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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Ten reasons I’m glad we saved our school:


1—Well, obviously, because now we’re going to get a fancy new building

2—There is still a place for old students to visit the few of us who are still there

3—There is still a place they can go to get transcripts, etc. if they need them for school or work

4—The lunch truck—even though Antonia and Steve are gone and Gabriel is long gone

5—All the students who, since 2005, have graduated with an AA degree, a year or two of college, or just simply graduated ready for college

6—All the students who would have got beaten down and/or shaken down at their home school. (I won’t name them but they know who they are)

7—It’s fun to go to a school in which the students know more about what is going on than the teachers, a place where we’re not always sure what the schedule is or which room our class is going to meet

8—All the ironies of Middle College and all the laughs, though not nearly as many without Charlap

9—All the crazy angry goofy freshmen

10—The sophomoric sophomores—wearing their immaturity like a badge of honor

11—The juniors seizing their moment—taking over the school, plotting to take over the world

12—The seniors thinking school is already over, remembering it’s not and turning in reams of last minute work, chasing after me as I turn out of the school driveway and tossing their papers into the open window of my car

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Lame Duck School


The first battles we had to were for our school’s immediate survival. July—and the demolition of our decrepit building—was a long way off. Meanwhile, we had already been abandoned by L.A. Southwest College—President Levy having essentially served us our eviction notice for July 1st 2005—and by the Los Angeles Unified School District which had made no effort to fight the eviction or to figure out an alternative to keep our school open.

The college now refused to accept our incoming mail. That could sabotage our seniors applying for college and for financial aid.

The plant facilities department ignored all requests for repairs or maintenance on our buildings or the broken air-conditioners of our mostly windowless bungalows.

LA Unified wasn’t authorizing any new expenditure. The previous spring I’d spent about three hours filling out the paper work to order books for the AP Literature class I was now supposed to be teaching; those orders had never been processed. Nor the orders for any other new books for our lame duck school.

Meanwhile, hundreds of new algebra books sent by the district, ordered from the central office for every high school—none of which had requested them. Non-returnable—charged to the school’s text book account.

$4,000,000 worth. The district official responsible for this was, according to the Los Angeles Times, later investigated for fraud.

Mostly we had to battle against our own resignation—pretend our school had a future so we could be of some use to our students.

They didn’t know this was our last year—at least they weren’t supposed to know.

Ms. Jackson had us in her office at lunch the second day of school to say that she would get the AC running in our rooms and take care of any other problems if she had to fix them herself or beat someone over the head with a 2x4.

“If anyone from this college or from LA Unified or anyplace else gives me any procedural nonsense, I will hurt them.”

She moved among us with her usual swagger, the one that said I am trying to do right by these children our children—and everyone better get the fuck out of my way. Pam Jackson had grown up in this community. She’d attended local schools and eventually worked as an assistant principal at Markham Middle School, one of the roughest in the country. She had chased drug dealers and gangbangers and sexual deviants off that school’s perimeter. She’d seen a courier executed in front of the student store and then counseled children who had also witnessed it, and a lot of other brutality. She was demanding and could even be harsh with some kids but not nearly as harsh as she could be with lazy, incompetent, cynical, or stupid so-called educators.

She promised to stay all weekend if necessary to get things working right around our school. She said, “I don’t care if the school is going to close next month or next week. The problems need to get fixed and they will get fixed.”

We knew her promise was good. It always had been.

That was a reassuring thought—also a scary one. Some of the teachers in that room had never worked for another principal.

Some of us had.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

September in the Dark


We weren’t even supposed to know that our school was doomed, that 2004-05 was likely to be our last year together as a school. But our principal, Pamela Jackson, told us anyway. She said our classrooms were slated for demolition on the first of July 2005 and that Los Angeles Southwest College—which had let us use these dilapidated, termite-infested, leaky bungalows for 16 years—had given notice that there would be no place for us next fall. Room 823 was one of the nicer of these bungalows. It was where we held staff meetings. The room was bright with stale air. The plywood walls, painted mucous green, were bare except for a single poster with warnings in English and Spanish about STDs. “I think I know where I’m going if this place closes,” Ms. Jackson told us. The raspiness in her voice seemed to come from the rocking of her body. She bounced as she talked. “I suggest that you all have a contingency plan figured out for yourselves. I’ll certainly do whatever I can to assist you. Recommendation letters, phone calls, whatever.”

