Expulsions, student behavior, and the shortcomings of principals

Recently I've been extremely busy with assorted, big projects at my daughter's high school. They have absorbed a great deal of my time so I haven't posted for over a month. Here's something I sent out via the Oakland Public School Parents Yahoo group this morning. It's length qualifies it for a Perimeter Primate posting.

The community needs to be aware that when a student is suspended from their school for a serious infraction and is then recommended by the school's principal to be "DHP'ed" (submitted to an expulsion hearing), if the Disciplinary Hearing Panel decides to expel the student, most of the time they are simply assigned another equivalent OUSD school.

Students are rarely expelled from the district, only from their original school. Very few students are sent to alternative schools. For instance, a student who has committed a serious infraction, and then is DHP'ed from Bret Harte, will be directed to enroll at Frick, or Montera, or some other middle school the following week. All school year long, these DHP'ed students play musical (classroom) chairs.

Of course OUSD charter schools will never be directed by the District to accept the DHP'ed students, nor be expected to take part in providing any of their resources to them. Even though those schools declare themselves to be "public," they are allowed to be exempt from accepting ALL students. This means, too, that problematic students of the charter schools must always be accepted back into the general system when they get kicked out of the charter. For all the popular talk about equitability, this is not equitable.

After students have been DHP'ed, they arrive at the attendance office of their new school to be enrolled by their frustrated, discouraged, ashamed, and/or angry parents. For a little while, the kids are generally subdued and on their best behavior from having been submitted to the DHP process. The schools have case managers who are supposed to follow the DHP'ed arrivals. They have varying amounts of experience and training, and are trying to manage a huge and difficult load. Because of the nature of the kids' family situations, and the magnitude of the problems that they have, this is very tough work.

Principals are required to accept these students, but are usually not happy to do so because they know the students usually bring chronically difficult behavior with them. Although the District's method sometimes works because it separates enemies from each other, it is not unusual for the DHP'ed student's negative behavior to start up once again as soon as they are comfortable at their new school and get underway with developing new enemies.

Students who are inclined to live their educational years in this way might also have strong neighborhood turf, and/or ethnic subgroup, allegiances. The rivalries caused by the tribal outlook of some of Oakland's youth are the cause of a considerable amount of the fighting.

East and West Oakland groups dislike each other. Some Latino/Black/ Pacific Islander and Asian groups dislike each other. In OUSD there aren't simply enough White kids who are so inclined. Even subgroups within each of those groups dislike each other, for instance Latinos who are either Norte or Sur, or those from 98th Ave. vs. those from Seminary vs. those from the Dirty Thirties, etc. (all East Oakland neighborhoods) . Add adolescent behavior and weak family structures into the mix and you'll get the behavior problems seen in OUSD secondary schools. You may wish to research the increase in school violence in New Orleans as a result of forcing rival neighborhood kids together when their school system was re-formed.

Having attended Bret Harte and Skyline, my children and their friends have never been part of this type of social drama at their schools and they have learned how to keep far, far away from it. This is why they have always been safe at those schools and why I believe they are better off, and more socially aware and mature than their private school or suburban school peers. I value those qualities in young people.

I've learned that the majority of the school fighting is caused by a subset of kids who mess with each other constantly and don't know how live their lives any differently. Sometimes they have parents and relatives who actively coach them and encourage it. Elijah Anderson (in "Code of the Street") explains how schools are a "staging ground" for establishing Respect, the drive behind all "street-oriented" behavior.

Because my daughters and their friends are simply outside that sphere, they've expressed to me that most fights are simply annoying, or even amusing, rather than scary and threatening. Their immense entertainment value is why kids stop everything and run like crazy toward a fight that has broken out -- blocking adult access to the combatants. Of course some of the fights can get serious and cause severe bodily harm, but most don't get to that point.

In my opinion, OUSD schools lack a comprehensive, unified and effective behavior modification approach toward student behavior. This might well be the District’s most serious failing.

Some principals have adopted the techniques of Noah Salzman, a respected education consultant, to guide the overarching philosophy and approach to behavior management at their schools. I'm sure there are other effective and tested strategies, but they are not always considered or exploited by principals, or even seem to be required by the District. It is very haphazard. Any of these approaches -- well-implemented, discussed, made transparent, data-reviewed and constantly adjusted -- would be able to control and contain a fair amount of the negative behavior. This strategy would relieve the concerns and frustrations of many parents and teachers.

There are some charismatic school administrators who are gifted with the energy and strong instinct for managing student behavior, but they are a very rare breed. Joe Salamack might be one of them. He worked as a dean at Bret Harte in the late 1990’s, then as an assistant principal at Montera, with admiration and glowing reviews by most parents and his peers. To OUSD’s loss, he was snagged by Bishop O'Dowd a couple of years ago to become their principal.

Unfortunately, some principals strongly believe in, and cling onto, their own personal philosophies about student behavior management. Those philosophies are not necessarily proactive and "best practices" driven, or derived from any serious insight or research. They are likely to be either a passive and vague philosophy, or one which is reactive and consists of repeated threats, screaming and punishment.

It's too bad that there is such a lack of sophistication on the part of some principals about these matters -- considering the wealth of human behavior research that is available. I do not believe that coaching for the principals will necessarily be able to correct their deficiencies, either. The principals need to arrive at that position of authority open-minded, sufficiently learned, and with a strong internal sense about group behavior management.

