The "More" Child

[Link to Centering in on the Centers - Part One]

Aside from the challenging situation inside of C.’s classroom, there were also larger issues with the school as a whole, not the least of which was the fact that the school community didn’t want the Center program housed in its school. I had no clue about this situation until a few months in, but it came to the surface in an ugly way when it was learned that the school would lose it’s Title I funding because the Center program had “tipped” the FARMs rate.

Okay, translation. “FARMs” is the abbreviation for “Free And Reduced Meals,” a shorthand way of measuring a school’s poverty rate. Schools where at least 40 percent of the children in the school attendance area are from low-income families or at least 40 percent of the student enrollment are from low-income families are eligible to receive federal Title I funds, which are to be used for programs designed to improve academic achievement. The influx of 100 overwhelmingly non-FARMs Center kids caused the school’s poverty rate to drop just below the 40% threshold, jeopardizing funding for activities, extra staffing etc. that benefited the entire school community…especially those FARMS kids.

Gee, thanks Center kids.

No wonder the home school parents were bitter. Many of them were the holdouts. They hadn’t sent their kids to private school.  They had older kids who had dealt with school-within-a-school magnet friction at the nearby middle school. And now, they felt, a “we’re smart, you’re not” message was being foisted on their elementary-aged kids who weren’t accepted into the Center in their very own school. Ultimately the Central Office was able to resolve the FARMs/Title I issue, and the school didn’t lose its funding, but there was some nasty stuff on the school listserv while it was going on. And Center parents were left to absorb it. It felt like the school system left us swinging in the wind, never countering the perception that somehow Center kids were getting “more goodies,” never putting out there that the Centers were meant to meet a legitimate educational need for this population of students.

And then were the other school quality issues.

The PTA was dysfunctional. Magnet parents were much more likely to show up to meetings, and were willing to step up, but the remaining small number of involved home school parents were resentful and suspicious of the outsiders. As for administration communication with the Center parents…there seemed to be little interest in, and no mechanism for, exchanging information or gathering feedback on how things were going.

There were no men in the building. Well, I take that back. There was a janitor and a P.E. teacher. Call me completely sexist, but having male teachers in the building makes a difference, especially to boys. Our neighborhood school was fortunate to have male teachers at several grade levels, plus a male music and P.E. teacher, a male vice principal, several longterm volunteers and a male in charge of the school’s after-care program.

There was the music program–or the lack of one. The woman who taught music was just flat out awful. Here you had a group of kids who probably played music at a higher rate and more seriously than most 4th and 5th graders–and this woman managed to make them hate music. She basically just yelled the whole class period (I know…I observed a class.)

There was the lunch room. At the beginning of the school year someone had the bright idea of assigned seating. They took these 50 brand new-to-the-school kids and carefully sprinkled them around the lunchroom, presumably so they could all become one happy rainbow school community. Talk about stupid. Talk about alienating. One of the purposes of the magnet ostensibly was for these highly gifted students to be with peers. They hadn’t even had a chance to get to know their new classmates and gel as a class before they were putting them at tables with kids that a) already knew each other from early elementary school and b) probably had very little in common in terms of interests. But it got worse. The lunchroom was presided over by a woman that I came to refer to as The Lunch Nazi. She ruled that room with an iron fist. No talking. And just to make sure that it was sufficiently quiet, she would read aloud or screen videos during lunch. Crikey! Kids need to be able to talk, socialize. (Note: How do I know all this? Occasionally I would go have lunch with C. and subversively whisper to C. and her classmates. You can learn a heck of a lot about your kid–and a school–by visiting during lunch.)

Recess was just as bad. Rather than make playground announcements while the students were in the lunchroom (“The far corner of the field is muddy, please don’t go there…”) they lined up to go out onto the playground, walked through the door and then had to line up–by class– on the blacktop once more to get these announcements. By this time these kids were practically vibrating with pent-up energy, and the clock was ticking on precious recess time. I swear, it felt like inmates in a prison yard.

