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.