can’t input this data and get the rest of her work done. The Boss writes that all the other Prospect schools meet this objective and he expects I will do so immediately.

I want to remind him that we’re the only school that must input the data in the public school database as well as Fred’s database. I want to write we now have nearly three times as many students as any other Prospect school. I want to write that the database Fred created has bugs and Lynne has made several calls to Fred to try to work around the problems. I don’t write any of this. I’ve said it all before. I ask Lynne to do her best at inputting the data The Boss requires.

After the 8:00 morning meeting, Daphne asks to speak with me. She thinks she needs to leave her husband and move back to Santa Fe. She cries. I listen and deliver another pep talk; hopefully loaded with enough positive power to last until I return from Tampa on Wednesday morning.

At 9:00 a.m. Adoncia gets off the bus and collapses. Lynne, my business manager, calls 911 while Rosie, the counselor, tries to ask the semi-conscious Adoncia if she took any drugs. The ambulance arrives. The students are unloading from the busses and running over to the ambulance and paramedics to see what is happening. Great excitement, too much excitement.

As I am packing my briefcase to leave for my meeting in Tampa, Noreen arrives in my office. I tell her to leave; she is not to be on campus when students are present. She wants $42 for the gift wrap I purchased from her son several months ago as part of his school fundraiser. She also asks for her old job back. I could laugh, should laugh, but I don’t. I pay her $42 and tell her to leave.

I get in the car and drive many miles before I can unclench my teeth and loosen my grip on the steering wheel. My encounters with The Boss, Daphne, Adoncia and Noreen are not my favorite way to start a morning. Now I am driving two hours to Tampa for a command performance with The Boss. Somehow I don’t expect this day to improve.

Trying to feel his pain

During the drive, I coach myself on how I will get along with The Boss. I search to find empathy for him. After all, he is the boss of four women and one man all of whom are older than he is and more educated (we all have Masters degrees, one has a PhD). As a former college football player, The Boss is accustomed to using his huge physical presence for effect. This isn’t effective with five principals who care about what he says and aren’t intimidated by height and weight. As a black man who grew up in Florida, The Boss’s poor communication skills and lack of mathematical acumen are no doubt a byproduct of an inferior education in recently desegregated schools. I craft the story of The Boss to try to find the patience and understanding I have for my students and their parents and apply it to him. I see the irony in this situation. As a pro-affirmative action liberal, I have been burdened with a boss who may have earned his job based not on his qualifications but on his skin color. Somewhere a right wing conservative is laughing.

If The Boss were white, it would be so much easier. I would immediately go to his boss, Clyde, to discuss my concerns. But since The Boss is black, to even hint he isn’t fit for the job, smacks of racism. Last week Lynne, my business manager, was reading one of The Boss’s difficult to decipher emails and asking me to help her. She wondered aloud how he got promoted and suggested it’s because he is black. Jumping to the defense of affirmative action I pointed out that it was valid for Clyde to want a black man to run this program since over 50% of our students are black males. In frustration I added that I just wished Clyde had picked a smart black man. Florida-born Lynne inquired, with some sarcasm, whether I knew any. Facing off against her racism I assured her I do. Clearly she doesn’t think she does. Maybe Clyde doesn’t think he knows any either.

My conversation with Lynne leaves me frustrated and unsettled. I feel I have crossed over into a parallel universe, a universe where until recently, segregated schools insured most black people would receive an inferior education. I think of the smart black men I know - Brendan the accountant, Richard the counselor, Bryce the attorney, Syd the doctor, and Raymond the social worker/therapist - and suddenly, desperately I want to make Lynne see their faces and experience their brilliance. But my words are inadequate to the task and when I finally surrender, I feel I have been disloyal to my black friends.

My kind thoughts and good intentions toward The Boss fade fast in his presence. There are no goals or objectives for this meeting. Team bonding, which is usually somewhere on the agenda of such meetings, is scuttled. The Boss runs the meeting like a football coach with a losing team and some wild players.

Lacking an agenda for this multi-day fest, The Boss collars various Ebencorp employees and convinces them to come “shoot the breeze” with us. Good old Let’s rap Leighton from HR, asks what we want to know. The risk management guy comes in and delivers the same spiel we all heard last August. Cell phones ring. Each of us has left behind a school with students and problems and no one to solve them. (I get a call from Rosie about Adoncia. The hospital called and she is fine. They don’t know why she lost consciousness.) At lunchtime a discussion ensues to determine which restaurant to visit. The Boss announces he will not be going to lunch. In my continuing struggle to understand The Boss, I take the cue and follow his lead. Maybe he and I can bond during the lunch break, but he goes in his office and shuts the door.

The other four principals are late back from lunch. The Boss, the angry football coach, goes on a rampage. This team is not showing any respect. His examples include leaving cell phones on, returning from lunch late and leaving the room to go to the bathroom. My fellow principals and I are speechless and dumbfounded. Post tirade, The Boss invites a woman who writes grants for Ebencorp’s residential programs to talk to us. Unfortunately, she explains, she doesn’t have time to write grants for Prospect Schools. I have to go to the bathroom, but I don’t dare leave the room.

The Boss doesn’t adjourn the meeting until after 6:00. Most of the other principals have booked motel rooms in Tampa, but my budget is too tight and besides I live only two hours away. It takes me closer to three hours with the rush hour traffic, then I have to turn around and do it again the next morning.

By the time I get back to school Wednesday morning my desk is piled high with urgent messages and a line quickly forms at my desk. People want to complain, tattle and ask for help.

While you were out…

Daphne wants to schedule time to meet with me after school. She says she’ll need my undivided attention. I have a hunch she wants to tell me she is quitting. I’d like to make myself unavailable to hear that news.

Stone needs to vent and snitch. He had surgery on his foot Monday and while he was out, some combination of staff members (Billie, Jana and Rosie) used his computer. He can tell because some of the settings have been changed. I express sympathy. He threatens to password protect everything on the computer. I remind him the computers are school property. I don’t achieve the goal of calming him; he leaves agitated and shaking. Lynne predicts a heart attack.

Billie, the PE teacher, comes to tell me it was Jana who used Stone’s computer.

Jordan, who teaches on Daphne’s team, wants to talk with me about Seth’s situation. When he made his weekly calls home last night, Seth’s mother, in the wheelchair, confessed that Seth, like his father, beats her. Jordan spoke with the Deputy who plans to send an officer to Seth’s house tonight. Seth, who believes he’ll end up in prison, seems determined to make that prophecy a reality.

Counselor Rosie tells me Tyryona (formerly known as “dollar girl”) kissed a boy on the bus on the way home Monday. The bus driver told Tyryona’s guardian. The guardian was not pleased. She spoke severely to Tyryona about how her increasingly difficult behavior is leaving the guardian with no options but to relinquish her to DCF. Tyryona became very upset, began to punch herself, ran in the bathroom and sprayed a bottle of perfume all over her body in an attempt to poison herself. Tyryona was Baker-Acted yesterday.

Jana comes to tell me it was Rosie who used Stone’s computer.

Stephanie says she wants to graduate several students from Orientation. I ask her for the worksheet we agreed would contain all the data needed before moving students out - pre-test scores, proof a planner was purchased, date child arrived at Prospect etc. We have this same discussion every week. Stephanie often “forgets” about the sheet and just gives me a scribbled list of names of students she wants to move out. I go down her list, she admits most haven’t been tested yet and don’t have planners. I won’t move them until we meet those objectives. She gives me the “I think you’re mean” look and leaves.

