In academia for more than thirty years, this contributor has seen the world of education from many vantage points, including from across a teacher's desk and now in a school library. She has also been a grant writer and has served as an independent consultant.
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I work in the heart of the most urban of areas in a large metropolitan city, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) population just under two million.
Eighty-nine percent of children in the school where I work have no father in the home and live in single-mother households. The transience rate for the students is 105 percent, and historically is about 30 percent on average per year for teachers. Only five out of 336 students pay for their lunches. About 20 percent are in Special Education classes. And only 38 percent pass the annual state exams. Over 40 percent receive in-house mental health counseling and another 15 percent of the school is on a waiting list for services.
Stark figures, to say the least.
The day-to-day lives of the children ages three to fifteen (grades pre-K-6th) fair not much better.
This week, kindergartner Demilo was exposing himself to classmates. CPS said all boys do that. His single mom sent him away to live with his dad.
Yesterday, Treasure entered the school library with her class and began quietly, factually recounting her experience with watching her mom forcibly raped three times the night before. Treasure is a first grader.
In fifth-grade for the second year, fourteen-year-old Corrience left the school bus this morning and entered the building visibly angry, fists clenching and unclenching, shallow breaths punctuated by grunts as he glowered straight ahead and shouldered his way ahead of the line. As he steps over children he has knocked down, he flails and twists away from a teacher’s gentle but firm hands trying to redirect him and minimize the collateral damage. Never mind she had just slammed her own head into the wall as she tried to spare a toppling child.
Corrience’s problem today? His foster mom told him he couldn’t have money to spend at the school store for a pencil and eraser.
Gre’marquis is new to the school just last week. This morning he quietly approaches me in the hall and says he needs to speak to the social worker. As I respectfully try to learn why, he tells me he cannot let his brothers or himself go back to his mother’s home again. He says she was drunk and high again this morning and beat him and his brother as she does most mornings. Most days he comes home and finds her incoherent on the couch. He says he knows it means they will go to the Guardian’s Home, but it is better that way. He magically recites his mother’s name, her complicit boarder’s name, their phone numbers, ages, and the drugs they were using. He provides his grandmother’s telephone number in a distant city and asks that she be notified. In a very subdued tone, Gre’marquis pleads to not go back to his mother’s again. These are his own words. Gre’marquis is 7. His brothers are 6 and 5.
I mull over all of this as I sit at my desk in the library. Making a difference in these children’s lives--a measurable difference--is difficult. At least it is difficult to know if anything I do makes an appreciable difference beyond the moment.
I recall my own tumultuous, traumatic elementary years, and I realize words and actions can make a difference far beyond today, far beyond the moment. I recall the summer school teacher between my seventh and eighth grade years who believed in me like no one else did. He said I could pass the classes. He said he knew I could do it, and he’d help me all I wanted.
And I passed the classes. I passed them for him and because of him.
I see Corrience trudging past the library windows, scowling as he makes his way down the hall. Wondering if he had been suspended or helped, I wave at him and he waves back. I beckon for him to come in to the library--which he does, with a torrent of invectives directed at no one in particular. I let him spout, and then I ask him to come sit with me for a bit and help check-in books. We talk about what had set him off this morning. Eventually, we discuss what he likes to read (not much), but when I tell him I’ll buy for him whatever books on whatever subject he might be interested in, he lights up and begins sharing an amazing amount of knowledge about outer space and space travel. Explaining the source of his mental compendium, he says he likes watching Nova when he can but he usually gets laughed at by his foster family. He says his biological father had encouraged his interest as a child before he disappeared one day when he was eight years old. I say I’ll buy a bunch of books for him tonight at Half Price Books (knowing I’ll have to be sure they were at the 3rd grade reading level he is working at). He can keep them at school or take them home--whatever he wants.
Glancing at the clock, he scoots back his chair hastily, unfolds his gangly fourteen-year-old man/boy body from the chair and heads for the door to catch breakfast before too late. Taking the pencil I proffer him, he lopes to the door. Looking back over his shoulder, he says, “Thanks, man” and heads off for his day.
Do I think that a span of five minutes cures the ills in his life? Hardly. But I do hope as I follow through on my promise, he can begin to learn to trust again, to trust in talking, talking about his needs and wants, about his hurts and hopes. I hope he can begin to see a place for his dreams when maybe no one else does. I know it can happen. I wanted to be Maria Mitchell, girl astronomer, and only that summer school teacher ever said this troubled, waif-of-a-girl and abysmal math student could be whatever she dreamed she could be.
