Emergency Teacher (26 page)

“Why not just move him into regular education status?” I asked. Wilson nodded.

She ignored me and spoke directly to the grandmother. “There's no guarantee that next year he'll be with Ms. Asquith. He won't get this special arrangement or such a small class size. If things change at all for him, the door will be open for him to get more services.”

In special ed he hadn't even had a teacher. Was that an extra “special service”? My frustration rose, and I sensed a fight brewing. It felt as though we were both tugging at the grandmother's sleeves. Wilson sat between us, gazing from left to right as if he were watching a tennis match. Looking at him, I knew there was no point in going into all our school's problems. So I asked directly, “Does his grandmother have the legal authority to change him to regular education?”

The grandma jumped in: “Oh, yes,” she boomed. “I know my rights. I moved him in, and I can move him out.”

Mrs. Q. said, “I don't recommend that.” In the end Wilson's grandma relented, leaving us with a compromise of sorts. Wilson would retain the special education label, but he would stay in my class.

The following day, Mrs. G. found out. She was furious. She banged on my door in the middle of class.

“I can't believe you did this,” she said. “He's a terror.”

She was clutching a thick sheath of pink slips she had dug up on him. “These say he steals. He punched a hole in the wall. He's out of control. Do you know what you've gotten yourself into?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Wilson, who was chewing on his pencil eraser. I said, “Well, he hasn't had a teacher. He's been fine with me.”

“I don't want one pink slip on him,” she warned, walking around the corner. “He's yours. Not one.”

After school one day, while driving a student home, I spotted Wilson alone in an abandoned lot overrun by weeds, staring at a wall. Block-long pockets of North Philadelphia were vacant. Some were so large you could stand in them and almost forget you were in the city. I pulled the car over. Wilson was wearing a ratty blue shirt and his book bag lay on a dirt pile a few feet from him. Smack. He slammed his hand against the deteriorating brick wall. He inspected the mark. I rolled down my window.

“Wilson?” What was he doing? As much as I liked him, I had bouts of selfdoubt, that I was missing something—that he had some crazy Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde complex and was going to turn on me any day.

“Hi, Miss,” he said, waving.

“Hon, what on earth are you doing out here?”

“I'm smacking bugs for my chameleon to eat,” he said, scraping a carcass off the wall. “Miss, you said you'd call my grandma if I did good all this week. You forget?”

He was right. I had forgotten. I pulled out my cell phone. I hit the speeddial button marked “Wilson.”

His grandma answered.

“What he do now?” she yelled.

“No, I'm calling to say he's had a great week, and did a super job on his report, and I'm really proud of him.”

His grandmother said, “Ohhh? That good. That goooood!”

I passed the phone to Wilson, who was gesturing wildly and beaming from ear to ear. “See, Grandma?”

Auditors from the federal government arrived at our school to investigate our special education program. A student's right to special education is protected by federal law, established under the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This act states that a child has a right to any service necessary that ensures they have equal access to public school. For some students, this meant a tutor or a seat closer to the board or extended time on tests. I wasn't certain what the one hundred or so special education students at Julia de Burgos needed, but considering that they didn't even have a teacher, I could only imagine the trouble we were in for.

Mr. Whitehorne told me they chose at random two students to interview. “They picked Rogia. Can you believe it?” Mr. Whitehorne exclaimed. I wanted to high-five him.

I hadn't seen much of Rogia since I'd tried to help her back to her attic classroom last fall. Sometimes she stopped in my classroom, and we did art projects together. She tried to hang around with the cleaning ladies after school, but she stole things off their cart, so they shooed her away. Mostly, she continued to wander the halls, getting screamed at and pushed from room to room.

I prayed that Rogia would describe in full detail her experiences at Julia de Burgos. This was her chance to be heard. We would finally be caught, and things would change around here.

The morning after the special ed auditors announced their visit, a memo from the principal arrived in our mailboxes.

“From now on,” the memo read, “H87 special education class will only be covered in their room, and you are to teach them math or reading. There will be a curriculum and lesson plan on the desk.”