We all sat there taking this in, considering our options.

Must have been ten or twelve high schools closer to my house than this one. Venice High School was within walking distance. But if I had wanted to leave I would have done so already. Bob Hart, who taught World History and PE, lived near Frazier Park, eighty-five miles north. Physics and Chemistry teacher, Sherwin Boucher, lived in West Covina, ninety minutes away. Tenth grade English teaching Charles Charlap had the worst commute. He came from Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County. Sometimes, on Friday afternoon, it took him more than three hours to get home.

Next on the agenda: a review of our school’s emergency evacuation plans so that if there was an earthquake or terrorist attack we would know the route by which to lead students outside. This bulletin cautioned us not to go inside a collapsing structure to save anyone and this suggestion, that we would ever, for any reason, leave a student behind when he or she most needed us, was intolerable.

“What happened to No Child Left Behind?” someone joked, but there was no laughter.

“Maybe in a big high school,” said Tracy Jaffe, our foreign language teacher,, “where nobody knows anyone, but you can’t tell me that if Bryan Hernandez or Deara Okonkwo or Terence Roberts were pinned beneath a fallen ceiling, pleading for help with an outstretched hand that any of us would turn our backs on them.”

_____________________

At eight in the morning on the first day of the 2004-05 school year, my classroom was packed with 54 new students, eighteen of them standing smashed against each other at the back of the room. This was my new homeroom. They seemed shell-shocked to be in this barely-illuminated hellhole with this white guy with white hair welcoming them with a manic smile and sweat-stains under the arms of a faded polo shirt and trying to pronounce their names off a green temporary roll sheet. Some of the boys were so tiny I wondered how they had survived three years at Gompers or Clay or Markham or Harte Middle School.

These 54 boys and girls had chosen to escape what would otherwise be another four years of mediocrity and miseducation. They had applied to come to our school, where they could get a pretty decent education in relative (comparative) tranquility and even get a head start on college. Middle College high schools merge the last three years of high school with the first two years of college so that students can potentially graduate high school with enough credits to be juniors in college. I think, however, that most of these students, having been herded into my dilapidated class room, were wondering if they had made a terrible mistake.

The windowless room was dark – with more than twenty of the 42 florescent sticks unilluminated. Last June it was worse; I think only ten bulbs worked and I’d had to suspend enforcement of the no cell-phone rule so that students could use the devises like flashlights by which to read and write. Unable to get a maintenance worker to help, our principal had bought some bulbs herself and we had tried replacing them but most of the ballasts, it seemed, were broken. Around the fixtures stretched a ceiling encrusted with water stains and mold and rusting air-ducts from a broken air-conditioner. The plywood walls had been painted a rough coat of military green. Strange electric wires jutted out of the leftover fixtures of a 1960’s electronics class; crusty plastic knobs, corroded sockets and terminals, and rotary telephone dialers lined the walls. Exposed wires had been disconnected from their source of electricity – I had tested each one with my fingers – but new students always seemed wary.

Termites lived in the doors and sections of the wall. Ant colonies and fleas thrived beneath the floor. A community of rodents had also flourished since 1999, when all the feral cats were captured and removed. Our Spanish teacher back then, Nikki Hariton, who had been feeding the cats, took home as many as she could rescue. For a few years after that, an occasional mouse or rat would poke its head through one of the holes in the floor. Students would try to stomp them with their feet or smack them with a rolled up notebook. It was perhaps the only commonality our school had with an amusement park – and it ceased three years ago when Ms. Jackson became principal and went to great lengths to have fresh, speckled linoleum laid down.
I began the task of separating and distributing computer-generated class schedules to each of the 54 students, whose names I did not know – Alex Gonzales, Antonio Gonzales, Kathy Gomez, Moses Harris, Aisha Henderson…. – while the temperature seemed to rise at the rate of one degree per minute. These kids had probably all spent plenty of time in overheated classrooms. I certainly had. There were once windows in this 1960s box; their shattered remains were now encased in plywood.

