Second Chances

The year that this was all going on—2004-05 school year—I kept a diary of what was going on and it actually continued into the next year, until I got to page 824 and got an electronic warning message on my computer that the file was too big and in danger of crashing.

I haven’t looked much at what I wrote, mostly just calling upon what I remembered, but recently I started scrolling through it to help with that remembering. I saw the name Kevin Moncrief [not really, I changed the name] and stopped to read about his antics that fall.

Kevin had graduated in 2003 after four tumultuous years vexing teachers—including one short-timer who attributed his departure from MCHS to his dealings with Kevin—with his smart mouth and mischief, smoking weed, selling weed, breaking hearts—inspiring girls to fight each other—organizing crap games and card games, sports books, and pay-per-view live boxing in the handicapped stall of the men’s room.

His mother was secretary to one of the college vice presidents, one of many college employees who enrolled their children or other relatives at MCHS. LA Southwest College didn’t want us in its midst but the people who worked for the college kept entrusting us with their children.

Since "graduation," Kevin had been a full-time LA Southwest student and for all we knew was still selling drugs to some of our students. He had at least one girlfriend attending our school. A year ago, his first year after graduation, he’d spend a semester as a uniformed police cadet on campus writing parking tickets on the cars of HS teachers he hadn’t much liked and harassing the basketball team on which he’d once played. When they stood up to him, he’d called for backup. Three squad cars of LA County Sheriffs descended on my basketball practice (I think one or two might have still had powdered sugar and jelly on their mustaches) and nearly made two arrests before realizing that their cadet had been abusing his uniform and his radio.

Kevin made it up to his former teammates, though, donating his DJ services during our first game of last season, scratching and bumping records and taunting the players on the other team with his microphone until a referee ejected him from the building.

Now, a year later, he seemed to have sobered—in pretty much every way. I saw him sitting on the wheelchair ramp shredding documents outside the registration bungalow. I teased him about the cigarette in his hand. He says, “Yeah, I got to quit or I’ll end up looking as old as you.” He’s never formally thanked me or Ms. Jackson or anyone else for all the second and third and fourth chances we gave him at MCHS, all the encouragement and tolerance and second chances, including the letter I wrote to a judge on his behalf after he got arrested the first week of his senior year. And I’m not sure he quite saw the irony now, in the fall of 2005, when he said, as I was walking away, “Hey, I hear y’all about to get kicked out of here.”

Last month Kevin came back to MCHS—after more than seven years. He returned as a volunteer drug counselor, preaching sobriety to our students. He gave a presentation in my homeroom and a few others. I watched him nervously talking to my students. Afterwards, I showed him where our new school building is going to be. He was very excited for us.

Short-Timers

At the rate I’m going, the new Middle College HS will be completed long before I finish telling the story of how it got there. But maybe I can step up the pace a little though there is a part of me that wants to tell the whole story of the school, everything I can remember from every year—and I know that as I skip ahead, some students will feel left out. But, again, I invite anyone reading this to add their recollections and insights to the story, a story which is anything but mine alone to tell.

I often find myself explaining to students, teachers, and others how it is that our school has changed over the years—and I wonder always whether those changes were for the best.

A few years ago, when our students were getting mugged regularly by students from nearby Henry Clay Middle School and Washington High School I was reminded of how, the year I came to MCHS, some of our students were banished from a daily school bus for picking on students from Washington.

How did we go from being (our students anyway) the bullies to the bullied?

It was a fairly slow process—and perhaps an inevitable one. My wife who worked at the original Middle College HS in New York saw a similar thing happen there—the school’s concept of “at risk” broadening to accommodate teacher and administrator temperament. She saw it happen at another alternative school in New York City. Other alternative educators we know tell similar stories.

It goes something like this:

-A school opens to served students no one else is serving—at risk, undisciplined, violent (I can recall at least half a dozen of our students who had come to MCHS after assaulting a teacher or administrator at another high school).

-The school may have success with some, perhaps even most, of its students, but never all of them and the losses are sometimes heartbreaking. The work is rewarding but extremely challenging and quite draining.

