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.