Sometimes the school's teachers have a great deal of insight and would like the principal to lead the school to adopt a strategic, effective and unified approach. And sometimes the principal is hopelessly "old school" and defensive, and the teachers' more innovative opinions are considered a threat and are squashed. The best that teachers can do under these circumstances is to manage their own classrooms effectively. A few of them create pockets of sanity -- peaceful oases for their students -- within a school wide climate of chaos. The kids always know who these teachers are.

The schools also need to be staffed with more Campus Security Officers. Ask anyone who works on any secondary school campus. Sometimes student safety at one school is sacrificed for another school. For instance, last week a CSO from Skyline was sent to work at McClymonds for two days. Then there are the sick and vacation days that come up for the CSO's (and disability days caused by the injuries they get from breaking up fights). The staffing of these valuable employees is simply inadequate.

Most parents have no idea that all of this is going on but anyone who steps on a campus can feel it. This submission has been long, but I hope it helps move us toward a better OUSD.

Sharon Higgins
OUSD parent (since 1993)
Former Parent Coordinator at Bret Harte (2001-08)

AND A DAY OR SO LATER...

If a crime is committed that involves juveniles, the name of the perpetrator or the victim is not usually revealed, but they are crimes that should be reported nonetheless. Every week we read about crimes committed by juveniles in the Oakland Tribune. Names are withheld.

Katy Murphy just posted a piece on her education blog about the student-on-student assault that injured one girl so badly she spent two nights in the hospital. Of course the names were withheld.

The community should be able to see evidence that some sort of crime data is being tracked by the school site. I would think that those numbers (type of crime and frequency in a given time period) could legally be revealed.

How many fights broke out that week? How much bodily harm was caused (simple or aggravated assault)? How many kids were the victims of a strong arm robbery on the campus, or on the bus ride home that month?

And as for property crimes that cost the school district a ton of money, how many times that year did the school bank get broken into with hundreds of dollars getting stolen? How much property was stolen or damage sustained b/c someone at the school didn't remember to set its alarm system (yet again), or b/c the alarm system is simply ineffective?

This stuff is going on all the time, but the only way we learn about it is if it leaks out by accident.

AND A TINY BIT LATER...

Hey folks, this is the elephant in the room that we're now just beginning to talk about in a real way. I hope the strong members of this group don't let it fade away.

I believe the scattered and closeted handling of these issues on the part of the schools and the district is a big reason, maybe the biggest, why so many Oakland parents are reluctant to use the schools, especially the secondary schools. If they use them, many parents are always slightly on edge wondering about the safety of their children. And they should be, because nothing meaningful, by policy, is dependably revealed by the school. Bad stories, true or false, just seep out.

There are few straightforward ways to find out what is really going on. Maybe things are better than parents think, or maybe they are worse.

As far as I can tell, this is also a big reason why parents feel the need to flee to the charters or the privates ("I've heard that there is a lot of fighting at THAT school."). It is why working in these schools for the long term is so difficult for so many teachers (haphazard discipline structures & lousy school climate). It is why many OUSD teachers living in Oakland won't send their kids to their neighborhood OUSD schools. It is how a fair amount of the crime problem in Oakland is constantly developing in the public schools right underneath our noses.

The problems need to be addressed in a more comprehensive way by the schools. The unadulterated numbers of incidents need to be tracked, publicly reported and thought-about, so the schools know where to begin and where they need to go. Think about that magic word "accountability."

Hey District people: If you aren't willing to step up and be strong leaders who will be innovative with these issues and attack them head on for us, can you at least create a venue that will pull people together to make a task force, or workshop, or some way to put our heads together to devise a new strategy? Then we might be able to make some progress with getting into the nitty-gritty of this in a more meaningful way. On one hand it seems hopeless, but on the other it might be possible to start heading in a direction that will make more sense.

This topic affects parents who live in the flatlands, traditional zones, and hills schools alike. Unlike so many of those who work at Second Ave., we parents live in Oakland and we are using your schools, ugly warts and all. I wish you would trust us and consider us as worthy partners, and let us help you chart a new course.

THE END.

Poetry: Family Album

My husband wrote this poem in the days when I was going nuts. It was early 2001 and I had just started working at The School. I was intensely affected, sometimes horrified, by what I observed during the daily routine of the school day.

Especially shocked by what the school was providing to students for lunch, I decided to conduct my own survey about their food intake. On three different days I randomly approached students to ask them about their lunches. My research wasn’t totally scientific, but it certainly gave me an idea of just how bad things were.

Three options for students existed – to bring lunch from home (18%), have the free school lunch provided by the cafeteria (14%), or buy food from either the cafeteria or the snack bar (68%). Either because of the stigma attached to getting a free school lunch, or because they preferred a different type of food, lots and lots of kids who couldn't afford to buy lunch from the snack bar would do it anyway. Of those who bought lunch from the school, two-thirds just had soda and fries (or chips) as their midday meal, day after day after day.

These were the snack bar menu choices in the spring of 2001: regular or curly fries (large and small, with or without cheese, chili or jalapenos), fried rice, pepperoni pizza, pizza pocket, hot links sandwich, hot chicken sandwich, hamburger, ham and cheese sandwich, soda (Pepsi, Wild Cherry Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Squirt, Slice, Mist, Hawaiian Punch, Root Beer, Countrytime Lemonade, Fruitworks, in 12 and 20 oz. sizes), milk (4 oz. carton), bottled water (which is good since most of the water fountains didn‘t work), king sized bags of chips (Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles, BBQ and Cheddar Ruffles, Regular and Flamin‘ Hot Cheetos, Spicier Nacho Doritos and Cool Ranch Doritos, and Santa Fe Ranch Potato Chips), four pastry items (Hostess Powdered Donettes, Hostess Cupcakes, Hostess Cinnamon Sweet Rolls, Chocolate Chip Cookies), and eight types of ice cream bars. The students I interviewed spent an average of $2.13 per day. I estimated that annually the students spend $262,160, but the real figures are kept by OUSD Food Service. All I know is that the District relied on the sales of junk food to students in order to supplement its budget.

