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It's 7:50am on a Monday
morning and the kids are piling in off of their busses and heading to
the lunch room for breakfast. They are walking bent over from the hip
sideways looking at themselves from the shoes up. The girls are packed
outside the ladies room squeezing for a place in the mirror checking
their makeup ignoring the bell while slicking down the gel on their
"baby hairs" at 8:05am. The teachers are frantically getting ready to
greet them after a battle through rush hour traffic and a stop at the
local coffee bean processing facility (adding to the nervous twitch of
the confusing day ahead), worried about job security and the 10 EBD kids
(students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders) in their homeroom.
The Administrators are in their offices getting pumped up for a day of
avoiding irate parents, pushing paperwork, while trying to tell a staff
of grown folks how to do their jobs. Pacing back and forth dreading the
five stacks of paperwork they have received from the district offices. A
mother is rushing to get to work on time because she is concerned that
her boss did not understand why she had to take off work for a staff
development day at her son's school on Friday.
In the days of the single parent or two working parent families the
schools are playing a much more vital role in raising our children.
For the last 3 months I have been employed as a janitor at one of our
north side K-8 schools and the problems are so severe that the
administration is at a loss for solutions. The discipline problems are
so bad that it is nearly impossible to give students the education
needed to insure that this generation will be more educated than their
parents. In the wake of funding cuts that are affecting area schools in
all major areas, the level and quality of service is sure to decline.
The special education services are being affected as are the amount of
support staff that will be present to assist teachers in their
overcrowded classrooms.
Over the last 10 years, public education as hit rock bottom. Teachers
are consistently having their power taken away; their ability to make
students repeat a grade has been taken out of their hands. Therefore,
students are being pushed ahead even if they cannot read or write, which
in turn leaves us with too many high school seniors unable to pass the
8th grade standards test. They, in turn, dropout because the burden of
being a senior for 3 years is too much for many young people to bear.
As we move into economic tough times -- where a bachelor's degree seems
equivalent to a 1990's high school diploma -- lese and less students are
being prepared for the real world while more and more are being prepped
for prisons and lives of social service and welfare dependency -- both
of which are being phased out.
Because of the economic dilemma we as Minnesotans have allowed ourselves
to be engulfed by, our children are paying the price. We must realize
that the youth are our future and if we do not make education a priority
on the sociopolitical and economical level then we are doomed to a world
that will be even less productive then the poor excuse of one that we
currently exist in. If the lawmakers that are currently making decisions
regarding urban education do not take a stand for the rights of our
youth, then we can look forward to an escalation in crime rates,
illegitimate children, and a host of other social and community ills.
Thanks to the budget cuts and the lack of student transportation we are
seeing the reemergence of segregated schools, with poor communities
getting the worst resources. Tenured teachers who have the experience to
make a difference in poor communities' schools are choosing to relocate
to the suburbs, and the politically involved members of the community
are choosing to send their children to private institutions, leaving the
urban youth with little or no support to fight for their rights to be
properly educated. It has gotten so bad that the urban school teachers
are more focused on kids not killing themselves or coming to school
under the influence of drugs or alcohol then they are on their own
inability to teach. When you have a class of 25 students with 5-10 of
them being labeled with some sort of learning disability, what are you
suppose to do? They have resorted to making sure that parents have a
somewhat structured daycare to send their kids while they are at work.
In other words, our schools have gone from institutions of learning to
day care facilities for teenaged children who are still going home to
empty households at 3:00pm. They come in the morning, roam the halls,
hang out with their friends, swear, kiss on girls, hope not to get
caught, get F's, and still move on, learning nothing until it is time to
go home watch videos, play video games, get high, run the streets with
no aim or focus. And the days continue.
It is 3:00pm on a Monday afternoon and students are walking to their
busses bent over at the hip sideways looking at themselves from the
shoes up. The girls are checking their makeup in the mirror, teachers
are breathing a sigh of relief, and administrators are heading to their
office to try and knock out the second stack of five. Mom is calling
home to leave her son a message that there is some left over spaghetti
in the refrigerator from her cell phone as she rushes to her 3:00 staff
meeting, while the school board is concerned about 300 empty classrooms
(as if there weren’t teachers out there looking for jobs who could help
lift the burden off of the 25-student-carrying social studies teacher at
Lucy Laney).
"Only 65 more days till high school thinks a student with all failing
marks." |
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