The Deputy comes to tell me that yesterday while I was in Tampa, several girls accused Kembrall, a student in Jordan’s class, of unwanted sexual touching. TobyBeth, the troubled girl with the illiterate father, is among the complainants. Yesterday’s Deputy launched a full investigation and made out a report but he felt there wasn’t enough proof to arrest Kembrall. All the accusers are white girls; Kembrall is a large, fourteen year old black boy. I ask the Deputy if I should be outraged that several girls have been attacked at school and should suspend the molester, or should I be repulsed that my girls have pulled a “Mockingbird” on this innocent black boy and punish these false accusers? The Deputy says since he wasn’t here and he wasn’t the Deputy who investigated the allegations and wrote the report, he can’t say, but he suggests I leave it alone. The parents of the girls have been notified that if they want to press charges they can do so. The Deputy adds: “In a school where everyone is a liar, how do you know who to believe?”

Corinna from Title One calls to tell me I can’t use the Title One money for the books I want. She chants in a sing-song voice that I must remember, Title One money is to “supplement not supplant, supplement not supplant.” Apparently I need to write this grant implying I’m supplementing when in fact I have nothing to supplement.

While I was in Tampa, the Risk Management guy from Ebencorp left a message (I’m not sure why he didn’t talk to me while I was in Tampa....), about busses and insurance. For months I have been begging Risk Management to insure only those busses we actually own and lease. It seems so logical and obvious to me, but this voice message tells me Risk Management has made a decision: the insurance policy year started in mid-September and someone (no one seems to know who) counted twelve busses on my campus, so I must pay insurance on twelve busses. The fact that I don’t now have and never did have twelve busses is immaterial. I don’t know whether I am insuring someone else’s busses or imaginary busses. Money I could have used for salaries or books goes to Ebencorp.

I also have a message from Henry, my public school liaison. I had asked his permission to have a half-day of school on the day before Thanksgiving. Henry’s message says I can’t schedule early release for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving since the public school has a full day and it would be unfair if the alternative students leave early.

I like and trust Henry, but his voice message burns me. Since when has fairness between the public school and Prospect ever been of concern to anyone? I want to call Henry back and tell him about “unfair.” I want to scream about the obscene unfairness inherent in the whole concept of a separate school for “bad kids.”

But of course, I don’t call Henry. I am not usually shy about making waves, but with my less than ideal relationship with The Boss, I am clinging to whatever harmony I can muster in my relationship with Henry. But like the Colorado river slowly carving its way into the rocks, Henry’s “no half-day” message erodes a bit more from our relationship. I slowly exhale and look at my watch. I don’t have time to digest what I missed, it is 9:00 a.m.: time to go meet the busses!

Chapter Thirty-Four: Death at an Early Age

2007-11-06T09:44:00.000-05:00

Chapter 34: Death at an Early Age

When I was a kid, a neighbor had a premature baby who died, and my mother had a friend who made pottery in Vermont, who died. With those two exceptions, I survived childhood free of death. I never even had a pet die. My students are not so fortunate. Many of them have had a parent die; most have experienced the death of a relative. My students know many dead people.

Selma

I am in the bus circle, on a warm afternoon in early November, preparing to call classes for dismissal when I notice two women one black, one white, coming out of my office. I don’t recognize them as parents and wonder if they are from DCF. I walk over to investigate and they tell me they are looking for Selma. Now I am sure they are DCF workers since Selma has been living with her cousin since the step-father accusation. I stick my head in the office to ask Lynne the identity of these women; she is meticulous about letting only authorized people pick up children. She answers before I can ask: “They’re cops.”

Selma is called to the office. I stand eavesdropping near the car with the two female police officers. If Selma is in trouble, I want to know. The black woman speaks quietly to Selma. Selma screams. A piercing scream. Not the usual loud girl scream she squeals when she sees Tyryona’s new skirt, nor the indignant scream she fires off when someone calls her a “ho.” This is the sound the painting “The Scream” would make if it had audio. Standing with her face pressed against the driver side window, Selma starts to pound the unmarked police car with her fists. Now she is crying loud, hyperventilating cries. As I approach, the white woman answers my unspoken question: they just informed Selma her older brother was shot and killed today, four miles from our school.

Marcus

The next day, the day after the shooting of Selma’s brother, the newspapers are filled with the lurid details. They say he was shot “gangland style.” Isn’t this is a line from a movie? Is this real life? The students are buzzing about the murder. Rumor mill says our student, Claymont, is related to the murderer who has not yet been arrested. Not surprisingly, Selma is absent today. But Marcus is here.

Marcus’s sister died two days ago. She was going to turn 26 in a couple weeks. She had cerebral palsy. Marcus’s mom sent a note explaining that Marcus wanted to go to school so she let him. Marcus’s hair is unbraided and he has that wild look in his eyes. He doesn’t want to talk to any counselors or other staff members about his sister or anything else. I phone his mother. She cries telling me about the pain of watching her daughter suffer for years only to die. She tells me Marcus hasn’t shown any signs of grief but she believes this is because he is relieved his sister is no longer in pain. I suggest that Marcus is grieving and needs Mom to talk with him. He is so volatile under regular circumstances, I really worry about him attending school today. Unbraided Marcus has been known to wander out of class and around campus. Unbraided Marcus has beaten up children half his size (and Marcus is so big, most of our students are smaller than he is). Unbraided Marcus has cursed and threatened teachers. I don’t want Marcus to hurt anyone today or to end up arrested. Marcus’s mother agrees to pick him up and talk with him.

Claymont – ramifications of an arrest

Stone, who rarely has anything positive to say about his students, wants me to read an essay Claymont wrote. Rosie too raves about this piece of writing. I ask Claymont if I can read it. Claymont has written about his grandfather, their shared joy in comic books, how his grandfather needed to take medication and it was Claymont’s job to bring him his pills. The story ends with the death of his grandfather. Claymont explains his grandfather died when Claymont was arrested for punching Brock and he, Claymont, was in jail and not there to give his grandfather his medication.

“Claymont, is this true?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds like you feel like your grandfather’s death was your fault.”
“It was.”

Then I remember. I remember the punching incident with Claymont and Brock, Brock and his racial epithets and later marijuana in his shoe for which he too was arrested. Given the circumstances I never would have requested the arrest of Claymont, but neither did I protest. If I had stopped the deputy from arresting Claymont would his grandfather still be alive? I look at Claymont intending to say something reassuring. Something about how surely someone else could have dispensed the medication to his grandfather and that this death is not his fault, but when I look at Claymont’s eyes, I don’t see a boy who needs reassurance. I see burning anger and hate. And in a flash I see that as much as Claymont blames himself for the death of his grandfather, he also blames me. As far as he is concerned I requested the arrest. I don’t think protesting my innocence by saying I didn’t want him arrested, yet did nothing about it will alter his view of me as the murderer of his grandfather. I say the only words I can find: “I am so sorry Claymont.” His continues to stare at me, unaffected by my words. It is a horrible haunting stare.

Souvenirs of Death

I have a file folder in my desk marked “death.” In it are lists of books to help children cope with death including picture books for children who have lost a grandmother and longer chapter books for a child mourning the death of a brother. In the file I also keep copies of cards some of my students have made for peers dealing with death.