By the time the special education investigators showed up, the principal had combined Mr. M.'s class with another special education class that hadn't had a teacher. Mr. M. was moved to a bigger room on the third floor, and three teaching aides were pulled from classrooms and given to him. The principal also moved many special education students into other teachers' classes, like mine, Ms. Rohan's, and Mr. Rougeux's. One boy was Josef, from Mr. M.'s room, a tiny, shy boy who rarely spoke and had been sent to me the day the fight broke out in Mr. M.'s room. He had simply showed up at my door one morning clutching a note. I had no paperwork on him; there was no explanation. “I'm in your class now, Miss,” he said meekly. I thought I remembered him from H87. From the first day of class, he was a wonderful student: overly timid, but sweet, obedient, and eager to please.

If I ever wondered what a school year without a teacher did to a student, this change made it abundantly clear. When he arrived at my door, he was practically mute. He never raised his hand. He rarely even reacted. He was so unresponsive that at first I wasn't sure he spoke English at all.

One day, after a week or so in my class, I put an assignment on his desk, and he pushed it away. “I hate tests. I'm gonna fail,” he whispered. Another time, I gave him a worksheet along with the rest of the class, and his face froze in such trauma and pain he began to fidget and squirm. “I can't,” he said, and simply, “No.” So Josef spent most days just sitting and staring at the backs of students and not talking to anyone.

I didn't know how to diagnose him, except by acknowledging that he'd spent the past eight months in an unsupervised and out-of-control room with five or six, and often a dozen, bigger boys. The littlest boys were always terrorized, and in that classroom no one would have stopped them. Josef was yet another one of those students who retreated the only way he could, by closing himself off to the rest of the world.

At the Friday-night meeting of the Pedagogical Society at J Street café, we all agreed that Mr. Whitehorne had had the toughest week. He was in the middle of a conference with a parent when a student burst in and told him to “Fuck off.” When Mr. Whitehorne ordered him out, he refused.

“What could I say?” asked Mr. Whitehorne. “This is a teacher threat at Julia de Burgos: ‘If I get one more problem from you, I'm going to start a disciplinary transfer. That means you'll be moved to a different school, because we can't handle you. I don't know when it will go through, if it goes through at all. It will take hours of my time, and your teacher's time, in paperwork. Nine times out of ten, your mom will be able to successfully protest it and have it thrown out. But listen up! You could be transferred, within a year or two. Maybe.'”

We all laughed. It was true. We had nothing left to throw at our students. They ruled the school.

“What happened with those special education auditors?” I asked.

“We passed the inspection,” Mr. Whitehorne answered nonchalantly. “We sailed through.”

“You're kidding,” I said. I was astonished. “How could we possibly have passed?”

“It was a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Mr. Whitehorne said. “They chose two students to interview. Rogia was absent that day, and they prepped the other student. They told kids not to come into school, and they hid the other bodies in the basement. Then they threw a lot of kids into different classrooms. They put all the teachers on their best behavior, and moved the after-school tutors from upstairs into the classrooms as aides,” he said.

Mr. Whitehorne told me that the investigators looked at the paperwork, and if it was in order, the school passed.

“Don't forget,” he added, “even if we're found out of compliance, what does that mean? It's not like the state or federal government will force us to hire more teachers, because then they have to give us the money. We've been fighting all year for more money. If they accuse us of something, they have to give us the money to make improvements,” he said. “They pass all these laws that make them look good, but they don't give us the funds to implement them.”

Driving home from the bar, I passed our school at Eighth and Lehigh. Behind it, in the neighborhood, people gathered outside on their stone perches. I once thought they were junkies. More likely they were my students' brothers or mothers. Tomorrow morning, bottles, needles, condoms, and cigarette butts would greet Juan C and Big Bird in their pilgrimage to school. No workbook could help that. No federal audit would change that. No amount of money could combat that influence. I no longer knew who to blame or what to do with that blame. So I went home, made dinner, and invented something new to teach for the next day.

T
61 was going to meet the new mayor. If we couldn't improve our school from the inside, a trip to see a higher authority might help. Philadelphians had elected John Street on the strength of his promise to turn schools around. He was visiting Edison High School in North Philly. All the education big shots would be there, and our principal offered to pay overtime to teachers who showed up and waved Julia de Burgos signs. We were encouraged to bring students. In English class, we did a writing exercise in which they described the school:

Ms. Rohan and I brought ten kids. I offered to bring Josh, Miguel, Big Bird, and as a special reward for an afternoon of good behavior, Jovani.

