Chapter Three: Destination Prospect

Chapter 3: Destination Prospect

They hated me before they met me.

Before my smiling face ever appeared in the Prospect School main office, the staff was already predisposed to dislike me. This was not the welcome I anticipated or desired, but I summoned the strength to meet the challenge. After all, I’d had experience taking over teams still nostalgic for their former leader; I understood opposition to change and I’d herded teams through mergers and reorganization and layoffs. At team meetings I’d been known to read aloud from Where’s My Cheese and use Myers Briggs personality inventories to help smooth transitions. Before I became principal of Prospect School I’d had nearly two decades of work experience.

Married at age 20 to a fellow University of Michigan graduate, we moved first to New York City where I taught seventh grade, third grade and second grade before relocating to Albuquerque where I taught first grade. A pregnancy, and moves to Rock Springs, Wyoming and San Francisco followed in rapid succession. Our son was born in the city by the bay. In awe we marveled at the power of his curiosity to influence the joy and speed of his learning and so we decided not to send him to school.

Fast forward ten years: we’re in upstate New York, I’ve earned my MA in education, my little homeschooler has started taking college classes permitting (necessitating!) me to return to the workforce – part-time at first, teaching math and history to elementary and middle school children, then full-time as a principal of a high school in a maximum secure prison for juvenile male felons.

Working with the teachers, guards and “troubled boys” was challenging, inspiring, and fulfilling. At first I was viewed with suspicion and anger since I wanted to make changes and unlike some of my pessimistic predecessors, I believed these felons could learn something besides crime. My enthusiasm was contagious and I quickly had buy-in from my teaching staff and the guards. We found the boys absorbed academic instruction at a fantastic rate. They were in small classes with dedicated, talented teachers who, rather than dumbing down the lessons, accelerated the pace to bring these boys up to speed. At night the guards, who were more like counselors, supported the education program by helping with homework and refusing to allow any leisure activities, including TV, until all schoolwork was complete. Boys who had never passed a test in their lives were suddenly passing the challenging New York Regents examinations.

But my work at the prison was also depressing, frustrating and involved a long, often snowy, commute. The Parole Board consistently paroled boys who were not ready to be released, blaming “intake pressure”, sending them home on a bus with a few dollars in their pockets. They sent them back to the city, back to the dysfunction, back to gangs and to crime, and more than once, back to take over the family business: a crack house. They were often rearrested. Then George Pataki was elected governor and he decided it was cheaper to transfer our older juveniles to adult prison. I watched despondently as some of the boys with the best chances of true rehabilitation were sent off to prison. Some of these transferred boys sent me letters from prison telling me they no longer had the option of attending school. On more than one occasion I read medical reports on some of my former students detailing their prison rapes. I begged the director, the head warden, to stop sending these boys to be incarcerated with men. He reminded me he served at the “pleasure” of the governor.

After two years, I left the prison and took a job at Verizon, first as a supervisor in a call center, then as a manager in Verizon’s Training and Education department. I loved the training position, it felt like the perfect job and I believed I could happily stay forever. Meanwhile my husband, who had also worked at Verizon, left to join a start-up phone company and was brimming with enthusiasm. Before long, this new company wanted me and the promised position held the possibility of no more out-of-town corporate travel, and no more trips separating me from my husband. In retrospect, there is some irony in the fact that I left Verizon to avoid living apart from my husband, but leave I did and regret it I did, although not at first.

At the start-up telecom, I took over a team of people half my age who were still mourning the demotion of their former boss. I worked quickly to help them accept the inevitability of change, to bond as a team and to make their hard work more visible and recognized by other departments. It was an exciting time of innovation and teamwork.

Then the telecom bubble burst, the company never developed the expected training department in which I’d hoped to secure a position. Overnight my skills in education, business, training and organization were suddenly not as valuable as the ability to troubleshoot channel failures on a T-1. I was crushed. At the prison and at Verizon I was accustomed to receiving accolades from bosses and upper management as I made positive and measurable changes. Now suddenly I was marginalized and pressured to leave. I tried to read technical manuals and texts to get up to speed on telecom technology, but the learning curve was too long in a start-up that needed results THIS quarter. In the pre-dawn darkness I soon found I could run 6 miles at a good pace while simultaneously crying - - hard.

Telecom industry layoffs closed the door to any hope of returning to Verizon, so I began to surf Monster.com. I found an advertisement for a principal position at Prospect School, an “alternative” school for “at-risk” children in Central Florida. Given my background, this seemed like a reasonable fit. Also my family has a great love of Disney world so the possibility of moving 75 minutes away from Mickey & Co. was quite intriguing! I sent my resume to Prospect’s parent company, Ebencorp, a private, non-profit corporation headquartered in Tampa, Florida. I was chosen for a phone interview followed by a site visit.

Once there was a prep school on this campus

Prospect’s campus was so dilapidated, I almost decided against the job before the interview started. Truly it could double as the set for Hogan’s Heroes. As you pull in the rutted, potholed driveway, on your left are six portables: “south campus.” These single-wide aging trailers are arranged in two rows with a walkway down the center. Between the portables is some trampled grass, mostly dirt and a lot of anthills. Each portable has a front and rear entrance with wooden steps. In the public schools the portables are usually newer and the perimeters are flanked by foundation shrubs or skirting. Prospect has neither. You can look under the portables and see garbage, dirt, bugs, feral cats, pencils, wadded up schoolwork and from time to time a runaway student.