The front of the brown construction paper card reads, in block letters:

I Hope your mom made it 2 Heaven.

Inside is neat printing in pencil:

Dear Milton:
I feel sorry for you and I know how it feels to loose (sic) your mom. My mom died 2 years ago and I got over it, you will get over it soon. I am so sorry that your mom died. When my mom first died I tried to kill myself don’t do the same thing. Please take care of your self.
Truly yours,
“J-Man”
Jeremiah

For just a moment, step into the skin of a child who lives in a world in which bad things just keep happening. What is it to not know, day by day, whether there will be gas in the car when your asthma chokes you and you need to see the doctor, food in the refrigerator when your stomach aches from hunger, new sneakers when your toes hurt from shoes that are too small? What is it to have the power shut off for non-payment not once or twice, but often enough that you are relieved when flipping the switch does turn on the light? What is it to not know if you’ll be belted or why or how bad this beating will be? What is it to sometimes live with your mother and her boyfriend, sometimes with your grandmother, sometimes with a neighbor and even sometimes in foster care? What is it to call a dilapidated trailer home, a tent home, a car home, a motel home and nowhere home? What is it to see death surround you and strike so often and so randomly that you are unsure whether your family, friends and even you will die next? How do you cope when you don’t see patterns or causes and it all seems so random and out of control?

Do you think maybe you’d be angry and curse? Maybe you would fight? Maybe you would take drugs or sell drugs, have sex or sell sex? And if not, why not? Cause and effect have been pretty muddled in your life. Bad stuff just keeps happening and on the hierarchy of bad things, death is near the top.

My job at Prospect is surrounded by deaths, not just the deaths in the lives of my students, but in my own life as well. The death of my beloved father-in-law in January 2002 awoke me to the impermanence of life and in part motivated me to seek out this principal position. Halfway through my tenure at Prospect, a close college friend died. His death was unexpected (he was a healthy runner) and a wrenching shock. Shortly after I left Prospect, a former Verizon coworker, a good friend in his 20’s with two babies, died tragically in a car crash. Jack, John and Jason were men I loved; overnight they disappeared. Now I too know dead people. But I am more fortunate than my students. I lived over four decades before death interrupted my bliss; and it certainly didn’t define my childhood.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Guests - the invited and uninvited

2007-10-30T08:06:00.000-05:00

Chapter 33: Guests – the Invited and the Uninvited

My husband flew in last night, the first Thursday in November. We are going to celebrate his birthday this weekend. We have reservations to stay at Disney World for two nights. As I run my laps on this cool November morning I try to anticipate anything that can possibly go wrong today. My worst case scenario is a gaggle of poorly behaved children at dismissal, which will cause the busses to leave late and delay our departure for Disney.

Clearly I have no idea what is inside this finely-wrapped Friday.

Every Friday is Career Day at Prospect School. I schedule people to come talk about their jobs: a typical day at work and the skills and education they needed to get their job. In the beginning of the year I had students make a list of all the jobs they know about and then circle the jobs they would like to have. Their lists were short and pathetic. Many listed the names of retail establishments as though the store or restaurant was the job: McDonalds, KFC, Blockbuster, Wal-Mart. Others picked a place and listed every job there: cashier at Winn Dixie, bag boy at Winn Dixie, donut man at Winn Dixie, cleaner at Winn Dixie or sadder yet: Prison Guard, Prison teacher, Prison Cook…. Some listed sports, teams or leagues: swimmer, runner, jumper, wrestling, pool, basketball, NFL, play running back Others listed jobs of those around them: teacher, principal, policeman, parole officer, tattoo artist. There were the dreamers: TV host, Monster Truck Driver, Movie Star, President, Rapper, or “Brian Sergant.” Many listed, facetiously (or prophetically?) crimes: sell weed, sell dope, sell crack, pimp, deal drugs, bank robber. Friday Career Days are designed to broaden these horizons by exposing students to jobs they didn’t know existed or, if they knew, they didn’t know the details of the work or what skills and education are required.

Recently we’ve had former New York City commissioner of Corrections (and inspiration for television show “The Commish”) Anthony Schembri, State Representative Dennis Baxley and a real hit with the girls, a woman from Barbizon Modeling. The students were riveted when the Herald County Electric Company folks demonstrated the workings of a bucket truck and the Fire Marshall did the same with his fire engine. They were less excited when the woman from the Red Cross brought along the Blood Mobile and they were disappointed the pilot didn’t bring his plane, although none of them expected the ship builder to bring a ship! The wanna-be rappers had a lot of questions for the operations director of a local radio station (even if they do play oldies!). They had a vague idea what the mechanic does as well as the hair stylist but prior to Friday Career Days, they had no idea about the jobs of radiologist or chiropractor. Some of them knew the director of the YMCA and when some brave school board members came, some of the students used the Q&A time to voice some complaints (length of school day, school year etc.)

My students look forward to these speakers and are on their best behavior Friday mornings to earn the privilege of hearing a speaker. And after hearing the speakers, they are willing to write thank you notes with follow-up questions. They tend to stay in the good mode until lunch. Henry, my public school liaison jokes that Prospect students are so good on Friday mornings I should make EVERY day Career Day!

My staff can see these positive changes, but despite my requests for help, few of them arrange for any speakers. I’m not sure why. Maybe they see this as outside their job description or they feel they are too busy. I resent being the only one who schedules speakers, but I am dedicated to Friday Career Days and if I can’t get my team to find speakers, I’ll do it.

On this November Friday we have five speakers:
• A man who raises Alpacas (I read about him in a newsletter)
• Dean, the manager of Books-a-Million where I buy the NY Times daily
• Ward from Merrill Lynch who I met while working on the United Way grant
• Abby, a graphic artist working at a t-shirt shop and the future wife of Jordan, one of my teachers
• My husband, a vice-president in a small telecommunications company

I scramble getting each speaker settled in a classroom (except the Alpaca guy, he gets the spot under the tree) and introducing the students to the speakers. I am in the process of making all the speakers feel comfortable and at ease with my students when I receive an urgent radio transmission from Tara, the curriculum specialist over at Haven High. She says I must come to the Haven High office immediately.

Tara is the one person I trust at the Haven High, so I dash off. When I arrive, the first person I see is a Deputy. Oscar, the Haven High principal, tells me former Prospect employee, Noreen, is coming at 3:15 to pick up her belongings. I am flabbergasted. Why are Oscar, Tara and a Deputy involved in a situation involving my employee, my former employee? I calmly let them know what I told Noreen: that she is not to come on campus while students are present. It seems Noreen contacted the Sheriff’s office and claimed I wouldn’t let her get her belongings and she is so afraid of me she feels she must come on campus while a Deputy is present and since the Deputy leaves at 4:00 she is coming at 3:15. Oscar tells me I am legally obliged to permit her to do this. I offer several suggestions (weekends, evenings) but Oscar is adamant. Finally the Deputy agrees on a compromise. He will inform Noreen she should arrive at 4:00, I will put students on the bus early and the Deputy will stay late. If Noreen arrives early she will stay in the Haven High office until the busses leave.