I had ulterior motives for inviting Jovani. He was still terrorizing T62's classroom, and I'd continued to handle him as well as I could, but I had done a terrible thing to him. A few days earlier we'd been finishing vocabulary exercises in our workbooks. As always, my control of the classroom was precarious. I had walked past desks, pasting insect stickers on their books that said “GREAT!” and “SUPER!”

Jovani had stuck his fist in the air and called my name. I had raced over and saw he had completed an entire page. “Wow, good job, Jovani,” I had said. Then I checked his answers. They were wrong. Not only one—all ten of them were wrong. These weren't minor mistakes. He had simply plugged words in at random.

“Is this right, Miss?” he had asked, his eyes pleading.

I'd stared at the workbook. If I'd told him they were wrong, he'd have slammed down his workbook and torn across the room, distracting everyone. If I'd explained it to him, I'd have to review every question with him and ignore the rest of the class. It would have taken twenty minutes. Jovani had been in the suspension room when I'd explained the material, so his poor attempt had hardly been surprising. Other hands had waved in the air.

I'd murmured to Jovani: “Yes, hon, that's great.” I'd pressed a sticker of a bear holding a pot of honey against his page. He was beaming.

I brought him on a teacher trip as though I could somehow compensate. I drove back to Third and Indiana to pick him up. My students knew where to go, and we found his row house, next to several crumbling buildings.

Josh and Big Bird were already squished into the backseat of my car. As I jumped out, my plan was to get out and get back as quickly as possible. I banged hard on the blue-painted door. His mom opened it a few inches. When she saw me, she pulled the door wide open and smiled.

Jovani came stumbling out with an oversized puffy black jacket hanging off his tiny frame, like a cloak on a wire hanger. A little brother trailed after him, then clung to his mother's legs and wailed as Jovani sprung down the stoop. Jovani ignored him.

“Where we goin'?” he demanded.

“We're going to meet the mayor and hear him talk about our school,” I said, glancing around as we walked to the car. A group of men watched us from the corner.

“That's all they gonna do is talk?” he said, kicking stones on the ground. “I don't wanna go.”

I was jingling my pockets nervously for the car keys. When I reached the car, the other boys had locked the doors from the inside. Sunk into their seats, they peered out at us, saucer-eyed.

“This is a bad neighborhood, Miss,” said Josh as I got in.

Josh lived three minutes away. I looked back at the decaying buildings and purplish sidewalks. Dirty diapers were slung atop a pile of cinderblocks. A man slumped against a wall nearby. This wasn't the family neighborhood the other boys lived in.

We got onto a main street and relaxed. Edison High School was five minutes north. When we arrived the students spilled out of my car and scampered up to the front doors. They seemed much more excited about seeing Edison High School than listening to the mayor.

Edison had about 2,400 students and was the high school for the Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia. More than half of Julia de Burgos's graduates went on to Edison. Edison was not the worst high school in the city, but it was close. The dropout rate was more than 66 percent.

The community had fought from the early 1960s until 1988 for a new Edison school building, and when the city finally agreed they spent $50 million building the most expensive school in the city. Yet, for all the money poured into Edison—for all the years of community protests that their children were held back by an old building and unequal school funding—the new building hadn't helped much. In fact, many say the school grew more violent. Among the 685 students that became Edison's first freshman class in 1988, 85 percent dropped out by 1992. Since then, the school had been plagued by teacher turnover, violent lunchroom brawls, knife fights, shootings, and gang warfare. Between 1988 and 1995, nine Edison students were killed in crime-related incidents in the community. They were all buried in the New Cathedral Cemetery across the street from Edison.

Yet Edison High School was the neighborhood school, and Vanessa was enamored of it. She said that cute boy, Bebe, was a student here. She couldn't believe how big the lockers were. “Miss, I wanna go here,” Vanessa said.

“You said you're going to CAPA,” I reminded her, referring to the prestigious performing arts school she'd spoken of months ago. She didn't answer.

When we entered the auditorium, I was amazed to see the stage decorated with signs from each school. Teachers were cheering and singing school songs. A handful of teachers from De Burgos waved glittering signs that the kids had painted. They read “We Want a New School!” Jovani tried to sneak upstairs to sit in the bleachers, so I kept him firmly planted by my side. Vanessa attached herself to my other side.