-Less challenging students begin to find their way to the school—either because the school is convenient, because it is small, because they know someone attending the school, or, as in our case, this school with all these dangerous and potentially dangerous students ironically—because of being small and having a really committed staff—becomes a relatively safe school.

-These less challenging students make the more challenging ones seem like even more of a burden.

-Teachers burn out—or leave for other reasons—and the new teachers have no ownership (and may even have no knowledge) of the original mission. Tolerance for the most challenging students continue to erode.

-Policies are enacted to kick students out of the school that was supposed to be a school for students who had been kicked out of somewhere else.

-Intake policies keeping those challenging students from ever entering the school.

In our case much of this was justified by our desire to please LA Southwest College so that they would tolerate our school’s existence. So it is ironic that in 2005 they conspired to obliterate us anyway.

I wonder sometimes whether we could have won the battle to save our school if we’d stuck to our original mission—or if we would even have lasted until 2005. I doubt it.

I suppose one could argue that we hadn’t abandoned our mission at all, that we still did—and still do—serve at risk students. In South L.A., pretty much everyone is at risk. And many of our students still come from difficult situations—single-parent or no parent, foster care, poverty, abuse. They’ve seen and been victimized by violence. But most of the students we see now have never been sucked under by the streets, a testament to their own resilience and perhaps their parents or guardians and some teachers they had before coming to our school. One of those teachers, Mr. Negrete—who a number of our students have credited with helping them survive three years at Bethune Middle School—is a 1992 graduate of ours.

Still, when I think about that original mission of MCHS—to help at risk student with academic potential who might be awakened in a college environment—I cannot help thinking about two of the smartest young men we had and how one ended up a career sailor never attending college and the other is in a federal penitentiary.

My Boucher and I and some of the other old-timers used to argue with our newer colleagues about preserving—or going back to—or original mission and about the identity of our school but maybe we were just being romantic about it. Maybe we were never as good as we thought we were at helping the most at-risk students. We definitely got to some of them and made a difference but we lost a lot of them too. Some came back years later and said that we had helped them even though it hadn’t seemed like it at the time. One guy said that he’d spent three years in prison and that while he was alone in his thoughts during those years, he kept hearing our voices and that it had meant a lot to him.

I don’t begrudge any student who has ever attended our school and I’m honored to teach every class assigned to me—and my job, of course, is much easier now that I am teaching students who are more easily motivated—but sometimes I see those lost boys (and girls) strutting past our school toward Henry Clay MS or Washington HS and I wish someone was doing more for them. And I’m afraid that once our beautiful new building is up, there will be even less chance of us ever helping anyone like that again.

By the fall of 2004, the beginning of the school year we were told would be our school’s last—about half the teachers who had been my mostly crazy and idealistic colleagues when I came to Middle College were gone. Burn-out, career ambition, retirement.

Most were replaced, at least for a while, by what Charlap [my English-teaching colleague] called, “Short-timers.” Longterm sub wouldbe actors and musicians, deadbeats and revolutionaries or just regular teachers unable to put up with the disorder and intenseness of working in a small school with no buffer between us and the students.

Battersbee herself had retired in 2002 and some of us had wondered then what would become of our school. Her replacement, Pam Jackson had seemed, at first, determined to whip us into shape—but seemed almost immediately to appreciate what we’d been doing and became our strongest ally. She organized things and figured out ways to get us in compliance with the education code we’d for so long been ignoring, but she did it in a way that didn’t intrude on our free-wheeling style. She found filled the gaps in our staff with teachers who mostly fit in with all us passionate misfits and brought stability to the faculty. She used to tell us that Middle College was the best place anyone could ever work and most of us agreed with her. She used to say that when she was really old that this was the place she was going to, in her senile delirium, insist she needed to go.

Still, in the fall of 2004 she was philosophical about our impending demise. She had been a student, a teacher, and an administrator in the LA Unified School District for most of her life and understood the political concrete of this bureaucracy—and of the LA Community College District, which had once been part of LAUSD.

She did, however, enroll the largest freshman class in our school’s history—nearly 120 of them (to replace only about 80 graduating seniors)—in the fall of 2004. She told some of us, in private, that if the school districts intended to shut us down, she wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them.

