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From Magic City Morning Star J. Grant Swank
Brian was so doped up on something that he could not keep his head up. He slumped over the desktop. The bottom line was that he had taken too many Valium before coming to the REAL School. "REAL" equals "Regional Educational Alternative Learning" and the building is located in South Windham, ME. That's where I tried to teach. The school's director phoned Brian's mother at her work. That meant she had to take time off, drive to the school, and somehow get her son to slosh himself into her car for a ride home. Was this the first time she had been called at her work about her son? No. Of course if Brian had been in his clear head, I had no teaching materials by which to see through another day at this alternative learning school. It was alternative learning all right. It was so alternative that it fell off the charts. As teaching staff, we had a shared stapler, some chalk, erasers, no textbooks, no teachers' manuals, no supportive supplies, a meager stash of lined paper, pencils and pens. There were a few cast off computers that tried to work. No wonder the Superintendent of Schools praised the director for being the most outstanding alternative learning head in the state. That was even printed in the local newspaper. After all, he kept below budget. There was rarely a visit from anyone close to the Superintendent's office. We basically were left to warehouse these troubled teens on our own. If one of the bureaucrats came into the school, it was a swift in and out. I would see the car drive up to the building, a well-dressed individual disembark, and then climb the stumps for stairs. (The school was a very old brick building buried in a residential neighborhood). Then that educator would click heels down the hallway, disappear into the director's office, and in short order reappear for exiting. When I was hired at that school, I actually felt that I could make a difference in teen lives. So I gave it my all. It takes some time for naivete to strip away until there is nothing left but bald, needling facts. With that, I trudged on. Because there were no teaching supplies, I went to the shopping mall where homeschoolers bought their materials. I purchased the paperback math, English and spelling texts. Then I duplicated the pages on the school's copy machine to use as handouts to pupils. That's how I managed to get through lessons. When I presented the receipt for the purchases to the director's secretary, she looked up with a scowl to ask if I really needed to spend that much. The amount was less than fifteen dollars. The director was an Australian. He sported quite the charming accent as well as packaged his own brand of vulgarity. Somehow his potty mouth did not seem to turn off the Superintendent's office. With such charisma, he managed to hoodwink the officialdom, slip far below budget, and thereby hoist the teaching burden sans materials onto frazzled teachers. When I asked him one day how I could teach with nothing to teach with, director responded by saying that that was what made the alternative learning school so marvelously different from other schools. We were left with our own unique creative skills, our sparkly imaginations by which we could manufacture our own curricula. So it was that teachers daily bent their brain cells in attempts to create something from nothing. Most of the time it did not work. That's why the police cruisers drove up to the school several times a week. When desks flew across rooms, doors were punched through and teachers were told to go to hell, there were occasions when the cops had to be called in. Yet this was the REAL School. There was no other school quite like it. We were the example for other schools to follow. The director reminded us that we were a model showcase. That's when I drove out to Pineland estates to investigate their Collaborative School, another term for alternative learning. The director took me on a tour. There I noted rooms laden with supplies, teachers smiling as they went about their daily routines, nary a sound from the students, and well-lighted rooms, carpeted floors and a staff kitchen. The student population was composed of the same troubled sorts as those enrolled at the REAL School. We had a kitchen at the REAL School. The problem was that its sink was crudded over with mold. Dirty trays lined the counter tops. Pots and pans were left to clean themselves. Fill in the blanks. After three-plus years on the job, I appealed to the teachers' union. I was told that my union representative would go to bat for me. In short, she did nothing of the sort. Nothing but stall. I provided her with copious detail as to what was actually going on at the school. She rarely responded to my appeals. Keeping hope alive, I believed that when it came down to the final push, she would be there to hold me up. Not. As finally the message was coming through loudly and clearly that I was standing alone in the middle of a dark warehouse for messed up adolescents, I prepared my voluminous copy for the governor's desk. Then I mailed it to his office, telling no one. With that, the director and union rep met with me. By this time, the Australian had returned to his homeland and a greenhorn female took his place. Though her motives were idealistic, her methods went nowhere. After all, she could not pry loose funds for supplies. But it would take much more than supplies to unclog the grime that had collected over years at the REAL School. As the three of us met, I handed the director and union rep my communique to the governor. The director, astonished, asked me if I had actually sent the communique to the governor. She thought it was merely a mockup of my complaints. I informed her that I had already sent the material. With that, the union rep scowled at me to scold, "You have just dug a huge hole in this process." Process? What process? Up to that point, I had to forge my own "process." In other words, the bureaucrats had no idea what to do next. I had planned it to come to that. I had been forced to play by my fair, reasonable rules. Nothing else worked for the benefit of the students. Why should I play by the system's rules of neglect? So I shot a homerun straight to the governor's office. There followed a luncheon with union rep and assistant superintendent of schools - and me. I ordered soup and sandwich. I ate nothing. I looked at the two and said, "I quit." They asked me why. I said, "I cannot ethically continue to show up at a warehouse for teens. You call it a school. It's not a school. I have substitute taught in every school in this system and know what it is to walk into a classroom overrun with supplies: magic markers, colored paper, posters, pencils, pens, staplers, computers, stickers, textbooks, teachers' manuals, handouts, and more. "At the alternative learning school, I have to beg for a stapler. We have nothing to work with. Yet at the start of the day till 2:30 in the afternoon, we are left with corralling these yelling, swearing, threatening teens. So I quit. It's not fair to the kids. I quit. I can't be a party to such meanness leveled against these teen-agers who are already troubled because of one misfortune or another." By this time, the Superintendent of Schools had been elevated to head the state office of education. It is true: incompetence rises to the top. Therefore, when the governor sent to her office my communique, she had no other choice but to send an investigative team to check out the very low-standard school that was in her previous employ. It was the school she had neglected, leaving it in the charge of the Australian with witty accent. The state review committee called in all teaching staff, students, and their parents (most of the teens were from one-parent (mother) homes with some teens having no parents, no home). Questions were asked. A report was sent to the governor. In the meantime, I phoned the Department of Health to tell the facts about the school's filthy kitchen. A surprise visit from that office resulted in the director doing some hurried cleaning up. As time passed, I learned that most of the "students" at the REAL School worked their ways into jail. A few escaped the bars. But I had done what I could. And for that I felt as if I had at least attempted something redemptive. J. Grant Swank Jr. © Copyright 2002-2008 by Magic City Morning Star |