As you move north from south campus, you pass the baseball diamond and rounding the curve you see a dilapidated greenhouse followed by three portables in a row behind cyclone fencing. The first portable is Prospect’s main office, the next two are elementary classrooms. They look much like the portables on south campus except since they have been around longer, there is more debris underneath them. Students rarely hide under the north campus portables. Continuing along the road you come to the bus circle. There is a large tree in the middle with Spanish moss drooping from the branches. To your right is a small cinderblock building with a front and back cafeteria, the back cafeteria is a former storeroom with no windows. There is an old kitchen between these rooms but there is no cooking or cleaning equipment, just a food warmer, a refrigerator and a chiller. Behind these rooms is the orientation classroom, also windowless. Next to this building is a tennis court, which has seen better days, and a basketball court. The nets on both courts need repair. Next to the basketball court are two more portables; the first is a combination library (with no books), nurse’s sick room (with no nurse) and transportation office. The second is the counseling/discipline office. Across from these portables is the main cinderblock building.

The main building has 16 classrooms, eight in front, and eight in back. Prospect occupies a total of six classrooms, three in the front and three in the back, all on the east end of the building. The remaining ten classrooms belong to Haven High, the public alternative high school with whom Prospect shares a campus. There are two student restrooms and two staff restrooms. Haven High also has a main office with five private offices and a lounge. There is a custodial break room and two offices for custodians. There is no interior hallway; all classrooms have two doors, a few feet apart, which open onto a covered breezeway. The pale yellow paint is peeling on the cinderblock buildings and Prospect students have added to the decay with graffiti. If you walk south and west from the cinderblock building you’ll come to a parking lot (Haven High students only) and then to a beach volleyball court and a football field.

The steps to Prospect’s main office, nestled between one of the elementary portables and the former greenhouse, are a little rickety and the corrugated metal roof above the door slants hard to the right. I’m told this is intentional (the roof not the steps) to direct the rain away from the steps. There are no windows on the front of the office; you have to open the door to see the campus. The portable is about fifteen feet wide by twenty-five feet long. There are no interior walls, so filing cabinets and bookcases are used to divide the portable into three spaces. The front half is the reception area complete with a desk and a large conference table. The back half is divided into two sections: one space for the principal and one for the business manager/secretary/receptionist. Some of the bookcases are six feet high but the filing cabinets are shorter, about four feet. This furniture provides only the illusion of privacy; every conversation, except one in an extreme whisper, can be heard by everyone in this portable. This portable also has a bathroom (complete with ants and palmetto bugs) and a storage closet. Like a child who has made a fort from a table and blankets, the principal sits at a desk surrounded by tall furniture, talking to parents, students and staff and maintaining the pretence of being in a real office.

When I arrive, Dr. Sheila Harvey, my interviewer, determines the lack of privacy in the main office necessitates a move to the custodian’s break room. We sit at a table next to a vending machine, frequently stopping our conversation when custodians and bus drivers stop by to buy a soda. Despite the interruptions, my face-to-face interview with Dr. Sheila Harvey makes me forget the rotting wood, peeling paint and the barracks atmosphere. Sheila and I bond over our shared passion for helping the toughest, most “hopeless” children. We talk for hours about curriculum, programs, extended school days, anger replacement training, teacher training – I feel I would be really fortunate to be able to work for and with this incredible woman.

On the flight home with my husband, the opportunity costs for this decision coalesce. On one hand I have a chance to find joy in my work again, on the other hand if I am working in Florida while my husband’s job remains in New York, we would only see each other on weekends. On one hand if I remain in my current position I’ll be miserable and the writing on the wall says I‘ll soon be fired, on the other hand I’ll take a substantial pay cut to become Prospect principal. My husband and I are not wishy-washy and make decisions easily. By the time our plane lands in New York we know I’ll accept the job if and when it is formally offered. It is, I do.

All in the family

So there I am on my first day at Prospect finding out I was loathed before I arrived. It is like a twist on killing the messenger: no one really believed I was responsible for the departure of Mel, my predecessor, or that I played any role in his exit. But the people at Ebencorp Headquarters in Tampa who forced Mel to resign were too far away and too anonymous to effectively hate. The staff could never gain any satisfaction from carrying out acts of revenge on these real foes of Mel. Since Mel’s “enemies” selected me to be the replacement principal, by association I became the enemy.

Staff loyalty to Mel was deeper than one would expect. I soon learned why: Mel was related to some staff members (he was their father, brother-in-law, cousin), he was the therapist for others and a friend to the rest. Mel never hired a stranger to work at Prospect. The fact that the skills, education and talents of Mel’s friends, family and patients frequently didn’t match their Prospect positions never troubled him. Mel felt justified in bending, breaking or ignoring rules as long as he was true to his own principles. Mel-morality dictated that to give an unemployed friend a paying job was more important than following a bunch of bureaucratic hiring procedures. Mel’s personal moral code was imprinted everywhere at Prospect from repairing busses (he didn’t), implementing grants (he didn’t believe he was required to follow any of the guidelines), assigning grades (based on hunches, not assignments or test scores) to promoting students (see grading system) and approving employee time off (tell Mel a tale of woe, get extra days off).

In my first year at Prospect, Mel’s disregard for rules, the problematic precedents he set and the paperwork he neglected, would create hours of headaches for me. But worse than all that was the way his absence in and of itself made the staff feel every time they looked at me.

As I stood before them on that first day, in the ramshackled trailer that was my office, they saw: an educated northerner with a “Yankee” accent, a female boss determined to follow rules and make changes, and simply “not Mel.” To make matters worse, I had the distinct misfortune of having to enforce one rule immediately: with the school year ending two days after I began, it fell to me to “remind” the faculty they were all working under twelve month contracts and didn’t have the summer off. Of course, Mel had already told them they did. We were not off to a good start.