I made an effort to memorize their names while handing out class schedules – Isaiah Moldanado, Tomika Nelson, Ismelda Núñez, Paulina Ortiz…. We were going to be together for the next four years, meeting every day for announcements and attendance and the sustained silent reading program Pam Jackson had instituted last year to improve student comprehension. My last homeroom had graduated two and-a-half months ago and I missed them. I could still remember their first day, their apprehensions along with their lack of self-control. Most were in college now; many were the first in their families to accomplish that. A few had sent me excited E-mails over the past few weeks. I thought for a moment about how similar transformations awaited these new kids, and realized, almost immediately, what I’d forgotten, the thing I wasn’t supposed to tell them – and remembering made it difficult to look at them. They seemed to sense my shame. Some boys along the back row found that funny but everyone else seemed nervous. A girl – it was Paula Ortiz, though I did not remember her name at the moment – yelled at me. She said, “You look really sick, sir. You should go to the hospital. My seventh grade social studies teacher he died right there in the classroom. It wasn’t no joke.”

Then everyone was very quiet, including me. In our silence, I could hear something – a pigeon or a bat, a high-pitched groan – from inside the rusty vents of the broken AC.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

A Light in the Darkness


That 2004-05 school year, the one that was going to be our last one together, I fielded our first cross country team. I’d been wanting to try it for a few years—get our winter athletes in shape and maybe we had some really good distance runners in our midst.

For uniforms the kids wore unmarked reversibles someone had donated to the school years ago. I’d found them in a storage closet. I bought them gray basketball shorts from a discount store in the garment district. Back in June, our principal had said I could order new uniforms for the new team, but now, with it looking like this would be our first and last season, the local district had cautioned her not to buy any materials or equipment.

At the first meet, one of the coaches from Dorsey warned me that the cross country officials were fussy about runners being properly attired—said they would probably disqualify our runners—but no one seemed to care much about what we were doing, our small team in their raggedy anonymity.

The great thing about Cross Country is that anyone can compete and pretty much without the usual mortification that sports is so good at providing. The races for all the different leagues start every five to ten minutes—so that even a kid who is five or ten or fifteen minutes slower than the rest of the pack will still finish along with some other runners. Comically, a kid running the three miles in over 25 minutes will sprint to the finish line to hold off someone running the same race in under twenty. Afterwards, they often shake hands.

The third week of the regular season, our lack of speed was exposed when our girls varsity race was the last of the meet. Our girls, EG and RD, were so far behind the officials forgot about them (or just didn't want to wait) and packed up their finish line and headed for their cars.

EG and RD were running in virtual darkness—the sun having set behind the tops of the Hollywood Hill.

But they kept running.

Other teams were already on their buses, belching their noxious fumes into the air as they pulled out of the parking lot.

But EG and RD kept going—running toward the imaginary finish line.

We gathered around it and cheered them on as they made the final push and crossed it, collapsing on the scarred grass.

Inspiration— a reminder that we had to keep pushing to keep our school together, even if we couldn’t see or imagine how that was possible.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

An Encouraging Site (and Sight)


I almost didn’t notice the piles of dirt that now represent the future of our high school, the demolition site that has been twenty years in the making. A lot can happen in the two years it is supposed to take for that building to be completed. But the dirt and the rubble are an encouraging sight.

Half of the teachers at our school weren’t with us the year that was very nearly our last. None of our students were. Neither was our principal.

It was five years ago and perhaps it’s time to forget the whole thing—but I’m not going to.

Somehow it doesn’t seem right. The students—and to some extent, their parents, and perhaps also some of us on the faculty and our principal at the time Pam Jackson—kept this school open. If they (if we) hadn’t, there wouldn’t be a pile of dirt and a set of fancy blue prints for us now.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of education: South Central Los Angeles—where the official dropout rate is fifty percent and the actual one is near seventy percent; where matriculation to college is talked about constantly but achieved rarely because many students cannot, on their first try, pass a high school exit exam that could more accurately be given as a high school entrance test; where a lunchtime dance or a pep rally or a cultural celebration can turn suddenly into a race riot; where school colors and gang colors are the same; where actual lockdowns happen more often than lockdown drills; where drug dealers sometimes show up for career day just to “keep it real;” where it is not uncommon for twenty percent of a school’s teachers to be out on stress leave at any given time, and for corruption on all levels to be rampant and unchecked.

So what happens to a high school that graduates more than ninety-five percent of its students, most of whom go on to universities and do not engage in ethnic violence or gang banging, and whose state test scores far outpace the surrounding neighborhood high schools, the district as a whole, and even the state and national averages? What happens to a school like this?

It gets closed down, of course...

…almost.