I remember, in mid-September, when she confirmed all the rumors and told all those 9^th graders that they and their parents needed to start thinking about another school for next year. Some of the kids seemed not to be able to get their minds around it—they couldn’t think that far ahead—while others looked visibly scared. Some cursed aloud to express their anger and Ms. Jackson told them they should be angry and that they could direct their anger at her but that they needed to continue to work hard and have a good school year no matter what happened. One girl checked out of the school the next day and enrolled at Washington High School a few blocks away. She returned a day after that, begging Jackson to let her back in. Later, the girl described to me classes in disarray and a lunchtime food fight that had left her and others covered in macaroni and cheese.

A few days after that, a former student from the early 90s approached me with his nephew who his family was desperate to get into our school after he’d been repeatedly beaten, robbed, and threatened at his neighborhood high school. This happened at least once every year and Pam was almost always sympathetic. This year we had to caution the boy and his family that we could not offer him more than one year.

But mostly we all went about our business and the ticking clock became white noise while we all but forgot that we were now all short-timers.

The Spot

I‘m not sure whether this photo was taken my first day at MCHS but I’m pretty sure it was my first week. A lot of these guys had a rough road but I hear from a few and they still remember all the fun we had inventing a basketball team out of nothing.

A few years after that picture was taken, the backboards and their poles were uprooted and the yard filled up with old equipment and furniture and other trash. We called it the “bone yard,” and occasionally found treasures we could recycle for our classrooms. Years later the refuse was cleared from that spot and a shipping and receiving dock was built there. Now that structure has been demolished to make way for our new school building.


I paid some serious dues my months at MCHS.

Those overpopulated classes were like teaching in a crowded elevator. They wore me out. I knew I wasn’t reaching everyone and it weighed on me. I tried to keep them all busy and on task. I gave out jobs—writing discussion notes on the board, passing out this, collecting that, looking up words, I even assigned one boy to perform sound effects if we read a story aloud. When, toward the end of one short story we were reading, a car exploded, my sound-effects master detonated a firecracker.

My room became a lunchtime hangout, and then I never had a break from the kids—from their noise, their hysteria, and their profane bravado—but it was what I needed, to be immersed in the energy of the kids. Those chaotic lunches provided teaching opportunities. Students encircled my desk and we would talk—and they would listen much better than during class, and I began to believe that I could do more teaching in these informal moments, once the charade of a class no longer bound me or my students. I broke up fights by hurling my body between the slugging students and miraculously never got seriously hurt. It was the thing I did best, and I had a lot of practice—probably because I never reported the fights and thus the kids knew they could do battle in my room with impunity. Sometimes I had to chase after a boy to talk him out of “dropping a dime,” calling “the homies” in order to carry out some vengeance for an offense no one would probably ever remember. I should have reported anyone who threatened to make such a call but I believed so strongly in the underlying goodness of these kids that I just wasn’t willing to give up on anyone, even if it meant risking my safety, my credential, and the lives of a lot of people I had no business risking. Thank God nothing ever happened because of my recklessness.

It almost did. One day a huge fight involving six guys wound up in my room. It had started outside and then moved like a hurricane through several other rooms before bursting through the door of mine as if into a safe house. Before I could intervene a police officer charged in and grabbed one of the combatants. The young man struggled and the cop put him in a choke hold. The students in my class that period, already terrified —though also exhilarated—watched in horror as one of their peers fought against the night stick at his throat. I pleaded with the officer to let go, to ease up, but he seemed, like the student, to be caught in an adrenal trance. I yelled at the young man to stop, to relax, but that seemed impossible. I leaned up to his ear and in an irrational but inspired moment, whispered to him:

“We love you, man. Everybody loves you.”

I hardly knew him, just from those ragged basketball practices. But those simple words from a virtual stranger meant something to him in that moment. He stopped fighting—and the officer stopped trying to kill him.

Battersbee had a zero-tolerance policy about fighting and so all six of those boys were kicked out of the school. One of them died of AIDS a few years later. Another went to jail a few weeks later. The day after that Roger Butcher and I drove to his grandmother’s house to retrieve the basketball uniform we’d issued him for our upcoming season. Someone fired a gun somewhere behind us as we stood on his porch. We didn’t think it was at us. We stood there together and smiled at each other stupidly while the grandmother looked through her linen closet.

