Prologue: When do they become Monsters?

Prologue: The Future

Mookie is sitting in my office, the principal’s office. This morning he created a major disturbance in Classroom Five during a talk by one of our Career Day speakers and he had to be removed. Glancing over my desk I see Mookie is trying hard to sneer or grimace. But this short, scrawny, thirteen-year-old black boy is very un-tough. He sits quietly for a long time before he tells me he is mad at me.

Mookie is often mad at me. He was mad the day he stomped into my office in tears because somebody partially unbraided his hair. On that day he pounded the table with his fist and told me I had to do something about “the bad kids” who “mess” with him, shouting that his unbraided braids were a disaster because he doesn’t have a mother who can rebraid his hair. Mookie’s mother died last year and his father died the year before that, both from AIDS. I solved the unbraided problem by having Nishonda, one of my best hair braiding girls, come to my office and, after promising not to talk about Mookie’s tears or hair, quickly rebraid Mookie’s hair.

The Career Day problem wasn’t as easy to solve.

“Ms. Smee you got to stop having all these Career Day speakers. I don’t wanna be no pilot or no soldier.”
“Okay Mookie, what DO you want to be? “
Silence.
“Mookie?”
More silence.
“Talk to me Mookie. You had a car magazine last week, how about if I get a mechanic, or a car dealer, or maybe a race car driver to come talk?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Ms. Smee all these Career Day speakers keep talking ‘bout is the future. The future, the future, the future. They making me mad. That’s why I kicked over my desk and books earlier.”
“Why do you get mad when they talk about the future?”
“Cause Ms. Smee, I don’t got no future.”

Prologue: The Monsters



When do they become monsters?

My students were once babies. Gooing, smiling, crying babies. Somewhere between their newborn innocence and today, good, kind, well-intentioned people gave up on them. They gave up on educating them, they gave up on hoping they could help them, they gave up on changing them; they just gave up.

They didn’t give up without a fight. There were interventions and sanctions; there were counseling sessions, parent conferences, suspensions. But eventually they gave up.

You would give up too.

Say you are a fourth grade teacher and Perry is your student. He shouts curses at you during class. He makes sexual remarks toward you and other students. He throws pencils, chairs and desks. He punches his classmates. He lights a fire in the bathroom. Can you keep Perry in your class and effectively teach over twenty other students? You try, but despite your determination, behavior modification programs and various interventions, Perry doesn’t change.

Say you are a middle school math teacher and Victor is your student. Everything he says is vulgar. He grabs girls and fights with boys. Every lesson you teach is interrupted constantly by Victor. He likes to talk loudly about drug taking, drinking and sex. You have a tool kit full of resources, you try them all, nothing works. Victor is worse when he returns from counseling and suspensions. He brags about his “time off” from class and continues his disruptive behavior.

Say you are the principal in Perry and Victor’s school. The parents of the other children, Perry and Victor’s classmates, are phoning and coming to see you to complain. Their children are frightened, injured, not learning, upset. You try to talk with Perry and Victor’s parents. They alternate between cursing at you and expressing defeat. They gave up on their children before you did. Perry’s father and stepmother want to put him in a foster home. Victor’s mother wants him sent to boot camp.

So you give up.

You reassign Perry and Victor to an Alternative School.

Alternative schools run by private companies have become one of the solutions used by public school systems to cope with highly disruptive students. The children who could single handedly disrupt an entire class are brought together in one school. And that school has fewer, not more, resources to help these children. But is it a school or a dumping ground?

The ”alternative school” children ride to school on busses the public school no longer uses. They sit in outdated portables (a euphemism for a trailer) with surplus desks and chairs. Their teachers are often less qualified and less competent (who wants to teach really tough kids for less pay than you can earn in the public school?). Their textbooks are outdated or non-existent. There are never enough for a whole class. Forget about a gym, auditorium, art or music classes, playground equipment or a track. There isn’t enough money. Besides, who will complain? The parents of these children are disenfranchised, poor, inarticulate, off the grid. The children who need the most get the least.

For a year and a half, I was the principal of Prospect School, an Alternative School in central Florida. I accepted the position not because I believe gathering all the disruptive children in one school is a brilliant concept. But because these schools exist, these children exist and these children needed a principal for their school.

I left a job in telecommunications that paid me 28% more than the principal position. I left my husband, who is the love of my life, with plans to see each other only on weekends. I left the northeast, where I grew up and spent most of my life. I left all this because I believed I was the principal to help these children.

Was I an idealist? Was I insane?

Maybe.

Blame Jonathan Kozol. His books on urban, poor schoolchildren have moved and inspired me for 30 years. What shocked me is that my students did not live in high profile troubled urban areas like inner-city Boston or the Bronx, or in Appalachia. My students lived in middle class America. And there in Middle America, these children were camouflaged, hidden in plain sight.

This book is about my battle with the monsters. But the monsters I fought were not my students. The monsters were under funded schools and social service organizations like DCF (The Division for Children and Families). The monsters were low educational expectations, combined with a distrust of the educated and an acceptance of professional incompetence. The monsters were alcohol, drugs, racism and poverty. The monsters were zealous people interpreting the bible literally and unwilling to openly discuss sex. The monsters were the people willing to accept violence against children; people with a passion for punishment like arresting and imprisoning children. And sometimes the monsters were parents without anger control or any discernible parenting skills. These were the monsters while I was principal at Prospect School. And they still are.

This book is also about the teachers I employed, some heroic slayers of monsters, some unfortunately, not much better than monsters themselves.

But this book is really about the children: the hundreds of children who attended and continue to attend Prospect school. Maligned as monsters (often masquerading as those monsters) they are hungry and unloved, angry and uneducated. These are the students of Prospect school. I wrote this book because I don’t want to give up on these children.

The names of most of the places and people in this book have been changed and information that might identify them has been disguised. Conversations are sometimes condensed and some events have been re-sequenced. With the exception of two public school liaisons who I combined to be one person, there are no composite characters. All the children are real people, people who continue to live, breathe and struggle. Their futures hang in the balance and time is running out.
Section I: Summer 2002

Chapter 1: May - the Journey Begins