When the mayor arrived an hour late, the auditorium took on the mood of a pep rally. One by one, the mayor called out schools. Representatives cheered when their school was named. Those teachers who were there only for the overtime pay lingered near the door. They cheered obediently for Julia de Burgos. The principal was trying to curry favor with the administration. “Listen for when they call our school,” I whispered to my kids.

Jovani turned to me. “Who are we?”

I looked at his face to check what he meant. “Julia de Burgos, hon.” And he nodded. Vanessa and Ms. Rohan laughed.

The new mayor promised to be the city's “education mayor,” and repeated, “I am for public education!” The crowd roared. He made three main points: schools were underfunded, teachers needed a fair contract, and school employees should be held accountable. To each point, the crowd cheered and waved signs. At the end he gave us an opportunity to approach the microphone and ask questions. Several teachers repeated his demands, and a few from Julia de Burgos made their case for a new building. One of my top students, Luis, leaned over to me. He wanted to ask when we were going to get a new school. Jovani said he wanted to say something, too. I agreed.

Luis looked straight at the mayor as he spoke into the microphone.

“Um, I want to talk about my school, Julia de Burgos.” The soft child's voice against the sudden silence made everyone lay down their signs and listen. He cleared his throat.

“I really like it there, but like the school's not so nice. The bathrooms are really dirty and the pipes are broke. And there's always fights in the hall, and the other day part of the ceiling fell in and almost hit a teacher. Some days, it's like I don't want to come to school no more. That's it. Thank you.”

A woman had tears in her eyes, and I felt like crying, too. The mayor nodded, “Thank you, son.”

Jovani danced behind him, so I nudged him forward to the microphone. He had volunteered, so I assumed he had something he wanted to say. He stood there for a second. Then, he raised himself up on his tiptoes, causing his lips to bump the microphone, and echoed his steady breathing throughout the room. Everyone turned to see who was at the microphone. “Jovani?” I whispered. “Go ahead.”

He twisted his neck and stared up at me, frozen. His eyes were wide and lit up. The mayor raised his eyebrows. After ten awkward seconds of silence, I tugged at Jovani's sleeve, and we returned to our seats. I never found out what it was that Jovani had to say.

I took the kids home, dropping Vanessa off last. Lately, she'd even been sleeping through the separate, more challenging assignments I'd given her. “Have you given any more thought to changing middle schools next year to Conwell?” I asked her. Conwell was a considerably better middle school in the neighborhood that was application-only.

“Yeah, Miss,” she said.

“Well, I want you to reapply for Conwell Middle School next year and go if you get in.”

She shifted uncomfortably as we bumped down the potholed streets of Erie Avenue, past the row houses and the abandoned buildings. Streetlights flickered across her face.

“It's nice, Miss, but I'm used to my own friends. I don't like to go into things and meet new people. I'm not into trying new things.”

“You'll make friends there, too,” I said. We crossed a bridge over railroad tracks. The giant building looming in the distance was an abandoned factory. I thought about Vanessa's mom, who was in her early thirties and had grown up in the neighborhood. She answered all my calls, visited the school on parents' night, and said she didn't want her daughter to have the life both she and her mother had had: working in a low-wage factory, being financially dependent on a boyfriend, having few choices.

“C'mon, Vanessa. You said you wanted to go to CAPA, the honors high school. Julia de Burgos won't get you there.”

She stared out the window. I tried to tell her that her time was running out. What would she learn with someone like Mr. Jackson as her future English teacher? Despite all her aspirations and abilities, if she let Julia de Burgos waste away all her opportunities now, she would end up at the blunt end of other people's bad choices. She didn't want that, did she?

She shrugged and tucked her chin into her jacket lining.

We pulled up to her house. The one next to hers was abandoned. On one side, the windows were dark cavities. On the other, the house had crumbled into a pile littered with street trash.

“Listen, Vanessa, our class is pretty good this year. I mean, we get work done. But look around the school. Not all the classrooms are like that. If you get placed with a bad teacher, you could waste the whole year not learning anything, and my worry is that you'll fall so far behind you'll never get into a good high school.”

“All right, Miss,” she said, giving me her sweet smile. She hopped out of the car and ran up the stairs.