The whole encounter leaves me shaken and distracted. By the time I get back to my speakers, they are finishing up. I feel like a terrible host; usually I spend time with each speaker listening, taking photos and observing students. I am especially sad to have missed my husband’s presentation. He is not accustomed to talking to adolescents and he was concerned as to whether he could hold their interest. I wasn’t there to help him.

On a positive note, Abby, the fiancé of Jordan, is a huge hit. When Jordan first introduced me to Abby I made the mistake of assuming because she is petite and cute that my students would torment her. I was wrong. Abby is a former alternative school student herself. She was the only white child in an all black alternative school for “bad adolescents” in Alabama. When she talks to the students, they listen. She addresses minor misbehaviors before they become a problem. After an hour she has 25 students who are desperate to become graphic artists. Luke and Preston can’t stop asking Abby questions. Abby suggests a field trip to her studio in Gainesville. I agree to work with her to set it up. I try to convince Abby she’d like to be a teacher. She wouldn’t.

I place a call to Henry, my public school liaison, to let him know of the Oscar/Noreen situation. Henry comes over right away. He tells me Oscar called him earlier to let him know he intended to arrest me for keeping Noreen’s belongings! Henry also tells me former counselor Ernie is somehow involved in this mess. Now I am completely unnerved. Oscar told Henry I am power hungry and unreasonable. Henry asks me if I ever had these types of problems in other places where I worked. Do I have a history of vengeful former employees? No and no. Henry has the power to discipline or at least censure Oscar. Why doesn’t he use this power? I am learning that Henry does not like to make waves.

What will Ernie and Noreen do next? I fear Ernie’s good old boy connections are more powerful than my newly-formed and tenuous relationships.

They’re back….

I have only begun unwrapping this Friday surprise package. About 3:00, Henry and the assistant superintendent, Paul Cook, who also happens to be Oscar’s boss, come to tour the campus. They ask me to act as tour guide. The Assistant Superintendent is looking at the campus as a possible site for another school to open next year. He is also taking his first look at my students and at how well I am running the school. I didn’t know about the tour in advance so I didn’t have a chance to give my staff a heads up. Henry makes positive comments about how orderly my students look and tells Paul what a fine job I’ve done reorganizing the school. A class of students files silently past us, perfectly illustrating Henry’s words. Then a car pulls up. It is former teachers Noreen and Tammie. Unsurprisingly, they’ve arrived early. My single file students break ranks and storm the car. Noreen honks the horn several times and blows kisses from the window. As Noreen and Tammie get out of the car Sonya, the custodian, runs to give Noreen a long hug. It is Ernie deja-vu.

Neeley and his class are on the ball field playing kickball. He can’t contain himself at the sight of his friend, Noreen and the love of his life, Tammie. He waves and, surrounded by his students, starts toward the women. When Neeley sees me standing there with two men in suits (Henry and Paul), he stops and half-heartedly calls his students back to the ball field. As usual, they ignore Neeley and continue to throng, mob and hug Noreen and Tammie. Stone opens his classroom door, looks around to make sure I notice him, then waves and shouts to Noreen and Tammie “Hey, we missed you! You back to stay?”

I stand frozen watching Noreen and Tammie delight in my discomfort and in the adoration of some of their former students. I feel I should take some action to hustle them into the Haven High office but I don’t want to escalate the tension with a volatile encounter, especially not with Henry and Paul looking on. After many long minutes, the door to Haven High opens and Tara comes out. She shoes away the Prospect students and ushers Noreen and Tammie inside.

I look at Paul and Henry to gauge the impact of this drama. Henry catches my eye and raises an eyebrow, but Paul hasn’t noticed anything unusual, he is engrossed in describing to Henry his grand scheme for the future of my campus. My students, staff and I are invisible to Paul as he reveals his plans to start a school exclusively for students who perform poorly on the FCAT’s. Usually I bristle at being so thoroughly ignored, but today I am relieved nothing has penetrated Paul’s monologue. I am even more relieved when Henry and Paul depart before dismissal.

Before I call the busses I give Rusty, Rosie and Lynne a heads-up about Noreen and Tammie. Rosie agrees to keep watch over the doors leading to Haven High, but if Noreen and Tammie emerge during bus departure, there isn’t a lot we can do and undoubtedly it will heighten the usual Friday end-of-day chaos.

Noreen and Tammie don’t make an appearance during dismissal. The busses and staff are able to depart on time without incident. My husband and I are in the Saturn heading south on Florida’s turnpike shortly after 5:00 p.m. During the ninety-minute drive, scenes from the day play and replay in my brain. Should I have said this or done that? I process and reprocess the day, often aloud to my patiently suffering husband, as I try to make sense of and analyze the day’s events. I must be doing something wrong to have so many “ex-employees” with axes to grind. I ruminate, reflect, regurgitate and review both the events of the day and my reactions. My jaw aches from clenching, my temples pound from pondering. Finally we arrive at Disney World and just in the nick of time. A wonderful feature of Disney World is that the minute I step though those gates, past the smiling faces of Mickey and Minnie, all my troubles disappear. Disney is like a drug and today I need a huge dose. Zippidy-doo-dah!

Chapter Thirty-Two: Sex and Violence

2007-10-25T07:39:00.000-05:00

Chapter 32: Sex and Violence

October is coming to a close; time to set the clocks back and trick-or-treat. I won’t celebrate Halloween at my school since too many newly-discovered Christians have declared it to be a pagan holiday. I try very hard to balance my own beliefs and philosophy with the cultural norms of Florida and of this community. At times this is not so hard - I am not terribly conflicted about down-playing Halloween (I can resist the temptation to buy jack o’lantern posters and candy corns for the students), but I have a much harder time bowing to community norms when it comes to sex education and corporal punishment.

Abstinence Training

I believe the primary goals of sex education are to keep girls from getting pregnant and to keep boys and girls free of disease. Abstinence is the perfect way to do this. I am fully in favor of abstinence for my students. There are not too many responsible adults who think middle schoolers SHOULD be having sex. However, since I know many of my students are having sex, I question the benefit of abstinence-only sex education. These days, questioning abstinence-only education is akin to questioning the war in Iraq, in the case of the latter you are labeled “unpatriotic” as for the former, you must be an amoral, free–love-hippie.

At least once a week, and usually more often, the local paper has a small article about the arrest of an adult who has had sex with a minor. There are also stories, albeit less frequently, detailing sex acts in the Herald County public schools: during a class video a fifteen-year-old girl performed oral sex on a fifteen-year-old male classmate; two middle schoolers had sex behind a portable while seven of their peers watched, a 14 year old girl performed oral sex on three boys on the bus; a middle school boy forcefully dragged a girl into the boys’ bathroom to fondle her. After each of these stories runs, angry letters appear on the editorial page from citizens who believe these problems are because of sex education in the classroom and a lack of prayer and religion in schools. A school board member bangs his fist and says: “The chickens have come home to roost – we had a President who engaged in these behaviors and now our students are doing the same. The preachers need to address this from their pulpits.” The daily paper runs an editorial calling for more arrests of these sexually precocious children.

The public school children who engage in these sex acts are usually expelled and end up in an alternative school, some at Prospect.

I don’t have all the answers to the problems of inappropriate and illegal sex, but I am certain more, not less, sex education is part of the solution. But given the community values, I have to compromise. I continue to have my counselors, Rosie and Rusty, talk about safe sex in counseling sessions, but I also schedule Mallory from the Herald County Health Department and her abstinence training classes.

