A Teacher's Aide's Journal #7

The District Meeting

                I expected the district meeting to set the tone for the school year.  The district has three high schools.  One is a selective enrollment school where the previous average A.C.T. score was 23 and the other two schools where thought to hold the left overs in the district.  Those two schools had an average A.C.T score for each of them was between 15 and 17.  The superintendent, Doctor West-Braxton addressed the staff with a welcome that was not very well accepted by anyone from what I could see.  Despite the halfhearted hand clap welcome, she spoke to us pointing out that the Hispanic students had the most gain in test scores.  She said that the Hispanics had gains in Science, math and reading whereas the black students had gains in reading but negative gains in math and science.  The white students who represent only 5 percent of the student population in the entire district had gains in math but no negative gains and the Asian students who represent less than 2 percent of the district population had gains in all three areas. She then pointed out that the construction crews did a good job on repairing the building.  They worked very hard over the summer making repairs to the building that caught fire at the end of last school year.  The fire took out almost 20% of the school.  She said that the building had a face lift – a paint job in certain areas and that the swimming pool had been repaired – it was destroyed 5 years ago when the river flooded due to nonstop three days of rain.  She mentioned that the financial oversight committee had approved the new teacher and support staff raise giving the support staff a 4% raise. She didn’t mention her $50,000 raise. She mentioned that the district had been given a B+ credit rating.  I wondered if anyone really knew what that meant.  I am fortunate enough to know that a B+ credit rating isn’t very good.  I do my share of investing in stocks and bonds and I wouldn’t invest in a municipality bond when the municipality had a B+ rating.  She said that there would be more funds for books this year and it occurred to me that while I worked the book room, just a few days ago, we had no math books to give students and there were no Chemistry books for the non-honors Chemistry classes.  This problem had been going one for a while and last school year the special ed students were given Honors Chemistry books.  Needless to say, they didn’t read them.  She suggested that this would be the last year that the state appointed financial committee would preside over the district spending.  The finance committee had the district under its thumb for some four years now due to poor financial management.  By state law, the finance committee had to take charge. 

       When she finished, she introduced a speaker who spoke to us for the next ninety minutes about race matters.  He played with the wordings to have double meaning.  He spoke of his personal truth and explained that everyone had their very own personal truth.  He began with a story about his experience as a child in school.  He started with an all-black school in the urban area of some east coast city.  He had photographs to showing his kindergarten, first and second grade classes.  He had photographs of his teachers as well.  All of the students and all of the teachers were African American.  He mentioned that there was a relationship that the teachers had with the parents in the community.  He mentioned that he saw his first grade teacher at the grocery store and there were teachers in the building who went to the same church that he attended.  He mentioned that when he went to the third grade, the school hired a white teacher and that was when behavior problems seemed to magnify.  He said that there were perhaps behavior problems in the previous grades, but he did not notice them.  He mentioned that the white teacher was very sensitive and the students found it laughable that she was very emotional and at some points she broke down in tears.  They were challenged each week with getting her so upset that they did not have to work due to her breakdowns.  He said that the white teacher had no connections with the community and he thought that she was an outsider.

      He explained that he was soon transferred to a different school.  It was a “smart school.”  In the fourth grade, he was one of just three black students.  He was suddenly the minority.  The teacher was white as well.  He spoke differently and as a result was not anxious to speak at all.  He felt very uncomfortable and isolated.  His teachers spoke about things that he did not relate to at all.  They talked about camping and he had never been camping.  They talked about skiing and family vacations all of which he had only heard of or saw on television.  He eventually made adjustments and went on to do well in his subjects.  He was accused of cheating once when he wrote a report for English because his grammar was perfect. 

I related to that experience as the same thing happened to me when I was a high school sophomore.  I did not have perfect grammar but when I was assigned by my English teacher, Mrs. Marx to write poetry following the fixed verse formats of Villanelle, Sonnet and haiku it was assumed by her that I plagiarized.   She was out to get me.  At that time, she did not have the help of the internet, but she used every resource that she had available to try to find the poems that I wrote.  She searched books and she asked her colleagues.  When she returned the students work to them, I did not get mine.  Mr. Hinkle spoke to me about the poems; he was my freshman English teacher and one that became a favorite.  He told me that Mrs. Marx asked him about the poems and he told her that he thought the poems were original.  He told me that he said to her “If he copied them, why would he miss-spell words?”  In the end, Mrs. Marx gave me a C on the paper.  She said that I did everything correct and the poems were “nice” but the C was warranted because of my mechanical errors. Mrs. Marx was perhaps in her middle twenties; she was German and had blue eyes.  When I latter returned to that school as a school teacher, she was still there.  She worked there for over twenty years and retired.

      After the speaker told his story, he presented a question to the staff.  He asked how many of us felt that we came in contact with racism between 0 to 10% of the time in any single day.  He asked them to stand.  There were ten people who stood, they were all white.  He went from 11% - 25% and there were more than fifty more teachers who stood.  In that crowd, there were two black staff members.  He went from 25% to 50% and by this time, every white person was on his or her feet.  Oddly enough, with a very small exception, just about every black staff member remained seated.  He skipped to 90% to 100% and it seemed like every black person who remained seated stood.  I was waiting for 75%.  It was obvious that the vast majority of black people believed or felt that they were subjected to racism in 90% to 100% of their lives.  He mentioned that 90% of blacks who were surveyed said that when driving, they felt apprehension whenever they saw a police squad car in the rear-view mirror.  That there are few times, if any do black people feel protected by the police.  He went on to discuss the relationships between teachers in class and students.  He suggested that unless the discussion of race becomes a common occurrence, there will continue to be a gap between black students and white teachers. 

I thought it was interesting that we ignored the fact that our educational staff was composed of more than 75% white teachers, 90% black or Hispanic support staff, and a 93% minority student body.  The superintendent is a black female, her assistant superintendent is a black female, the human resource department is 100% black or Hispanic female, and the board of education has only two white members.  In terms of the regional office, I have not seen one black or Hispanic face at all. 

      When we went to lunch I was informed that the support staff was to leave and go to Central for the second session.  I expected that this in-service would be more specific to our job and the training we needed.  I was told by Ms. Reed, the special services supervisor / chair that I would have a one on one with a Hispanic student who was dealing with autism.  Her name was Jessica.  I had the opportunity to speak with her case worker, Ms. O’Dell  and Ms. Yarbrough who worked with Jessica last year during her freshman year.  I was told that Jessica had no filtering system and she would say whatever came to her mind.  I was told that her mother did not speak English very well at all but that she could say “lawyer” in three different languages.  I was told that Jessica came from a racist family and was extremely prejudice to black men.  As an example, they told me that upon announcement of a girl who was sexually assaulted last school year, Jessica walked down the hallway and pointed to every black male student she saw saying that “He probably did it.”  She was afraid of bugs and she often had temper tantrums.  Initially, I thought this strange that she would be assigned to a “black male” one on one.  Furthermore, I had no knowledge of autism with the exception of Rain Man the movie with Tom Cruise and the story The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time that I read with my younger son when he was 13 years old. 

      The meeting was a disappointment.  We were taught to relax.  There was a guest speaker who came to tell us the importance of relaxing out mind and finding outlets to reduce stress from work.  We were made to do irritating ice-breakers that caused more stress than the job.  In fact, it was very stressful to sit there and hear all of the mess that she shoved in our ears.  What I did, to relieve the stress from the meeting about relieving stress was to get my android and play a couple of games of chess.  I realized that I would have to result to Youtube videos to teach myself ways to deal with or help a student with autism.  Then I would have to make a strategy to deal with her alleged racist views towards black men.