Not being a writer at the time, but compelled to sound the alert, I ended up writing an article for my local community newspaper about what I had observed. You can find it in the August 2001 issue of the MacArthur Metro (http://www.macarthurmetro.org/200108/news/1066). The national concern about child obesity hadn’t yet hit the front page, but within the next couple of years it would be on everyone’s radar.

Around this time, OUSD was considering to contract with PepsiCo for management of the vending machines in the schools. I was becoming obsessed with the dreadful food that the school was serving to all these low income kids and this looming scenario made it even worse. In my spare time I would measure out grams of granulated sugar equivalent to the sugar present in the soda sold by the school. Then I would pour the sugar into baggies and tape the baggies onto the empty cans or soda bottles.

Finding myself morphing into a lone wolf activist, I took those many baggies of sugar with me to a school board meeting and displayed them to members of the Board of Education during my three minute moment to speak. I implored to them to NOT be complicit with harming the health of Oakland's children. It seemed like a completely logical thing to do.

Then the school board voted on the proposal. Oakland Unified became one of the first school districts in California (and in the country) to ban the sale of soda in the schools.

Of course, an awful lot of sugary drinks and junk food are still sold at Bret Harte and other schools; the District needs to make the profits, see? Although the school is a long way from doing a really good job for its kids, I suppose things are a teeny tiny bit better than they used to be.

The garbage and the seagulls are another story.

FAMILY ALBUM
by George Higgins

You photograph the cans that overflow
with half-eaten pans of pizza and seagull excrement.
Crumpled cans of Surge and Mountain Dew
and glinting bands of Frito-Lay potato chips,
the standard meal.
You took the discarded fast food bags
and measured out the grams
of sugar, fat, cholesterol on your potter’s scale,
once used for making glaze calculations.
Your project you’ve called it, the photos that you take
of smiling kids beside the rubbish they’re waiting for the District to pick up,
The children stand beside the marks scrawled on the walls:
fuck the bitches, murder, 187, 300s rule,
you label them inside a family album.
They’re like the Cobalt blues coming out of the kiln.
The thugs are running things you say.
The union can’t get around to this
for months and months you say.

The Parent Center years

When it came time for our older daughter to go to middle school in 1999, we decided to send her to Bret Harte, the local public school. Despite its ragged appearance, the school had an “accelerated” academic program for its motivated students, a strong instrumental music program, and was within walking distance from our home. We knew a few other neighborhood families who had decided to go there as part of an emerging movement to “reclaim” the school, and who hoped – like we did – to “turn it around.”

At this time Bret Harte had a reputation as a “ghetto” school to the people in the neighborhood and was referred to as such by at least one local realtor. Things had not always been this way. In years past, all of our older neighbors had sent their children to the school without hesitation. They would tell us, “It used to be a really good school.” Of course this was before a major demographic shift took place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Over a short period of time, the school’s student body went from majority white (working and middle-class) to majority black (poor). Initially, white flight to the suburbs reduced the number of white middle-class kids who were attending the school, after which kids from outside the neighborhood filled those spaces. This started a snowball effect as the white (working and middle-class) families that remained in the neighborhood began to feel uncomfortable and pulled away from the school, too. They sent their kids to private schools or to Montera, the public middle school in the hills. Also during this time, Asian kids from poor immigrant families started attending Bret Harte, and as the years passed, more and more Latino kids from poor immigrant families came to the school as well. The climate at the school changed not only because of the demographics, but because of reductions in education spending caused by Proposition 13. The human and material resources that helped to make the school stronger just dwindled away.

As a stay-at-home mom, I had been an extremely active parent volunteer at my daughter’s elementary school and had also been involved with the co-op preschool my younger daughter attended. As soon as I arrived at Bret Harte, it was clear to me that this was a school that was in dire need of more adult attention. I immediately cut down on my volunteer activities at the elementary school and started showing up at Bret Harte to do things. What bothered me most was the filthy and neglected condition of the campus, so I joined with a few other parents to work on custodial and littering issues.

When my daughter was in the sixth grade, I was vaguely aware that there was a Parent Center at the school. I knew that there was someone who worked in it named Howard, but I didn’t really understand what he did. The few times I went in to talk with him he was sitting in the corner of the room alone with his leg up on a chair. The room was filled with boxes and furniture and the lights were always turned off. I would sit down and rattle to him about my frustration with the negligent custodian who mostly wandered around campus doing nothing useful. He listened to me and seemed nice enough.

The PTA had purchased an answering machine for the Parent Center hoping that Howard would record school announcements on it. Parents were frustrated and would gripe because he couldn’t often seem to get this simple task done. The following year when my daughter was in the seventh grade, he wasn't at the school anymore. The Parent Coordinator position was vacant for months until I made an offer to the principal: I would take on the job if I could work part-time and set my own hours. She accepted my proposal.

In February 2001, I started working as a part-time Parent Coordinator at the school. I did not receive any training or much guidance, but I was given free rein to do the things that needed to be done and I was highly motivated. Since the Parent Center had become a catch-all room for storage, I cleaned it up, brought in a desk from home, purchased a sofa at the White Elephant sale and started making pots of coffee in case anyone stopped by. I hunted down the person in the district who knew how to set up voice mail and then started to record regular school announcements for parents.