The boy who was almost choked to death—I’ll call him Brian Thomas (not his real name)—was exiled to a continuation school but told he could come back at the end of the semester if he’d exhibited good behavior. There was no other safe high school for him. He’d severed his gang affiliation and now Crips and Bloods alike considered him an enemy.

I let him continue to practice with the basketball team, even though he no longer attended our school. It was the only thing that mattered to him. He had been the one who’d organized the team, who’d gotten all the other boys to agree to practice together and had then badgered Mr. Butcher to be their coach. After practice one day, Brian got in another fight and knocked a teammate down. I helped cover that up. I was so impressed with Brian’s courage—to me he was such a magnificent exemplar for having defected from the cycle of gang violence that in one way or another plagued virtually every student at our school. What did a few post-gang punches matter? He didn’t seem to know how else to respond to conflict. Someone had to teach him. I didn’t know how to do that. I just knew I wanted him to have the chance. And if, in the meantime, he killed someone, (he had been convicted of murder when he was eleven), then the blood would be on my hands.

For those of you waiting for me to get through all this history and tell the story of how we saved the school, I’m almost there—I think. But it is important to note that 2005 was not the first time MCHS was nearly closed. That first semester, in the fall of 1992, LA Southwest College informed us that they would be demolishing the old bungalows that housed our school. The rumor spread wildly throughout the school and students bolted from classrooms as if from a bomb scare. Kids were crying in the office. We tried to reassure them but no ne of had much faith in our future. Soon the turmoil of our students’ lives eclipsed the crisis of our school, which was all but forgotten. And then somehow the college forgot to demolish the bungalows—or just changed their minds and forgot to tell us.

Reaching for the Sky

This morning, the construction crew raised the crane that will help build our new school. Dark clouds enshrouded for awhile but soon the sun burned through and the yellow steel glinted against a blue sky. I remember, in the spring of 2005, how insulted our students felt that our classrooms would be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Soon I’ll be able to look out from my new classroom and see that parking lot and remember when we fought for those crappy old bungalows. I’ll also remember my first days at Middle College. The Friday before my first day, I was invited to the faculty meeting.

When I arrived, teachers were filing into Principal Battersbee’s office for a meeting, walking up the concrete steps the led directly into her third of a dilapidated gray bulgalow. Inside, a thin layer of carpet lay over the plywood floor. Old metal chairs were arranged in a semi-circle. Battersbee introduced me to the rest of the staff as the bright new instructor who was going to finally bring some fresh teaching to our school. Afterwards, no one would speak to me.

I got a key to what would be my classroom. It was a disaster in there. Junk was piled high in the corners, including a shattered old console TV. Graffiti scrawled across one wall. It said, “SHOOT TO KILL.” The word “Gumby” was carved into several desks. At first I didn’t notice the substitute teacher I was replacing, a short bald guy with an angry face. He sat on an uneven table and seemed to blend in against the dirty white wall. He ate a burrito and waited for 3 p.m. so that he could collect the full day’s sub pay. He glared at me with puffy eyes and flicked bits of rice off his bushy mustache, then he got up and chucked a ball of foil through the open doorway and followed me around the room as I tried to get oriented. He told me that he’d been there two weeks and was glad to be leaving.

“These kids are nasty,” he said. “They don’t want to learn.” He said they accused him of racism, then showed me a snapshot of his wedding to a black woman. He said that the teacher before him had been driven from the class by “bad kids.”

I rearranged some frayed paperback books on a dented metal bookshelf. Stenciled on the top in dingy white spray paint was “South Gate HS.” Some of the books had that same insignia stamped on them. Others wore the insignia of Jordan HS, Hope High School, Rollin 60s, East Coast Crips, Main Street Bloods.

