Laying the Foundation

I want to be clear about this—

The college president who tried to kick our school off the LA Southwest Campus is no longer the president of Southwest College and the current college president, Dr. Jack E. Daniels, had nothing to do with that policy. Daniels, in fact, is part of the reason we are getting a new building—for which, as you can see from this photo, the tractors are laying the foundation .

Let me also make clear that the manager of plant facilities, the man responsible for the awful conditions of our classrooms in the fall of 2004, is also, thank God, no longer an employee of LA Southwest. The current facilities manager, Randy Craig, is not only extremely competent and professional but a really decent guy.

Institutions and their problems may be larger than individuals—but sometimes people can make a world of difference.

The LAUSD superintendent who was willing to let our school close—either out of indifference or ignorance—retired from that post not long after and his replacement has since resigned. The current superintendent, Ramon Cortinez, has much larger problems to confront right now than the fate of a school with 350 students. Still, when I see those tractors and bulldozers out there every day making way for our new building, I’m glad he’s our superintendent.

I did not imagine any of this would be possible back in September of 2004 when we were like the citizens of an abandoned city.

By the end of that first week, on a sweltering Friday afternoon, my classroom was been overrun by ants.

I emptied a can of Raid in there, closed the door, and met students outside, escorting them to the nearby covered eating area. Plastic cutlery and Styrofoam plates still littered the blue plastic bird-shitted picnic tables where our students were served their federally funded lunch each day.

This was my journalism class. I handed out a questionnaire for them to answer about where they got their news and why newspapers are so important to us. Students complained about having to “do work” on the first day of class and having to do work on Friday afternoon and having to do anything outside, but eventually they were all writing something in their notebooks—or pretending to. Their answers were predictable—and so, probably, were my responses to them. I told everyone how fortunate they were to be in this class and how it made them reporters on our school’s weekly newspaper. There was mild enthusiasm, then the usual questions about how they would be graded. Some students said they didn’t want to be reporters. They hadn’t chosen to be in this class, had no interest in journalism, and demanded to be told the minimum requirements to earn a B or C.

I used to get tired of this argument and think it would be better to reserve the school paper for those with an interest and aptitude. I’d imagine what this publication could become in the hands of our school’s best writers and most active citizens. But in our school, (and perhaps in most, if not all, urban high schools), elective classes do not exist so that students can explore their interests. They exist as a safety net in the schedule, the place where students without a class that period can be deposited.

As usual, my new class told me that last year’s newspaper was boring, what the school needed was a gossip paper—after all, rumors are way more interesting than well-investigated news. I tried to convince them otherwise. Some girls were taking making corn-rows on the head of a boy named Will. I normally don’t allow hair treatments during my classroom rules were a bit difficult to fully enforce without a classroom.

I told the class how democracy requires informed citizens, then told them to brainstorm some ideas for school newspaper reporting.

I’d always wanted the school paper to be written by students for students – and to that end I had always allowed them to devote a certain amount to the perpetuation of their materialistic mythologies, their self-imposed poverty of endless desires – but I always insisted that they devote some time to writing about the kind of issues I found important.

The first year we had a school paper one student got an exclusive interview with her godfather, Dameon Williams, the man accused of the videotaped beating of truck driver Reginald Denny during the initial moments of the 1992 LA Riot. On another occasion, student reporters uncovered fraud committed by a former principal. I told these kids about all that but they all seemed quite unimpressed.

Behind us, a flock of sea gulls and one courageous pigeon were fighting over one of the bright red boxes the college bookstore gave away, one per customer. There didn’t seem to be anything eatable inside of it but they still were going at it, tearing at a bar of soap, ripping open a tube of toothpaste. Two gulls had a condom and stretched it until it snapped. Then they all flew away.

Class was nearly over. I was ready to walk straight to my car, which sat patiently in the parking lot just yards away, and escape into a pleasant family afternoon: a bicycle ride to the beach, a barbecue in the backyard.

The corn-rows were finished. They shined in the afternoon sun. Those two girls had done a really magnificent job, a great accomplishment – much greater, I was afraid, than anything I had taught these kids today. The boy with the rows sat up straight and seemed to be checking them on his pavement shadow. “Hey,” he said, “I got something to put up in your newspaper, Strauss….”

My mind was on the beachfront bicycle path and I almost didn’t hear him say:

“Man, according to a unnamed source named… [and he dropped the names of two of my colleagues] … they say the college bout to close up our school and blow up these buildings.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Class was over but without a bell announcing it, I was trapped. They all watched me and then someone asked if it was true. I supposed that a denial was my professional obligation. I supposed I ought to have done it for the sake of the kids. Protect them from the truth. But I couldn’t do it. Not after everything I’d just told them about the perils of ignorance. So I said it:

“Yes, it’s true – I mean, it’s a possibility, a strong one – that this will be our last year.” A lump formed in my throat and I couldn’t look at the students now. I glanced, instead, at the mangled storm gutters hanging off the cracked awning just above us. I remembered when those awning cracks were hairline and when those storm gutters could still hold water. Lately, during a heavy rain, the perimeter of this place was like a car wash. What a piece of shit this place was, pretty much everything about it, but it was our piece of shit. We’d made it ours in so many ways, my colleagues and I and our students, over the years, had made this a decent school.

“We’re getting punked,” I told my students. “Punked out of our school, your school. And what did you do to deserve that? Did you join a gang? Did you start a race riot? Did you smoke crack?” To that question, some kids pointed at each other, but mostly they just listened. “No,” I said. “You came to school, you went to class, you did your homework—most of you, most of the time— maybe with a kick in the ass first, but you did it. There are a hundred other schools that should be closed before this one, a thousand.” I was out of control and might have kept going but the boy with the fresh corn-rows raised his hand and asked:

“Do I get extra credit for telling everybody?”

“Yeah, sure, maybe.”

“Write it down, Strauss. Write my extra credit in your roll book.”

“I’ll write it down when you write it down—an article about it. Maybe we’ll have our first edition of the paper by next week. Who are you going to interview for this story?”

Someone said he would interview our principal, Ms. Jackson. Someone else offered to talk to our U.S. history teacher because he knew everything about everything. Someone even said she would try to get a statement from the mean old college president. I was proud of them. They had suddenly made such progress!

“Ain’t gonna do nothing anyway,” someone said. “Writing about it’s not gonna keep us open. It ain’t like the mayor or the governor or the school district people read our newspaper. So can we just do a newspaper about gossip? I mean, if they gonna close the school anyway, what difference does it make?”

An incredible stench wafted towards us. It was no mystery; we were directly downwind from the Hyperion Water Treatment plant, to which every toilet in LA County flushed. A few of the boys accused each other of being the source of the odor but no one thought that was very funny.

“I sure ain’t gonna miss that smell,” a girl said, and suddenly the boy next to her—who must have not been paying attention for the past ten minutes— picked his head up and said, with dismay:

“Are they closing our school?”

One of his friends leaned over and punched him and told him he was stupid.

“Hey!” I said, stepping between them. But the boy hadn’t even seemed to notice his friend’s punch. He just sat there, stunned and said:

“Where I’m gonna go?”

And then everyone sat there, trying to figure out their futures.

The other classes had all ended and students disgorged, successively, from all the rooms—the ones with AC or windows – but my students still sat where they were, watching, a little dumbfounded, as all their peers scattered toward the streets of the city.