Abstinence is an eight-week course. Mallory supervises high school volunteers who instruct lessons using videos, pamphlets and structured discussion sessions. Mallory is eager to work with my students; she knows they are at high risk for sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Mallory feels the sessions should be segregated by gender. We plan to start with a small group of girls, once a week on Friday afternoons. On the first Friday we are short staffed. Mallory and her team say they are comfortable running the class without a Prospect teacher in the room. Mallory will be here with three high schoolers and eight of our girls.

Abstinence lesson one doesn’t go well. The girls mutiny and the high school volunteers leave in tears. Mallory is appalled. I blame myself for not putting a staff member in the room. Mallory is willing to try again with a staff member present. Counselor Rosie joins the girls and threatens sanctions if they riot again. In Abstinence lesson two, the girls are a little better but still not good. Mallory and her team quit after Abstinence lesson three. Mallory calls me to brainstorm options. Would a different day, time or grouping work better? Should we mix genders? I look at the girls who were in the room: Karla, Selma, Roxanne, Chloe, Tyryona, Estralitta, Alexia/Pilar, Adoncia. How many have been raped or sexually assaulted by step parents, relatives or boyfriends? In fact, my students are not all that unique in this respect, they reflect the statistics for all sexually active adolescent girls: 10% say their first sexual encounter was non-voluntary while 25% say their first sexual partner was four or more years older than they were. Given the nature of my students’ sexual experiences, how realistic is it to talk about abstinence?

I am reminded again of that article about married women in Lesotho who exchange “sexual favors”: for rent, transportation, etc. But you don’t have to go to Lesotho to find desperate females who have relationships with males to meet their basic needs. I think about Lorayne, living with her aged grandmother in the forest, their only vehicle a broken down pickup truck without a hood. Perpetually hungry, no coat in the winter. Then along comes a 44 year old man who wants to be her boyfriend. Forget abstinence, this is a meal ticket, a new pickup truck, a warm sweater. Too often I hear adults, even well-meaning adults who work with troubled youths, allude to these sexually active adolescent girls as pleasure seeking nymphs, but just like their own mothers who tell me they won’t banish their abusive boyfriends and husbands “because they put food on the table” how many sexually active girls have boyfriends for the same reason? When the safety net has holes, there are many ways to fill them.

I tell Mallory I’ll have to get back to her about rescheduling more abstinence training– I don’t.

Whuppins

Like sex education, corporal punishment is an area in which my beliefs differ from those of the community in which I work. My opinion, that it is never okay to hit a child, is viewed as extremist and irresponsible. Most of the residents of Lakeboro believe in the redeeming value of punishment and are certain that if they spare the rod, they will spoil the child.

One Saturday, my husband and I browse slowly through the aisles of the outdoor Lakeboro Art show. A booth is selling decorative brooms that are hand carved with fancy, intricate designs. A child walks by, stops, points and says, “Mama, look at them spanking sticks.”

In the grocery store I hear a mother talking to her friends about hitting her three year old son. When he is fresh she reprimands him. He laughs when she chastises him but then she gets the paddle and hits him and hits him and hits him and that sure stops him from laughing. But, she adds, she has to make sure she stops hitting him before it leaves marks or she’ll have “more trouble on her hands.”

Hitting children is acceptable, encouraged and frequently practiced here in central Florida. Not a day goes by that a staff member, deputy, parent or public school employee (including our custodians) says something to the effect of:

These bad kids wouldn’t be here (wouldn’t be bad), if someone (presumably their parents) gave them a whupping (took a belt to their behind, tore up their butt etc.).

Darius tells me his foster mother is a teacher in a Baptist School in town. One of the Darius’s foster brothers attends this school. Does Darius wish to go there? No! They give whuppins there, on your bare butt. Darius’s foster brother got one last week and it hurt real bad and if you start to cry they hit you harder. Darius reports it left marks on his foster brother’s butt and Darius knows, he’s seen them.

Even Dr. Henry Sevier, my public school liaison, the person in charge of alternative education for the school system and a person for whom I have great respect, calls for beating children. He and I are engaged in a discussion of meaningful consequences for poorly behaved students when he says he wants to remind me that corporal punishment is legal in Florida and I might want to consider it. His words form another crack in the growing gap between how Henry and I view my students.

No I don’t wish to beat my students or any children for that matter. But that doesn’t stop “whuppins” from making regular appearances on my campus.

One afternoon while trying to calm three poorly behaving elementary students on the bus, Rusty gets a “suggestion” from one of the older boys that he give the little boys a “whuppin’” with a belt. The boy offers up his own belt to take care of the matter, but Rusty politely declines the offer. Instead he threatens vague and awful outcomes if there are any further problems on this bus and sends the driver on her way. The bus departs, and we cross our fingers.

The bus returns 45 minutes later. It seems enroute home the middle school boys determined some of the younger children did, in fact, need a whuppin’ so they removed their belts and began whipping the elementary students, who began racing around the bus to avoid the swinging belts.

Rusty and I confiscate all the belts, much to the anger of many “innocent” students. The bus does not return again, but my phone rings and rings. Parents call to complain about the late bus, missing belts and to curse at the principal.

Another day, I am sitting at my desk when an old, thin, black man walks in. Lynne recognizes him and shows him where to sign in. I am working on the schedule but there is something unusual about the man, so after he leaves I ask Lynne who he is.

“It’s Nishonda’s grandfather.”

“Why is he here?”

“Nishonda has her uniform with her, but she refuses to change into it. I think Rusty called the grandfather to come talk some sense into her. Nishonda’s been sitting in Rusty’s office all morning. I sent her grandfather over there just now.”

“What was that thing he was carrying? It looked like he had something in his hand.”

“A strap.”

“A strap?”

“I suppose to hit Nishonda.”

In a panic I radio Rusty. I picture Nishonda’s grandfather storming into the counseling portable, swinging his strap, belting kids left and right as he aims for Nishonda. Rusty responds to my urgent walkie-talkie message by phone. He tells me not to worry, Nishonda’s grandfather already arrived, took Nishonda out back and now she is changing into her uniform and will soon return to class.

Out back?!

I am totally unnerved that a man just came on my campus and hit one of my students with a belt. It seems, however, I am the only one who thinks this is odd or wrong.

Nishonda was the first, but as the year progresses, there are more. I am guilty of being part of the problem since I don’t work very hard to stop it. Parents come on campus when called to deal with a misbehaving child and in the process of counseling their child, give the child a beating. I never witness this directly; I’d like to think if I did I would stop it. These events tend to happen in the counseling office or the parents take the child in the bathroom or out back behind the school. I want to forbid it, but I fear I would be unable to enforce the rule and my staff would continue to permit it and just not tell me. The culture here dictates hitting children is not just a right, it is what God requires of good parents. I’ve come to view this drive to punish as an innate desire for revenge.

Revenge and Punishment: Whatever happened to Empathy?