Kevin Kennedy came up the crumbling steps and introduced himself to me. He was a stocky man, a cannonball with waves of gray hair and a Santa Claus beard. He’d been a teacher since the early 1970s, started out at Jordan HS in Watts, then Polytechnic in the east San Fernando Valley where he’d been head football coach. Battersbee had referred to him as the assistant principal, though I later found out the title was fake. He was a teacher. Battersbee was exploiting his career ambitions in order to make him do some of her administrative work. He wanted me to know about the school, that things weren’t exactly the way that Battersbee portrayed them. He tried to be polite about it but I could tell he thought she was full of shit and that I was a fool. He said that giving students the freedom to come and go as they pleased had not—at least not yet—compelled those kids to attend class regularly or take academics seioursly. The sub I was replacing—I think his name was Ron—agreed with Kennedy. He said, bitterly, that these kids were out of control and that if you tried to do anything about it they would call you a racist and the principal would back them up.

Kennedy ignored the guy but I didn’t let it go. I said that it was natural for minority children to play the race card, to test your response. I had learned that much as a student teacher. There were effective ways to trump the race card—if, of course, you really weren’t a racist. That shut the guy up. Kennedy said that these kids mostly led lives of chaos and desperation and came to school in search of stability, structure, and discipline.

“What about inspiration?” I asked.

The sub sneered in the background. Kennedy pulled on his beard and gave me the once-over, as if he’d just noticed I was there.

“Yeah, that sure as fucking hell wouldn’t hurt them.”

Then Kennedy said good luck and left me there.

I took home a wad of unmarked student papers I’d found buried amidst a pile of gummed-up old newspapers and McDonalds wrappers and hoped they would inform me about the students I would face on Monday morning, but without knowing the kids their papers just confused me. Still, I assigned point values to each of them. On Monday morning I told everyone that we would be starting fresh. Those who had been slacking would get a second chance. Those who had turned in work would get extra credit. I was generous with points. What the hell. Then I made a big deal about how this would be their only second chance, and hoped I had the fortitude to back that up. I told my students that I thought it was a terrible thing that the school hadn’t provided them with a reliable English teacher.

“We ran them punks out the classroom,” said a boy named Thomas, a tattooed banger with a lazy eye.

I feigned surprise, told them they all seemed too nice to do such a thing.

That got a laugh, and Thomas’s sidekick, Ernest, said that maybe the same thing would happen to me.

“Well, first,” I said, “I have an assignment for you.”

I asked them to describe my predecessors in this class and what they had been doing. A girl named Maria asked if they could cuss and I made a speech about how profanity was a cop out, a symptom of intellectual atrophy.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

I wasn’t sure where this was going but soon they were all writing. Suddenly I was aching with ideas. Tyranny and liberation through language would be our theme. We would read 1984 and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—though God knows how I would get enough copies. I got a little too excited and tried to tell students of my plans.

“You’re a new teacher, aren’t you?” Maria said, and though I tried to deny it they knew, and then they seemed to forget I was in the room. They were polite about it. No blatant disrespect. They stayed in their seats. But I wasn’t their teacher. They couldn’t trust that I was going to stick around and I couldn’t swear I’d be able to.

It was a strange day—strange and frightening, terrible and revelatory. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing but neither, it seemed, did most of the other teachers. That was invigorating. Try anything. Nothing to lose.

My first class had 32 students. My second class had five. Ten minutes later 25 students were added. Each had a fat stack of assignment sheets called a “contract,” the completion of which would compensate for a class flunked in the 9th grade. Pre-algebra, English, earth science. I was supposed to help them when they needed it and teach my English class at the same time. My next class had 47. Some had to sit on top of someone else’s desk. The class after that had 40. I understood why I was the third teacher this semester. I was surviving, but just barely. At one point, during that fourth class (they called it “4th mod”), I couldn’t get more than half the class quiet at once and a boy named Jerome stood up and approached me. His teeth glinted from the center of his dark face. He wore a huge winter coat with blue Dickeys and matching Chucks (Chuck Taylors, canvas Converse All-Stars, gang shoes). He leaned up to me and whispered:
“I don’t like the way these niggas is disrespecting you. You need to get strapped,” he said, meaning I ought to carry a gun. “I could shut these m’fuckas up with mine.”
I told him no thank you. I thought he might be joking but I didn’t want to know so I didn’t ask. I knew I should have, but I didn’t want to get this kid in trouble. He was the only one so far who had really been nice to me.

