Growth

Herding kids off campus on Friday, I heard something that cast a shadow over the weekend: Catrice was coming back.

Catrice was in my homeroom for the first half of the first nine weeks, but in that brief time she provided some of my best what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here stories. Brash and tall, with her hair cut close and bleached blond, she stuck out among the generally meek and gawky kids in her class. She was 15, in the 7th grade, and read at a 2nd grade level, maybe. Homeroom is supposed to be silent reading. She also had spent part of last year in a mental institution, until she was kicked out for assaulting a nurse. Somehow, she was allowed to enroll with us, rather than the alternative school.

Naturally, she didn't have much interest in reading and spent homeroom talking. She’d prop her feet on the desk or make bizarre noises designed to get my attention. After trying and failing to deal with her in the classroom, I'd send her to the office. They'd send her back. Fine.

Then, Catrice started taking an interest in me. She began by commenting on my clothes, then on my hair. Then she moved on to trying to touch my hair. If I was standing next to her while talking to another student, she would lean backwards and stretch, brushing the back of my head. I’d back away and tell her to stop. Eventually, she started growling at me. I'd write it up and tell her it was inappropriate, but my principal did nothing, and nothing changed.

For one glorious, week-long respite, Catrice was absent. My homeroom looked entirely different while she was gone: kids had their noses buried in books, and hardly anyone talked. I found out that she had had to go to court for beating up her stepfather. I wondered how we could allow her in the same room as those angels.

After a week, Catrice returned and, perhaps sensing that she was on her way out, turned up the charm. Despite all of our preparation on sexual harassment, up to that point I hadn't really thought of her behavior as such—more as inappropriate or generally crazy. Then came the day she propped her leg up on her desk, as I was walking past her. That managed to get my attention and as I looked at her, she stared me in the eye and growled, while stroking her thigh. I was stunned. The next day, she was taken away by the police for some other reason that I still don’t know, and I was free to fight for quiet with the rest of my homeroom.

So, I was a little anxious to find out that she'd be returning. Why would we let any student return for just the last week of school, let alone one who last left school in handcuffs? I asked my principal about it; he hadn't even heard about her coming back. I asked the assistant principal; she said Catrice was back from "the home," whatever that means, and that there was nothing we could do if she wanted to enroll. I told both of them that I wouldn’t let her in, that I didn’t want her in my class. "No one does," the assistant principal told me.

Sure enough, Catrice showed up this morning, but at first I didn't recognize her. The most lasting visual memory I’d had of her was from “Tacky Day,” part of our spirit week before Homecoming. Catrice, however, went beyond tacky, to truly scary; she wore a blue silk bathrobe, a thick brown wig, fake eyeglasses, and a set of rubber teeth that looked like they came from the costume department of a zombie movie.

Now Catrice was taller, much taller. Her hair was long—I don’t know if it was her own or a weave, but it looked much nicer than anything she’d had before. And most strikingly, she didn't have the crazed look in her eyes I'd seen before. You could see her thinking.

"Good morning, Mr. Schaefer," she said.

"Uh...good morning, Catrice,” I stammered. “Are you going to be in this class?" I was sure she knew what I wanted to hear.

"Yeah, they said that I should go back to my old classes."

"Oh, okay," I said. And then, trying to conceal my disappointment, "Well how are you?"

"I'm good. A lot calmer."

I wanted to say, "Yes, you are," but that didn't seem right. She was calm, though. Even as the rest of my homeroom girls crowded around her, a couple of them showing out for her the way they used to, her voice stayed low, in control. What had they done to her at "the home?" If this was Catrice, why not take her back?

A few minutes later, my ever-tactful assistant principal poked her head in the door and warned me, "Mr. Schaefer, your girl is here." And to make things completely clear, "'Catrice is here."

"Thanks, Mrs. Carter, she's right here in my room."

"Oh."

She didn't stay long after all. The counselor pulled her out and I heard later that she was being sent to the alternative school after all, which makes sense. If any of her classes were working at this point, she wouldn't be prepared for them. But still, I felt a little regret that I wouldn't be able to witness this new, reformed Catrice.