I once read an article in the New York Times that said revenge is in our genes and there is a “biologically rooted sense of justice.” If the desire to punish naughty children is seen as equivalent to the innate desire for revenge, it helps explain the passionate fervor I hear in the voices of parents, school board members and public school employees when they discuss the need to punish the bad children. The antidote for revenge, according to this same article, is to work on feeling empathy for the other person. Empathy! I very rarely hear anyone associated with Herald County Public Schools expressing anything approaching empathy for my students. They’re weeds, they’re evil, they’re vile, they’re disruptive, they’re vulgar. Where is the empathy? I know finding empathy can be hard. I struggle daily to empathize with the Prospect parents who clearly need my understanding instead of my anger. But when it comes to my students, it feels like no one in the community is even trying to find empathy. And anyway, revenge or not, no one seems to appreciate the incredible irony that most of my students’ parents have been beating them for years and yet they still misbehave.

Chapter Thirty-One: All in a Day's Work

2007-10-16T05:49:00.000-05:00

Chapter 31: All in a Day’s Work

4:00 a.m.

The buzzer sounds and snap, I’m out of bed. Step one, retrieve the newspaper from outside my apartment door. I love having the local paper delivered before I awaken so I can be aware of all the news by the time I arrive at school. Did a relative of one of my students get arrested? Was there an incident in the public schools and the child or children involved will soon be coming my way? Is there a national or international story I want my staff to discuss in class? The paper arrives about 3:30 a.m.; I’ve heard the thump in the hallway. Most people in Lakeboro don’t get the paper quite so early. I wonder if my paper deliverer lives in my apartment complex. Now if only I could get the NY Times delivered….

It is mid-October, but it is already 72 degrees before the sun rises. My morning run of 6 miles is slower than I want. It is steamy and humid with heavy fog. I run past Carolyn, one of my bus drivers, slowly navigating our Prospect school bus out of the parking lot. After my shower, I put on my short-sleeved lime green suit over a sleeveless off -white blouse. I am now ready to handle whatever this day holds for me.

7:00 a.m.

There is a flood underneath the portable that is my office. Vince, the custodian, informs me a water pipe broke and all the water for campus has been shut off. No water fountains, no toilets. It should be fixed soon. . . .

Shandon’s mother is waiting on the doorstep when I arrive at school and she is irate. It seems her son is the last child dropped off the bus in the afternoons. I express sympathy and suggest we all talk with Shasta, my transportation coordinator, to see what we can do. She refuses to speak with Shasta saying Shasta doesn’t have any children and therefore can’t understand (actually Shasta has a six year old son, Quinn); she will only speak with me. I listen and promise to call her later after I talk with Shasta.

8:00 a.m.

In the morning meeting I introduce our newest teacher, Sam Hughes. Sam, a white, thirty-something, former military man, will be a math teacher. Sam has never taught math; his last job was as an investigator at DCF, but he has a degree in business and has been taking education courses to become a certified math teacher. Sam is chatty and likes to talk about his wife, children, stepchildren and house repairs. During the interviews (both phone and face-to-face) my impression of Sam is that he genuinely wants to teach and enjoys helping children learn new skills. He is focused on discipline and referenced his military service as a model for creating a productive learning environment. However I sense that Sam accepted this job more to escape DCF than because of his drive to teach challenging students. During the interview, he is just a little too eager to tell me, unprompted, about the horrors of his DCF job. I am a little concerned about his ability to form relationships with our students, but I hope that by assigning him to the Daphne and Jordan team, they will mentor and coach Sam on this since it is an area of strength for both of them. I think the three of them will work well together. In the morning meeting, we do what we always do with new staff; we go around the table introducing ourselves and telling what we do at Prospect. When it comes to Stone he always says something vaguely inappropriate. Today he says “I don’t do anything here, ask Kathleen. I hate the kids and they hate me.” Then, for good measure, Stone ends his introduction punching his fist in the air and declaring: “The South will rise again.”

After the introductions, Rosie asks if we can discuss fourteen-year-old Lorayne. Before the school year started, I envisioned morning meetings including a discussion of a different student each day. The reality: often there is no time in our morning meetings for discussions of individual students; we have so many pressing problems and vital information to convey. But sometimes a student is our pressing problem and we are able to devote a few minutes to a discussion of that student. Today Rosie tells us Lorayne, of tongue ring fame, has been absent a lot recently. When she does show up, she is never in uniform and has prominent circles under her eyes. Yvonne interrupts to say she has had trouble getting in touch with the woman Lorayne calls mother but who is really her grandmother. Stephanie interjects that she heard Lorayne’s grandmother is in the hospital. If the grandmother is in the hospital, with whom is Lorayne living?
We will get our answer soon.

8:40 a.m.

Lorayne is dropped off at school by a man in a grey pickup truck. When Rosie asks, Lorayne identifies him as her boyfriend, proudly adding that he is 44 years old and they are living together. Rosie calls DCF. She gets the impression this case won’t be a priority. Rosie tells our Deputy and he calls DCF. They promise to have someone come out to our school. They don’t. We hold out hope until mid-afternoon when the Deputy takes matters into his own hands.

8:50 a.m.

Noreen is back after her bout with strep throat. She has been absent since the first quarter Award Ceremony. She and I need to talk. I ask her about the missed Award ceremony. She tells me she was at the hospital that night because her finger broke when she played basketball with our students. Her finger is taped, but I don’t believe her. I question why she didn’t phone me from the emergency room. She says she forgot her cell phone; she says she didn’t have a quarter for the pay phone; she says she forgot my phone number. I tell her I need to see the discharge papers from the hospital and Noreen hands them to me. Everything is in order except at the bottom of the page, next to the signature lines. It doesn’t take a professional sleuth to see that the Emergency Room diagnostic form has been altered. When Noreen leaves my office, I ask Lynne, my business manager, to phone the hospital while I dash outside for bus duty.

9:05 a.m.

It is a beautiful late autumn morning; 78 degrees under a cloudless sky. My sleepy students groggily emerge from their busses and float blissfully toward their waiting teachers. Ooops, scratch that. My bleary-eyed, grouchy children slump off the bus where they are abruptly awakened by a loose dog spotted on campus. Pandemonium breaks out. Students shout at the dog trying to either call it or terrorize it. Some try to run after it. Over 120 students gallivanting after one dog defines chaos. Counselor Rusty and the Deputy become involved. Several students contend they know the dog’s owner abuses it and they have seen the owner throw the dog over the fence onto our property when the dog is bad. They don’t want the dog returned. The teachers finally summon the strength to herd all the students into their lines. Rusty, my dog-loving counselor, goes after the dog using cheese as bait and a belt as a lasso and disappears from sight.

With students finally lined up behind their teachers, Daphne and Jordan’s classes are introduced to Sam. Darius shakes Sam’s hand, but he doesn’t look pleased. A new teacher is a change. Darius does not like change; not surprising from a child who has been in so many foster homes. After the introduction, Darius hurls rocks at another student and sprints away toward south campus.

I can’t take up the chase, because I have my hands full with two elementary students. Frankie, my sad-faced fourth grader with both parents in jail, got off the bus with his shirt untucked. I greet him with “good morning” but Frankie gives no smile or response. I ask him to please tuck in his shirt and Frankie tells me if he does he’ll throw up. I tell him to tuck in his shirt. He does. He throws up. Right there in the parking lot.

Meanwhile, Chip, our newest elementary student who lives with his grandparents in a retirement village, gets off the bus with a bloody face. Chip is a large, white, fifth grade boy who is usually morose and quick to anger. It seems he scratched his cheeks all the way to school. He says he did this because he is scared of our school.

Wild dog, rocks, vomit and bloody cheeks, all before 9:30 am.

9:30 a.m.

