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.”

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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.