The following year the school hired another Parent Coordinator to help with its communication to Asian parents. In an incredible stroke of luck we found Eva, an intelligent and conscientious woman with tremendous language skills; she could speak Cantonese, Mandarin & Vietnamese and also write Chinese. She and I worked together for seven enjoyable and highly productive years. A Spanish-speaking Parent Coordinator position was added but the two different people who filled that spot did not happen to have the same longevity and devotion to the school.

In the years I worked at Bret Harte, word got around about the good things we were doing at the Parent Center and it became a model that representatives from other Oakland schools would come to see. Skyline's Family Resource Center was based on our model. Even representatives from other districts heard about us, and would stop by to find out what we had created and how it was done. The two people who had been Parent Coordinators before me had not worked out well, so the principal and the teacher who had conceived the idea of starting a Parent Center were very proud that it had finally been actualized.

As a Parent Coordinator, my main focus was to give parents consistent, high-quality communication from the school so they could know what was going on. I also constantly scanned the community so I could provide them with a wide variety of useful resources. We worked with the PTA to produce a monthly newsletter, we worked to help develop a web site, we offered our own classes and promoted others, we installed the messages on the outside marquee, we organized special events for the school, we produced multi-lingual documents, we started a listserv and sent out weekly announcements, we promoted the positive things that were going on at the school, we answered questions from members of the community, we collected resources for the school, we helped parents with their problems, and we connected people with each other. Mostly, we were a dependable and devoted presence intent on providing high-quality information and interactions to parents and other people at the school.

As the years passed, things changed at Bret Harte. No Child Left Behind altered the milieu at the school as testing, preparing for testing, and tensions about testing started to dominate. When the Oakland Unified School District was taken over by the state because of fiscal mismanagement, the new state-appointed administrative team made changes that damaged the integrity of certain positive things at the school. I watched as, one by one, a number of dedicated, skilled, and experienced staff members resigned from Bret Harte in frustration, and as the teachers who were left behind suffered from a weakened morale. I don’t think the district’s downtown management, to me a set of arrogant outsiders with agendas incompatible with the health of school sites, has any clue about just how many of this school's resources they drove away, and it is just one public school in Oakland. This is a district that simply cannot afford to lose a single resource because of this sort of carelessness.

For some reason in my seventh year at the school, the new principal, her new fiscal officer, and OUSD just couldn’t seem to process the Parent Coordinator contracts to completion. In the years I had worked there, this had not ever happened before. As a result, for month after month, we were not issued our paychecks.

As dedicated employees who were being strung along with superficial statements from the principal, the three of us continued to work without pay because we could manage financially just enough, we liked our work, and we were extremely hesitant to abandon the school. As the first semester advanced and our financial hardships grew, I became more and more insistent with the principal about finding out what was really going on. Realizing that this was being caused by some sort of incompetence and/or deception, I started to emotionally detach from the school. In addition, in my free time I had become very outspoken about the motives and direction of the district’s state-run administration. Being a public school parent and community member, I posted my opinions on the Oakland Public School Parents Yahoo group and on the opinion pages of the Oakland Tribune.

In December 2007 just before winter break and having still not been paid for the school year, I asked the principal to have a formal meeting with me and my co-workers. Instead of agreeing, she asked to meet with me alone. When I arrived in her office she was accompanied by the school's Network Executive Officer, her supervisor from the district. They both apologized to me for the problems with the contract, informed me that the contracts had finally just been approved (as if by magic!), and told me that our paychecks would be issued in a few weeks. But then the meeting took an uncomfortable turn.

The principal told me that she felt that I didn't like her and that I always seemed angry. I reassured her that I liked her just fine, but that it’s definitely been a problem that we haven’t been paid all school year. Then her NExO started a little inquisition of me – asking what I liked about my work at the school and asking if I was unhappy. She told me that I didn’t look happy whenever she saw me. This seemed very odd because we rarely crossed paths. It also seemed irrelevant to why I was meeting with them. Then she slipped in the piece of the conversation that made everything clear. She told me that she had read some of the things that I had written about OUSD, and reminded me that the district is where my paycheck comes from. Then she explained that she, and the principal, felt it was time for me to step down from the Parent Center. The principal sat next to her mute.

When I returned to school after winter break I delivered my resignation letter to the principal. I have concluded that my complaints about OUSD’s current state-run administration may have finally become big enough that they decided to uproot me from Bret Harte. I suspect they sent the NExO to do the deed. I know for certain that I had been providing the school with consistent and dependable high-quality service and that my elimination had nothing to do with my work. I left the school in February. In the days that followed, I started this web site (I hate the word “blog”) so I would have a place to post the things I like to write about.

I still think about Bret Harte quite a bit, and wonder how everyone is doing. The school is in the process of being “restructured” because of NCLB, so I know that many things are changing there. Of course, we are all constantly moving on to new things. At this last week of the 2007-2008 school year, I send out warm wishes from my heart for a good summer to the many Bret Harte community members I left behind. As always, go Bobcats!

Different kinds of parents

During the seven years I worked as a Parent Coordinator at a large middle school in Oakland that served many low income kids (about 550 kids, or around 62%), I learned how some parents behave in relation to their children’s schools, and to their children’s educations in general. For instance:

· One parent urinated on the floor in a school’s restroom because she was angry with the school.

· Quite a few parents take their kids out of the country for several weeks in the middle of the school year. They do this even though their children end up missing 15 to 20 days of instruction.

· A parent blocked a residential driveway with her car while she was waiting to pick up her child. When the school’s neighbor arrived and asked her to move, the parent called her “bitch.”

