Searching for Hope: Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America

8. Where's the School Spirit?

+ + + 8 WHERE’S THE SCHOOL SPIRIT? The missing pieces of Manual were everywhere. The school didn’t have a student council, I learned one day. Or a newspaper. Or a yearbook. Or so many of the things that scream high school and that are just as routine as math and science at other schools. Day after day, I would notice one more element of high school life that the cash-strapped school didn’t have. Once, I stopped as I wandered one of the hallways and jotted a few words into my notebook: “This school doesn’t seem to have anything.” I wasn’t talking only about the programs and extracurricular activities. The school simply had no spirit. It felt like a sterile factory, and its students were the widgets. The goal was just to keep the dilapidated assembly line moving as much as possible and not to do anything more than that. I walked through the halls another day counting the many empty glass-enclosed cases that at other schools would be filled with memorabilia, photos, and information about student achievements. The only signs I saw on the wall had been taped up by the football coach. “Any student with the desire to play football, this is your last opportunity,” they read. Where’s the school spirit? 81 The coach was essentially begging boys to come out for the team—even though the first game of the season had been played three weeks earlier. Meanwhile , the sports trophy cases in the back of the school seemed to have been frozenintime—asifManualathleteshadaccomplishednothingsincethe1980s. The school was clean. There was no graffiti on the walls, and the building had been recently renovated. But it was soulless. When I walked down the halls, I often felt like I was in a hospital. Forsomereason,thelackofayearbookstruckmehardest.Itwasalittlething, inconsequential in the larger picture and superficial when compared with the school’s monumental issues of academic failure, student behavior problems, and high dropout rates. And I understood that times were changing and print products of every kind were suffering. All I had to do was look at my paycheck or the roster of reporters at my paper—both were significantly smaller than a year earlier—to understand that point. But the yearbook program had not been killed a few years earlier because of changing technology, because people preferred to store their high school memories on a disc or a computer file, or because Facebook had overtaken hard-cover books in the hearts of today’s students . It had faded from existence after a century of tradition because too few students had been able to afford the books, and the school had been forced to eat several thousand dollars’ worth of them. Many unopened 2005 yearbooks remained stacked in a room in the back of the school. Seniors graduating at the end of the current school year would never have a yearbook to fill with signatures and notes from friends, classmates, and teachers . They wouldn’t have a book to dust off twenty years from now when they were feeling nostalgic for high school. Again, I knew it wasn’t the biggest issue. But it bothered me. And it bothered some students. One day a group of them met with two twenty-something AmeriCorps workers who had been assigned to the school. The workers’ job was to get more students engaged in activities— a task they acknowledged they’d failed at miserably. On this day the women had sprung for pizza and invited students to meet to talk about the yearbook program and whether there was a way to bring it back. Seven students, all girls, showed up at the meeting. One of the AmeriCorps workers was surprised when the girls said they’d be willingtostayafterschoolonFridaystoworkonayearbookproject.Formonths she and her partner had been hampered by the inability to get students to show up for meetings or participate in activities aimed at tackling the depressing culture in the school. She smiled at the commitment from the girls in front of her. “You’ll really stay after school on Fridays?” she asked. 82 searching for hope The girls nodded, smiling as they ate slices of pizza. “Wow, you really want a yearbook.” “We do,” one girl said. “It’s memories,” senior Susan Lynn added. “You only go to high school once. For some people these are going to be the best years of...