Lynne informs me that privacy laws forbid the hospital from sharing any information, but Lynne is able to get the hospital to confirm that Noreen was seen on Friday night, not Thursday night, the night of our ceremony. I confront Noreen. She insists she went to the hospital on Thursday and when I ask, she signs a release for the hospital to give me access to her records. I fax over the release as soon as she leaves my office and the records come back showing she was seen late Friday night and treated for a possible broken finger.

9:40 a.m.

There are painters scraping paint in the cafeteria when it’s time for the students to eat breakfast. I ask them to wait but they point out when our last group finishes breakfast we have only twenty minutes, at most, before we start serving lunch. They tell me they have orders to get this room scraped today. The students complain the scraping sound is giving them headaches. I worry about lead dust and paint chips in the food. Outside the cafeteria other workers are removing asbestos from the ceiling tiles. I suggest this is not a good thing to do when my students and staff are around. They shrug and tell me Agnes, the secretary from Haven High, told them it must be done today. Good ole Agnes. While trying to negotiate with the asbestos men, I remember I have a 10:00 meeting and dash off.

10:00 a.m.

I am meeting with Sonya and Vince, the custodians. There is a problem with toilet paper shortages. I try to make the meeting non-threatening but it gets ugly fast. Sonya is belligerent and instead of talking about toilet paper she makes personal attacks on the teachers she believes “snitched” about the lack of toilet paper.

Rusty interrupts the Vince and Sonya meeting to tell me he just caught the wild dog and he will now drive it to his house until the owner can be found and the abuse situation examined.

10:15 a.m.

Chloe is still crying. She cried when she got off the bus, cried through breakfast and was crying in Social Studies. Rosie is counseling Darius (he didn’t run far after the rock throwing incident) and Rusty is kidnapping a dog, so Chloe, the girl DCF promised wouldn’t have to live with her abusive mother but then placed her there anyway, is in my office, crying. Chloe tells me she is crying because her boyfriend, Seth, was arrested on the bus yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, halfway through the bus route home, Seth, whose mother is in a wheelchair, inexplicably ran up the bus aisle and punched Glenn in the face. Glenn, the boy who forgot Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, is half Seth’s size: Why would Seth do this? I wonder if Seth picked up on the cues from staff that Glenn is not well liked and therefore an appropriate target. When Glenn’s mother saw his bloodied face she insisted the bus driver call the police. They arrested Seth directly from the bus. Chloe is crying because she thinks Seth now has enough arrest points to send him packing to a “program.” No one called Seth’s mother. The deputies at the Juvenile Assessment Center “forgot.” The bus driver didn’t think that was her job. Last night Seth’s mother phoned Chloe at 4 am to ask her if she knew where Seth was. Chloe’s mother (“I wish I’d had an abortion instead of having you”) decides if Seth’s mother thinks Seth could be with Chloe at 4:00 am then they must be sleeping together. They fight. Chloe has been crying ever since.

10:30 a.m.

The Boss calls telling me I must immediately call Virginia, the Ebencorp accountant, about some financial reports. Virginia frequently phones The Boss to tell him to tell me to call her. I wonder why Virginia doesn’t call me directly? I’ve given her my cell phone number. I ask The Boss if we can discuss the Noreen situation and possible outcomes. He says I should call HR, but not now. Right now, he says, I need to focus on the financial reports. I hang up and call Virginia. As usual she is behind in her paperwork and frantic. She shouts at me about some documents Lynne was supposed to send her. I know those documents were faxed over a week ago. Virginia then complains about not having her own fax machine and how other people take her stuff. I ask Lynne to fax them again.

I receive an email from The Boss. It tells me I am mandated to attend a week-long meeting at Ebencorp headquarters two weeks from now. This makes me most unhappy – not only do I worry about what will happen at school if I’m gone for a week, but I am having such a hard time working for The Boss. I don’t appreciate his approach whether he is sending me an email rather then talking to me, or when he makes demands rather than engaging in discussions. I was never in the military. I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts and learned to swim in Walden Pond; civil disobedience is in my blood. My adolescence was shaped by Vietnam and Watergate; I naturally question authority. I don’t do well with “orders that must be obeyed.” I especially question orders that will take me away from my campus for five days without telling me the value of that absence. Part of me says I should just shut up and go to Ebencorp to keep The Boss happy; I find it difficult to listen to that voice.

10:45 a.m.

Rosie asks if we can talk about Adoncia and Alexia/Pilar. Rosie believes these two street-tough Hispanic girls would benefit from an all-girl environment. I agree. Since I have been unable to start a single sex classroom here at Prospect, we discuss SBAA, the alternative school that contracts with the Herald County to educate forty girls. I have attended many principal meetings with the SBAA principal, I call her to try to get the ball started on moving Alexia/Pilar and Adoncia.

11:00 a.m.

Rusty is finally back from the canine capture. He says we need to talk about Aidan.

Aidan can’t stop. He can’t stop talking, or running or jumping off his desk or drumming his fingers or falling out of his chair. Aidan is a small thirteen year old white boy who looks more like a fourth grader than a seventh grader. He is good-natured and rarely curses. Aidan’s father makes too much money for Florida’s free child health care plan but not enough money to pay for doctor bills for his son’s hyperactivity. Aidan’s stepmother is not fond of Aidan. Actually that is not entirely accurate. She speaks of Aidan as one speaks of a palmetto bug. It’s not that she isn’t fond of him, she just doesn’t see the value in having him around. And so we learn not to share any frustrations about Aidan’s behavior with his stepmother. We suspect she abuses him but suspicion without proof makes it a waste to call DCF, since even when we have proof....

Without family support we are left on our own to help Aidan. Fortunately, Aidan has bonded with Rusty, so we try having Aidan stay in class for as long as the teacher can tolerate him and then having him spend time with Rusty. Aidan loves to help sweep, pick up trash, wash walls. The problem is, when Aidan is campus handyman, Aidan isn’t learning.

Today Rusty and I sit down and devise a unique schedule for Aidan. He won’t change classes with his peers every hour for math, language arts, social studies and science. We arrange to have him moving every 15 minutes or so, thus he will experience four different English classes, four math classes etc. This way no teacher will get too frustrated with Aidan and he will be able to run a bit between classes and maybe, despite all the fragmentation, he will learn. Rusty will roll out the new schedule in our morning meeting tomorrow.

11:30 a.m.

Noreen comes in my office saying she spoke with Billie, my PE teacher and wanna-be attorney. Billie has advised Noreen to rescind her signed release for hospital records. I tell her I have already received the documents. Noreen leaves my office. I contact Leighton, the HR guy at Ebencorp. I want to know if I have his support in firing Noreen. He tells me to ask The Boss. I call and reach his voice mail.

12:00 p.m.

Midge, my elementary teacher, comes in my office. She is overwhelmed and thinks she is a failure. I go in her classroom and teach a lesson on palindromes to demonstrate how to teach and maintain discipline simultaneously. Afterwards we talk; Midge is unable or unwilling to note what I do differently from what she does so I identify some differences: I keep moving around the classroom as I talk, never turning my back on the class. I vary the tone and volume of my voice and express boundless enthusiasm. I intercede to stop minor misbehaviors before they become major, such as when Kareem began to wave the periwinkle crayon at Trey as if it were a knife. When I point out these specifics, Midge becomes defensive saying she always does all those things.