· One parent came to the school, hunted down one of her daughter’s classmates on the blacktop, and then she and her daughter began to beat up that child. They did not stop when the security officer intervened. When the assistant principal intervened, the parent also hit her, broke her eyeglasses, and then sped off in a car.

· Some parents who come in to conduct school business are drunk and reeking of alcohol.

· Some parents angrily reply, “I ain’t joining no PTA!” when asked by other parents at registration if they would like to do so.

· One parent had her children stay at a relative’s house many miles away. Her 13-year-old daughter was left responsible for transporting herself to her middle school, and her two much younger siblings to their elementary school, alone and by bus. All three kids showed up at the middle school at 11 a.m. The daughter had given up with trying to get the younger ones to their school.

· Some parents think it is acceptable if their children call White teachers “bitch” but warn their children to never do the same with Black teachers.

· There are parents who tell their children that they should beat up other kids. There are parents who give the principal permission to hit their children.

· One grandparent publicly beat his adolescent grandson with a belt in the front driveway of the school. That kid was in prison two years later.

· There are parents who have no idea when the school year begins. They bring their children in one or two weeks after the school year has already started.

· One parent came to the school and was upset because their child has received an “F” in math. She screamed at the math teacher, “You’re the teacher. You’re the one that’s supposed to be teaching them!” There was a complete disconnect re: the student's responsibility.

· Some parents absolutely refuse to permit their children to see a psychologist even though their children’s teachers are advising it because they are observing possible severe emotional problems. The parents are not refusing because of financial reasons; the school provides this service for free.

· Despite information being mailed home, some parents still have no idea what grades their children are receiving.

· One parent spit sunflower seed shells all over the carpeted floor of the principal’s office when they came in to meet with her.

· There are parents who are in and out of jail and who intentionally train their children how to steal things from other people.

· Some parents who are members of violent gangs will have their children join the gang, too.

· One parent was talking very loudly at a school music performance and became very angry and confrontational when she was asked to be quiet by another parent in the audience.

· One parent provided a cell phone to her daughter and permitted her to wear a grill (teeth ornament). When that child failed multiple eighth grades classes, the parent threatened to take those things away. No consequences were ever given, though. The girl dropped out of high school after the following year.

· Some parents have homes where the TV is constantly on, but not a single book other than the Bible can be found in the house.

· Some parents just throw the school newsletter in the garbage can and “never bother to read it,” according to their children.

· A number of parents will never come in for special school meetings with teachers even though they are asked to attend because their child is in danger of being retained.

· Some parents come to the school two weeks before the end of the school year and are absolutely irate. They are angry because they have just learned that their children will not be allowed to graduate from middle school because of failing multiple classes all year long.

· Some parents are either oblivious, or in denial, about the fact that their children are gang members, even though the warning signs have been there for months and assistant administrators have had talks with them about it.

· One parent “helped” with a yearbook project, collected thousands of dollars from students, and then disappeared with the money.

· Some parents never, ever attend back-to-school night or any other school event.

· One parent asked her husband to turn off the home TV in the evening so that their kids could concentrate on homework. He absolutely refused because he wanted to watch TV.

· Two parents were completely dismissive of the fact that their daughter was getting a master’s degree. They told her that she was only wasting her time by going to college and thought she should just go get a job.

· One parent had to call the police because an ex- spouse with a drug addiction was breaking down a door to get into her house. On the morning of their first day of school, the four kids watched as their father got arrested in front of their house.

In the capacity of my work, I became acquainted with this type of behavior on a regular basis. Dealing with it, and the consequences of it, is one of the immense challenges that these schools must face. The average behavior of parents was not this extreme, but this type of behavior was not atypical. In a middle-class school, this type of parent behavior would be rare.

I would occasionally observe some low income parents exhibiting behavior at the other extreme. For instance, one mother was so bothered by a small error on her child’s otherwise perfect attendance record that she found her child’s schoolwork from that day, brought it in as proof of her child’s attendance, and insisted to have the error officially corrected.

Having observed incident after incident, and knowing that the behaviors are indicators of home values and parenting abilities, I find it impossible to believe that schools – on their own, with the resources currently allotted to them – will be able to sufficiently counter most of the attitudes that children learn in their homes and/or be able to adequately compensate for the things that parents are unable to provide.

As always, if you are interested in learning more, I suggest you read Annette Lareau (who describes the difference in parenting styles of middle class and poor/working class families and how these styles affect the behavioral outcomes of their children), Richard Rothstein (who looks at numerous other studies about family functioning as it relates to children's ability to learn) and Elijah Anderson (who describes behaviors typical in “street” (vs. “decent”) low income Black families and tells how fourth graders with a “street” orientation have already started to tune out of school).

On nurturing

As an Oakland public school parent, I’ve seen many changes in my local schools over the past several years. Various methods are being tried to improve the academic achievement of students. A number of the changes have been about increasing the testing of students, subjecting schools to penalties, and revamping school communities. Unfortunately, many problems continue because important pieces of the puzzle are still missing.

When I contemplate this situation and think about possible solutions, I often recall an experience I had in college. It was in my last year of nursing school when a guest lecturer spoke to my class about “nurturing.” As nursing students, we had been studying diseases, procedures, and care plans for the past three years. A lecture about nurturing was unlike anything we had heard before and seemed lightweight and slightly irrelevant to me, the soon-to-be critical care nurse.

But as it turned out, time after time I have learned from experience that nurturing is the essence of care-giving. Now thirty years later, the issues at these schools remind me of the wisdom of that lecture once again. One of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for helping the schools, and one that is never mentioned, is nurturing.