I didn’t think I could make it through another overcrowded class so I checked the rosters of my remaining classes. Each listed only one student.

But not for long.

During lunch, Kennedy asked me if I knew anything about basketball. He said that Mr. Butcher, a math teacher, was trying to organize a basketball team and needed some help. After lunch, we “practiced” on a weed-cracked cement court behind the “bone yard” where broken mangled equipment and furniture got piled up. Two backboards faced each other on either side of a jaggedly painted sidelines. The basketball hoops had been stolen and vandalized so many times that we had to hang them up for practice and then take them down afterwards. Only a few guys really knew how to play the game. The rest just slammed each other around and woofed and hollered.

Battersbee found me out there and asked how my classes were going. She reminded me that I was supposed to employ those innovative teaching methods we’d spoken about. This seemed to be a threat. I was working without a contract and could be replaced with a few words and a phone call downtown.

“I want you to do some team teaching,” she said. “We’ve got this really exciting class. It combines English and social studies and foreign language and even some science…. What’s that called archeology or anthropology? The study of bones and culture. It’s called Cultural Heritage class and it’s really going to be great.”

Her voice was as smooth as her polished fingernails. (It turned out that Battersbee herself was supposed to team teach this class but was having second thoughts). She gave me a room number and said, “You’ll be teaching with our foreign language teacher, Ms. Hariton. She’s one of our really dedicated teachers. She’s doing some very special things – especially with some of our Latino students.” She pronounced “Latino” with a Spanish accent.

The basketball hoops took a while to unhinge, so I ended up late to my team teaching assignment. I was filthy and sunburnt, thirsty and out of breath from running there. The door of the bungalow was open and it was dark inside. Coming in from the bright sun I could not, at first, see anything. The collective voices, loud and boisterous and combative surrounded me like a party of ghosts. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw kids sitting in clusters, talking, dealing cards and slamming dominoes, arguing and giggling and smooching. I was nearly hit by a shopping cart with two students hanging from it. Then a pair of rolling office chairs in what seemed to be a demolition derby. There must have been over forty kids in the darkness and I saw no sign of a teacher anywhere.

At the far end of the room was a small television showing something videotaped off PBS: wavy lines, and twisted images of desert landscapes. Loud distortion blurted out in sour spurts. It was as if the teacher – if there really was a teacher in this room – had, rather than try to quiet students, tried to maintain their attention by turning up the volume knob.

There actually was a teacher in the room. A squat woman with narrow shoulders and a big face and huge hair hunched over a small desk in a corner of the room.. A tiny girl sat next to her weeping. The teacher, Ms. Hariton, held the girls hand and tried to console her.

“Maybe you can get them to pay attention,” she said, seeing me. “I’m trying to help Rosa. Her boyfriend was killed by the Florence gang last night. He’s a member of South Los and they’re at war.” She seemed very proud to know all this. “Isn’t that terrible?”

I made eye contact with the poor girl to let her know I sympathized, and tried to imagine what I might do to get everyone to pay attention to those strangled images and strange noises springing from the television – and why anyone would want to pay attention to it. What I really wanted to do was get the hell out of that cave of madness. I thought I’d get fired if I didn’t stay there and “team teach,” whatever that meant, but I was at a complete loss and so instead, I proposed to
Ms. Hariton that we split up the class.

“Oh,” she said and I thought I heard her sneering a little and muttering something about “Mr. Innovative Teacher.” She was probably relieved to be able to get rid of half the kids – and to be able to choose which half. She opened her roll book and started to make a list of the students I would take. At the top of the list was my old friend, Jerome Smith, the boy who had, that morning, offered to brandish a gun in order to assist me with my classroom management. No one ever said anything to me about my refusal to team teach. Nor about anything I did or did not do in my classroom. I could have been teaching straight out of the Communist Manifesto or the Anarchist’s Cookbook. I did, in fact, probably violate some sections of the education code and the school district’s rules that first semester, trying to excite my students about reading and writing. No adults ever visited my classroom. It was just me and the students, and as long as I kept them all confined to the classroom and no one got seriously injured and no one complained about me, it was assumed that I was doing a good job.