After Midge leaves, although I feel frustrated that my attempt to role model good teacher techniques didn’t seem to work well with her, I feel invigorated from teaching the palindrome lesson. I love teaching and I’m excited when I can make time to demonstrate effective teaching methods. This role modeling also gives me credibility as I show teachers I am willing to go to the “front lines” and do what I ask of them. Several years ago, when I worked at a Verizon call center, I wanted to train my team by having them observe me handle some customer calls, but in the unionized environment, I wasn’t permitted to do so because then a manager would be doing union work. Then there was a strike and during the strike I had to take calls. When the union employees returned to work after the strike, I shared with them the printouts showing the number of calls I took per hour and per day. They were impressed and my rapport with my team increased as did the quality and quantity of their work.

I begin to think about lessons I’d like to do in other classrooms but my ruminations are interrupted by the phone.

1:00 p.m.

Caleb’s mother is crying on the phone again. They had a bad weekend. Caleb and his stepfather fought and they were still shouting before school this morning. His stepfather told Caleb “You’re setting yourself up to fail.” Caleb told his mother he won’t be coming home this afternoon or ever.

I promise Mom I’ll speak with Caleb. She cautions me about his dishonesty and confesses, “Caleb’s games with communication almost broke up our marriage last year.”

Who has ceded such power to Caleb?

I mention to Yvonne to keep an eye on Caleb today so he doesn’t run away from school. She tells me she spoke to him and he told her how much he hates his stepfather and how he plans to hide at dismissal and then sneak back into a portable and spend the night here.

I call Caleb to my office. He tells me how much he hates me, the school and his stepfather. He hates me for firing Ernie. Caleb explains he was here last year and when things didn’t work out in public school this year, he asked to come back because he remembered how good it was with Mr. Mel and Mr. Ernie, but I ruined everything. What does Caleb not hate? He wants to join the Sea Cadets; he wants a career in the navy. After a long talk Caleb still hates me but he doesn’t plan to sleep in a portable tonight, or so he says. We’ll have to watch him.

1:30 p.m.

Stone stops by to let me know Dirk’s mother came in this morning to say she is withdrawing Dirk and putting him back in public school. Dirk, the boy who is too lazy to stand and who hopes to achieve porn star status one day, is not ready to return to public school. Stone tells Dirk’s mother as much and suggests she come speak with me. She tells Stone she knows her rights and she has decided to withdraw him. Goodbye Dirk. I call Dirk’s public school principal, to give him a heads-up. Dirk’s principal thanks me for the call. He knows Dirk well; he predicts Dirk will be back at Prospect.

2:20 p.m.

With no sign of DCF, The Deputy decides to handle the “Lorayne and the older boyfriend” situation on his own. He calls Lorayne in to chat with him. He asks whether her boyfriend forces her to have sex or whether she wants to. She insists he does not force her. Bingo. The Deputy arranges to have this conversation repeated and video taped. Lorayne has never heard of statutory rape, but the Deputy has and when the police pick up the 44 year old “boyfriend” he hears about it too. Now DCF gets involved. Lorayne is moved to a foster home in another county. We won’t see her again for a while. Goodbye Lorayne.

3:30 p.m.

I finally hear back from The Boss. After much discussion he agrees to back my decision. After the students leave, I fire Noreen.

In truth, I have very mixed feelings about firing her. Noreen really is a terrific math teacher. Her students love her, her math projects are creative and she knows her subject. But she is dishonest. I have a better chance at teaching the uninitiated how to teach than teaching teachers how to behave ethically. Noreen doesn’t accept the firing well. She refuses to take her belongings saying first her car is too small, then that she has to pick up her children. I ask her what her plan will be for getting her possessions, and she tells me Neeley will take them to her. I let her know she may not come on campus while students are present. As she leaves I feel drained and defeated. I think I care more about Noreen losing her job than she does.

4:45 p.m.

Just when you think it is safe, a bus returns. Kelli brings her bus back to the school and refuses to take home five girls who won’t sit down. She doesn’t want to wait while they are counseled or disciplined. Luckily Rosie and Rusty are still on campus. We take turns scrambling to call parents and guardians to come pick up the girls. We get everyone picked up except Adoncia.

Adoncia, the girl from Brownsville, Texas who was living with an uncle and the uncle’s girlfriend, divulges she is now living with a family the girlfriend knows. We were unaware of this move. This new family has three young children and Adoncia is supposed to baby-sit them. The family lives in another county and has been driving Adoncia to her regular bus stop each morning. We can’t reach anyone who can or will come get Adoncia. I wait until the other drivers have finished their routes to find a driver willing to make overtime and drive Adoncia home to this family. We had been planning to try to get Adoncia into SBAA, the all-girls school, now I worry about what her new address means for that plan.

5:30 p.m.

Daphne comes into my office and sits down with a sigh and tells me she is depressed after making home visits to her students.

In the beginning of the school year, I encouraged all my teachers to visit the homes of their students. I’ve read this is the norm in China and felt it would help the teachers understand their students better and would help students see the home-school connection. Most of my teachers ignored me; a few told me outright how stupid it was. Only Daphne actually did it. She visited Seth (mother in wheel chair) and Timmy (bad football player). She became profoundly upset by what she saw and hasn’t been able to eat for days. Daphne is very thin and can’t survive too many days without eating. I tell her I’ve changed my mind: home visits are a bad idea and she should stop.

But she has been deeply affected by the poverty and living conditions of her students. I remind Daphne that while it’s true she can’t feed, clothe and house these children, she is giving them many equally important and lasting gifts: they feel secure in her presence and are learning so much in the rich intellectual atmosphere of her classroom. Before she leaves my office, she tells me she might quit.

I feel totally deflated and defeated. I wanted to be inspirational and to help Daphne, but I think I came across as brushing aside her concerns. I should have been a better listener instead of offering pat solutions and pop-psychology reassurances. Daphne is my best teacher but I’m not taking the time to support her. Sometimes when she comes in my office, I want to give her a pill to take away her worries and tell her to get back in the classroom and leave me alone. I know that a good boss listens and inspires. But I feel worn out; worn out from Daphne specifically who seems to require so much hand holding and reassurance, but really it isn’t fair to put all the blame on her, I am just worn out in general.

6:00 p.m.

My cell phone rings. It is The Boss. He has decided we won’t pay health benefits to the bus drivers after 90 days as we agreed. (He wants the drivers to wait two years for benefits.) He has decided he doesn’t like the point cards we are using for tracking student behavior and wants them changed. He says this is my school and I should work with my staff to develop tools and procedures that work. He tells me to remember that he is The Boss and I need to adhere to his dictates. As always, when I’m talking with The Boss, I feel a little like I’m standing unprotected in an open field getting shot at from all directions.

8:30 p.m.

When I walk in my apartment, my phone is flashing with a message. It is from Daphne, she says only: “Please call.” I return her call with some trepidation. (She wouldn’t quit over the phone, would she?) Daphne sounds relaxed and upbeat. She phoned because she and her husband want to invite me and my husband to have lunch together at her house this Saturday. Since Daphne is a stricter vegetarian than I am, I don’t have to worry about burgers or chicken at this outing. I also figure she won’t quit over lunch and dare I hope maybe she has decided to stay. I write the lunch date on my calendar and look forward to our get together. Hope springs eternal.