The whole thing just blew me away, to the the point that I marched into the office of our neighborhood school (where M. was a kindergartener) and asked if a) I could observe a typical 5th grade class (“Sure,” said a teacher who happened to be passing through.), and b) if I could observe lunch and recess. The next day I did. It was a completely different experience. The kids were allowed to talk and laugh. When it was time for recess the (male) vice principal lined up the students with the “recess song” (“Oh I love recess, oh yes I do….”), they walked to the back of the building… and then took off. That was that. It was around this time that I started calling our neighborhood school The Love School. There was just such a friendly feeling in the building. There were long term volunteers. The teachers sponsored a variety of after school clubs. The secretaries in the main office were incredibly friendly. (You CAN judge a school by it’s main office workers.) Geez, the teachers even had formed their own off-hours hand bell choir!

And how was C. doing through all this? Well some of this, like the FARMs rate issue, didn’t affect her. The other stuff simply was. It was low level stress. She read a lot in class. She hunkered down. Things in her class got somewhat better by January, when Chair Thrower was moved to a GT/LD Center, but the teacher never really regained control. C. just never found an adult in the building with whom to connect.

C. definitely found some alpha girls to connect with, but there was friction with the boys, particularly on the playground and later in the year someone wrote mean graffiti by her name on a sign up sheet. C. recently mentioned an incident I had totally forgotten, wherein during an assembly in front of the whole school she was called up and asked to put on a dictionary costume or somehow “be” a dictionary. I have no idea what kind of an assembly this was, and if she was chosen randomly or singled out by her peers, but I do remember that she came home crying that day. Great. For a kid who was already being called The Walking Dictionary, it sure didn’t help. years later, she still doesn’t want to talk about it. The counselor, a syrupy sweet young woman fresh out of school who would periodically come in to talk to the kids, was universally ridiculed by them. “Mom, she talks to us like we’re all psych cases!” (Just as an aside, but over the years bad school counselors have been more detrimental to us than one can imagine. In retrospect we should have gone to outside counseling several years earlier, certainly at this point. But we didn’t.)

Academically C. was doing well, but there were some projects she seemed to struggle with. For example she had a write a report but just couldn’t settle down to do it. Finally I said just tell it to me and I’ll type. That child literally spun in circles with perfectly-formed, whole paragraphs coming out of her mouth. In another case it had to do with her “reader’s journal,” where one has to write about one’s reactions to the reading. C. completely disliked this. She understood the writing, understood the motives and emotions of the characters, but she just didn’t want to bare her own inner life to the teacher and possibly her fellow students. She just didn’t want to go there. Mistakenly, I thought that perhaps the demands were too high.

So the end of the year rolled around. I was tired. Tired of dealing with this school. By the spring the principal announced that she was leaving. (It probably was a combination of the FARMS debacle, fallout from the chaos of C.’s class, and the headache of dealing with us parents.) The larger school community blamed the Center parents, but when it came time to meet with the cluster superintendent to discuss selection of a new principal, turnout was once more predictably thin. C., for her part, was surviving…but not thriving. She wasn’t excited about school. She wasn’t racing to tell me the cool new thing she learned today. This was certainly not the whole child experience that had been talked about 10 months earlier. And I wondered, in terms of socialization, was it really beneficial for her to be in this enclave of tightly wound kids for another year? What message was she getting when the school was overwhelmingly minority…and the program overwhelmingly wasn’t.

Meanwhile there was the siren song of The Love School, with the wonderful resource teacher who just loved C. One of C.’s fellow students had already returned there in January, leaving the Center. Should we go too? She had her alpha girl friends at the Center school…but there were also more kids who weren’t so nice. I knew that the classroom academics wouldn’t be as challenging at our neighborhood school, but,–I mistakenly rationalized–what was the harm in her “just being a kid” and having an “easy” fifth grade year? And there would be all those wrap around extras that could make up for it. I hemmed, I hawed, I wavered. C. talked with the homeschool teacher. C. and I talked. My husband and I talked. We thought. And in the end C. said our home school “won her heart.”

We wouldn’t be returning to the Center.

(And neither would her teacher. She left the teaching profession completely and returned to a career as a government economist.)