It's telling that, for a turnaround as dramatic as Catrice's to take place (assuming it wasn't all just good behavior for her first day back), you need to take someone out of our school. Too many of my students need whatever she got and have instead been allowed to run further in the wrong direction. While I doubt anyone sees it like this, sending Catrice to the alternative school might be protecting her from us more than it is the other way around.

scandal

In a piece I wrote this fall but never posted, I talked about the internal politics of my school and how they were mostly playing out along racial lines. In short, there appeared (and still, for the most part, appears) to be good camaraderie among the teachers at my school, a remarkable thing for an integrated faculty on the black side of a de facto segregated school district. But our principal has been a divisive force. By mid-year, his passivity and incompetence had infuriated many teachers, and faculty meetings were as tense and outright confrontational as his spinelessness would allow. I couldn't help noticing, though, that the most vocal criticism always came from white teachers. They would complain about discrepancies in the way he treated black and white teachers (e.g. letting my black team member arrive at school halfway through homeroom every day, but telling a young white teacher that she was probably being sexually harassed by students because she wore open-toed shoes) and wax nostalgic about last year's principal. True, last year's principal sounds great, like a real teacher's principal; she spent much of the principal's fund on photocopies and dry erase markers for teachers, while this year's spent it on a new desk and paint job for his office. But she was also white, and our principal this year is black. And it was discouraging to see how quickly our faculty could split along racial lines, with the white faction buzzing through the winter about filing grievances with our district office.

A lot of the unrest quieted down over the spring semester. Our principal may have improved some, but I think it had much more to do with people's complacency and their familiarity with chaos and incompetence trumping whatever racial tension was bubbling underneath. But now that tension seems to be manifesting itself on a larger scale.

An unintended consequence of trying to stay out of office politics is that I am often completely surprised by certain announcements. The most recent one came early last week, when all district employees received an email from our district superintendent saying that he was resigning, that he'd enjoyed working with us, and would miss all of us. Resigning, mind you, with two weeks of school left. The email began, "As many of you have already heard," but of course I'd heard nothing about this and had to ask several teachers to fill in the details. From them and from our local paper (which I never read, shame on me), this is what I've figured out:

As early as May 3, there were rumors that the school board was asking for the superintendent's resignation, but the formal announcement wasn't made until almost a week later. The case against him is legitimate: the district hasn't made as much progress as the board would like; the assistant superintendent had recently resigned and is filing a gender-discrimination suit against him; and he tried to not renew the contract of the music teacher at my school, a decision the board overturned. I've had hardly any personal experience with him, but he never struck me as particularly exciting or effective. To be honest, I'd suspected that he was using the job to live out his boy-band fantasies. On two different occasions, our district convocation at the beginning of the year and our district-wide Christmas program, he's monopolized the stage and microphone so that he could sing--"I Believe I Can Fly," supported by interpretive dancers from the white high school, and some falsetto R&B version of "Silent Night," respectively.

But some people liked him. I asked Mrs. GE, the oldest teacher at my school, about the whole affair recently, and she told me that a lot of people felt he was the kind of person who could bring the district together, integrate it, even. "Some people don't want to change," she said, meaning the white power structure in town.

Whether or not our superintendent was pushing for integration, his dismissal has brought the ugly side of race relations in our town back into the light. The school board is composed of five old men, one black president, three white members, and another black member. The vote to ask for the superintendent’s resignation was 4 to 1, the one vote against coming from the black member. He was quoted in the local paper as saying that he wanted history to remember that he opposed the decision. Parents on the black side of town are well aware of what this looks like and called the board out at its most recent meeting after the decision. From the quotes I found in our local paper, it sounds as though this was the last straw for many people. There are threats of a lawsuit over the district’s de facto segregation; I don’t know how often the topic is raised, but it sounds convincing.

Dr. Mullins told us this semester—and I fully believe him—that appointing superintendents, rather than electing them, is generally a better way of filling the position, since it usually allows the board to cast a wider net for candidates and keeps petty local politics out of the process. I don’t have all the facts, of course, but this seems to be a case where local politics need to be involved in the process.

My students are only catching onto the story slowly. True, they’re in middle school, so I’m not surprised that it’s not the first thing on their minds. I wonder though, how much of my school’s community cares enough about this to really oppose the decision, support the aforementioned lawsuit, or at least organize around the next school board elections. Complacency has roots almost as deep as racism down here.