The schools are expected to give an excellent education to the children, to elevate their social status, and to also repair the harmful effects of family breakdown, poverty, illiteracy, violence, values that have lost their moorings, and living in a neighborhood with a thriving underground economy – all on a meager budget. To me, the schools aren't necessarily the thing that is “broken” but that everything around them is sick. Individuals can be sick, and systems can be, too. It’s no wonder that schools are struggling and that so many children are doing poorly.

The children’s low academic achievement is just one symptom of the illness. Unfortunately, members of the society far outside these schools have concluded that the schools are the cause of the problems, not the other way around. Their mandate is for the schools to be “fixed” and they call the current attempts which are inadequate “reform.” So far, it seems as if the people inside these schools, who know better, are too few and too weak to effectively battle the misconception.

The fixes being imposed have been a “left-brain” approach that has been dictated by bureaucracies and businessmen. It goes along these lines: “Let’s collect data about all the different parts and analyze it. Then we are going to solve the problem by remaking the schools so that they’ll work more efficiently. We don't trust that anyone in the schools is working hard enough, so we're going to force them to work harder, too. It’s all very logical, you see.”

Sadly, this approach is narrowly focused and punitive, and it is doing more harm than good. Some people believe this the underlying intent. Limited in its view, it completely ignores other things that are needed to create health and build more human potential in these schools – in the students, their parents and their teachers. It completely disregards the wisdom that the “right-brain” has to offer.

Sick people are human beings; they are not just numbers that are occupying space. Restoring health takes much more than drawing blood and taking vital signs (or testing kids and closing/reopening schools). The students, and their schools, will need consistent, compassionate care – and plenty of it in order to get well. Both the urban public schools and their students desperately need acts of kindness done for them, just as sick patients need to have their hands held, sips of water offered, and kind words of encouragement spoken to them. The schools need nurturing.

Nurturing is action. It means to nourish; to feed. It consists of many, small, physical acts of kindness, quietly done over time, that make people feel better, and let them know that someone cares. This type of care can’t be measured or mandated, but the results can clearly be seen. If they choose to, members of the society who are stronger can do this for members of the society who are weaker.

Middle class families are lucky. They have less of a struggle to make ends meet so they have the time, money, and inclination to nurture their children’s schools. They contribute additional resources by providing the school with things that are enriching and morale building, such as student awards luncheons, teacher appreciation events, classroom help, meaningful input at meetings, community work days, multicultural fairs, talent shows, refreshment sales at performances, newsletters produced and sent to parents, small grants to teachers, etc. Eliminate these extras from those schools and watch them start to wither.

Less fortunate schools simply don’t have enough of those kinds of things; in addition they’re often criticized and attacked by community members who don’t fully understand the dimension of what is going on behind their walls. The inhabitants are trying to cope with an immense amount of stress by themselves, with not much to offset it along the way.

I remember the first time I felt the envy of not having those things that would have made it nicer at my daughter’s middle school. Coming from an elementary school that was well nurtured, we found ourselves in the harsh environment of our local middle school that lacked enough parents to do very many of the extras. Most of the parents were poor and uneducated. Many wouldn’t consider joining the PTA or attend school meetings, and a number of them were even hostile at the suggestion of it. The vast majority wouldn’t ever offer, or even consent when asked, to help at the school, not to mention take the initiative to organize something special for the students.

I soon entered a phase where I felt resentful towards them. From my perspective they were neglecting the school and its children. I was at first disgusted by their lack of participation but started to understand it when I read “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life” by Annette Lareau. People from different backgrounds have different points of view and abilities, and that’s just the way it is. In the meantime, the school was crippled by, and was suffering from, a lack of adult attention – even though most of the staff was doing their best.

I would like to see members of the wider community, and the organizations in them, tapped so that they would provide acts of kindness – and nurturing – to disadvantaged schools. Their participation should be institutionalized. This would help with lowering teacher turnover and building the community.

I would also like to hear the word “morale” spoken by school leaders more often than it is, and for them to demonstrate a heightened sensitivity to this extremely important feature. Teacher morale is continuously and devastatingly eroded because of the extraordinarily difficult work conditions in urban schools, conditions that very few teachers are able to tolerate over time. The high levels of job dissatisfaction lead to teacher turnover and apathy. So with the resulting loss of support for students, why is this problem so minimally addressed?

To help find our way out, perhaps we could look at the model provided by the U.S. military, an organization that recognizes the tremendous importance of morale. For generations it has known that strong levels of morale (of both the servicemen and their families) are essential for functioning; it even has an office called Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR). This is the type of support that the education-reform-minded-billionaires could have provided to OUSD which would have made a difference.

A few years ago, a friend told me what happened when his church decided to help an East Oakland elementary school. One of the first things they did was to give the teachers a luncheon. He told me how one teacher was near tears as she expressed her gratitude, “I’ve been here for 20 years and no one has ever done anything for us.” Just stop for a moment and imagine yourself in the position of that teacher, then you'll be able to understand how nurturing can help morale.

Arrogant minds might find it odd or silly to hear, but wiser folks will realize that I am right. By finding ways to provide more nurturing to these schools, the people in them would be helped a great deal and more progress towards wellness might be made. When acts of kindness are done for people in need, they tend to respond beautifully.

Poetry: Lake Bret Harte

If students attended Bret Harte during the years that a certain extremely negligent head custodian reigned, nearly every one of them would be able to tell you about this memorable “lake.” Located on the terrace where the kids ate their lunch, it was a body of incredibly putrid rainwater, rotten food and garbage that filled a concrete planter with a clogged drain. Being imaginative children, the students named it “Lake Bret Harte.”

Our daughter would complain and complain about the stench, but I never thought it would be as bad as she said it was until I checked it out for myself. The lesson here is to listen to your kids.

When workers from the District finally did something about the stinking hole, they just filled it up with asphalt. I always wished they had simply cleared the drain so the container could have been filled with soil and growing plants.

LAKE BRET HARTE
by George Higgins

Is not really one.
It’s not above the timberline
Lapping over lichened rocks or granite,
its gentle surf rattling stones.
It doesn’t freeze in winter
or slumber, fed by a glacial field,
nor does it wallow in the bowl, say,
above Glen Canyon Dam or Hetch Hetchy
houseboats bobbing in the shadow of sandstone arches,
although who knows all origins
man made or atmospheric?
What evaporates here may be deposited there
or piped somewhere else.
Nor did the writer Bret Harte ever sit
by its waters and calculate
a metaphor for this empty planter,
triangle shaped with six inch thick concrete walls
between steps and curb,
leading to the Cafetorium.
This isosceles triangle, a hollowed planter,
the kids say you could bury someone standing up
in this Oakland Middle School bearing his name.
While the students eat lunch
this well fills up on rainy days but never drains.
It contains the Milky Ways, the curdled cartons,
the discarded crust, decomposing batter
provided on the Black Top by a vendor.
Lake Bret Harte a name
created by the students
a lesson in irony, self taught,
their gift back to the bard
of the Oakland Hills.

January 2001

Poetry: Lady Bobcats

Our daughter was on the girls basketball team for one season when she was in middle school. The team would play on the second floor basketball court in the school's 1950’s-era gym. There we would sit on the pull-out wooden bleachers with the other parents and watch our daughters play.

LADY BOBCATS
by George Higgins

O, beautiful, O, graceful.
I've never seen anything like
this huddle. They have
more swagger than their mothers.
All the wet, damp winter,
on the break, the three man weave,
my daughter, sixth grader,
plays in her urban gym,
city games, the games
they play in Oakland.
Tonya, the coach,
says:
"Be aggressive."
"Stay down."
The moon also sets in Oakland,
and the Pleiades.
And so many city people
together there on the wooden bleachers.

Not For the Squeamish

For a time, when I was working at the school, I would occasionally check on the conditions in the girls’ bathroom. A number of the young ladies I knew would avoid using the bathrooms all day long because they thought they were just too disgusting. They would manage this feat by not drinking very much at school and would “hold it” until they got home at the end of the day.

Sometimes the girls’ bathroom was fine. Other times, a little too frequently, it was a realm of un-flushed toilets, perhaps a used sanitary napkin dropped in a stall, wads of dried toilet paper sticking to the ceiling (thrown up there while wet), and massive heaps of saturated brown paper towels left in the sinks and tossed all over the floor. It wouldn't be unusual to see every possible surface covered with graffiti – the walls, the broken hand dryers, the paper towel dispensers, the scratched metal mirrors, and the insides and outsides of the bathroom stalls.

The graffiti was applied in flurries. One day there would be hardly any, and a few days later everything would be covered. Permanent markers were the medium of choice, but pen, pencil and “white-out” would work, too.

Periodically, a team of school district painters would arrive to paint the entire bathroom. Afterwards the principals would lock the bathrooms for a day or two while the paint dried. The surfaces stayed clean for a short time and then graffiti would start to appear again. Once, a student scrawled this in a freshly painted bathroom: “You stupid to paint this cuz we just gonna do it again!”

There was so much accumulated paint on the walls that I started to wonder if a thick sheet of it could ever peel away from the drywall and fall on the floor. After years of repeated paintings, I wondered what a cross section of the paint layer might look like under the microscope – like tree rings perhaps.

One time, the PTA sponsored a mural contest, hoping that student artwork in the bathrooms would deter graffiti. It did, on that wall, for a short time until Randy Ward (the first OUSD State Administrator) dictated that all school bathrooms had to be freshly painted in colors determined by the district. That was the end of our student designed and painted bathroom murals.

From what I observed, girls and boys did different types of graffiti, and in different amounts. The girls’ bathroom always had much more graffiti and it could be very mean and gossipy. Their graffiti could lead to some of those ever-so-exciting girl fights that would happen periodically on campus.

The boys’ graffiti was mostly tagging, the scribbling of neighborhood locations and gang names (3800, E.S.O., Dog Town, Norte, etc.) which seems to be the young male marking of territory and the announcing of allegiances. The boys were also more likely to destroy fixtures in the bathrooms, like the time three of them spent a period in the bathroom dislodging a toilet completely out of its bolted fitting on the floor.

I was fascinated with the adolescent mindset behind the graffiti and what these kids were saying to each other, and to their world. For girls it was mostly the professing of love, and of hate.

This is some of the graffiti in the girls’ bathroom that I recorded a few years ago.* I want to warn you that it is disgusting, and not for the squeamish or politically correct. Remember, this is only one episode of graffiti. It was written by 11 to 14 year old girls who wanted it to be seen by other 11 to 14 year old girls.

T-Baye waz here, but now she’s gone. She left her name to carry on. Those who knew her, knew her well. Those who didn’t can go to hell!! Whaaa! Dashell waz here, but now she’s gone. She left her name to carry on Those who knew her, knew her well. Those who didn’t can go to hell!! Nigga T-Baye [scratched through paint] Dashell [scratched through paint] Hopkinson is a Hoe pimple bitch Vanessa Shakela Smith is a Bicth with hair looking as she look like a man Jessica humped dis pole ### is a ##### lick her #### Bitch you Go to Hell Her name aint Even T-Baye Bitch. Bitch Pryde HBG we stay smashing Mexican Puerto-Rican Latin Bitch Fuck U! Puerto Rican Pride Bitch Asn B2K Omarion & Tanya Mexican [crossed out] Asn [crossed out] Fuck [crossed out] Fuck Lil Bow Wow>>Fuck whoever wrote this Hoe Like what it is Bitch T-Baye Bitch Get it Right Hoe you heard me you ugly hoe suck you momma pussy How the FUCK YO PUSSY Smell ass gone tell me WHAT MY name is Mayra doesn’t love Malik SDF Fuck this school Stupid 30’s Lil zane is a fine ass Fuck John M [drawing of a heart] Latanya 4-ever Latanya still loves Daniel Morris 4-Ever R.I.P. Lil’ Dewayne you BEATENEM BOY!!! A WELL RESPECTED S.T.I. BOY!!! S.T.G.’z BITCH LOWER BOTTOM W.S.O. WHAT IZ IT ##### ## ### ASS Dick Sucking Bitch RiP LiL SHAN ALL WELL Respect 77th GREENSIDE ST Boy FUCK MRT [Crossed out] Dina & Travis Knight for Life=forever R.I.P. lil will Vanessa waz here but now she’s gone Angie Saephan A BITCH she left her name because she suck dick ASS Crack!!! N She Better WATCH HER HOE Shes a 1c Hoe Maria is a Fucking DICK SUCKING BACK! Miss Handleton suck dick HB Bitch FUCK STI SDF MARIA A HOE ### Mary suck dick John Mallon [crossed out] Ms. Handleton is a Bitch Maria eate Pussy [with arrow pointing to a drawing] Pauline is a BITCH fuck ##T Pauling Hong is a DICK SUCKeR Jessica Hong suck DICKS Jessica Hong is a little fatass Bitch Jessica Hong is a bitch Jessica Hong said that she was sucking her brothers Dicks! Jessica Hong is a bitch Maria is a slut SIGN PAULINE HONG Lidia is a beach Maria is a dick sucking slut!!! Fuck yall bitches Aliana Martinez sucke John Mitchells + Akeem+ her big brothers NUTS Hoe not! J. Anders is a bitch Nelly is fine cuties ### better watch her mouth BOOG OMARION LIC FIZZ Raz B Mayra + Malik is some dick sucking Bitches! 6500 VG’s ### Fuck who ever wrote this must be black [with arrow pointing to above] you jealous bitch #### is a ### who ever wrote that stank ## shit eat not bitch 6th & 7th ## VGS VGS d better watch your back Lil Bowwow is hella fine S.T.G.’z BITCH LOWER BOTTOM Mexican Pride 4ever Mexican Bitches can suck they daddys dicks Like they always do W.S.O. WHAT IZ IT!!! From a black bitch Laquisha and Tyrina is some stank ass hoes and Shamila need to stop wasting her time with then and Nina need to too They some stupid bitches Jalana ia a bitch Prosty Nelly is fine [crossed out] Fuck. took the Pic-away Bitch Sing Bitch asshole Nelly Ciera & Ernest HBG Condom use them S.T.I. [crossed out] Bitch you’z A HOE! Kristen WhiTe suck dick Arianna Martinez dose this Fuck [arrow] This person who wrote this is a bitch Keiu Pham 4 Life!!! Fuck you samerit you lick yo moma pussy Bicth Maria is a HOE she even suck moma’s dick And her mama is a man!!! HOE

# = crossed out to become illegible

*Names have been changed

Don't these words have an odd, poetic charm?

My Farewell

This piece was published in the March 2008 issue of “From the Harte,” the community newsletter for my beloved Bret Harte Middle School.

"Dear Parents, Guardians and Community Members,

I am saying goodbye to you because, after seven years, it has become necessary for me to step down from my position as Parent Coordinator. Tasked with the challenge to “increase parent involvement” because of its benefits on academic achievement, I have pursued this goal by trying to give you consistent, high quality school-to-home communication. Hopefully this has enhanced the connection you have had with Bret Harte.

This newsletter is one of those communication forms and, in partnership with the PTA, has been sent to the homes of Bret Harte students nearly every month since October 2001. I know that many of you look forward to its arrival. Just last month, I was contacted by two mothers who asked me when the next issue would be arriving. These types of inquiries have been most gratifying to me.

In addition to the work I’ve done here, I have a strong connection to Bret Harte in other ways. Both of my daughters attended this school (’02 and ’07), my uncle attended in the 1950’s, and my husband and I have lived in the neighborhood since 1988. Many of my older neighbors sent their children here, and some even attended it themselves.

Over the past 8½ years, I have become fascinated with current issues in urban public education and how they play out in a school like Bret Harte, and in a district like OUSD. I have been writing about these topics in my personal time and will continue to do so at my new web site, “The Perimeter Primate” at http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

While being on the campus during the school day for so many years, and learning what I have learned while here, I have become deeply concerned about many of Oakland’s kids -- your kids. I know how critical their educations will be to their futures and I worry about them. Far too many of them do not take this one-time school opportunity seriously enough, for enough of the time.

So, my final word of advice is to remind you to be more vigilant for the sake of your children. Monitor them more closely -- their homework, their attendance, their grades, their habits, their friends, their food choices, their backpacks, their pockets, and their bedrooms. Be the adult and don’t back down. If they angrily ask, “Don’t you trust me?” it’s really okay to tell them, “No!” They are just kids with urges and they are driven to explore. They need your steady guidance so they won’t get lost.

I wish you and your children well."