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

18. I Knew I Didn't Want That

+ + + 18 I KNEW I DIDN’T WANT THAT. Thirty-five years before I walked into Manual High School I began my own inglorious education career at Kuny Elementary. The one-story brick building sat in the middle of Gary, Indiana, a once-mighty steel town thirty minutes from Chicago that by 1974 was well into its steep and unyielding decline. The local steel industry, which had given healthy middleclass paychecks to generations of Gary residents, was crumbling. A city that was once the heart of northwest Indiana was now full of blight. In a region stung hard by a deep racial divide, whites had fled the city in huge numbers for the area’s surrounding cities and towns, leaving behind Gary’s increasingly overwhelming poverty and crime problems. The onetime home of the Jackson Five and scenic World War II–era neighborhoods was now home to a growing numberofabandonedbuildingsandsocialproblems.Thoseproblemswereonly getting worse. The city was in the midst of a staggering population decline that would drop its number of residents by a third, or nearly sixty thousand people, from 1970 to 1990. 170 searching for hope When my kindergarten year began at the tail end of the summer of 1974, I was sharing a bedroom with my young single mom and my seven-year-old brother in a small home in the Glen Park section of Gary. In the four previous years, the years that followed my parents’ divorce, the three of us had lived in four different apartments or homes in Gary. Ultimately, roughly a year before I started school, we moved into my mom’s childhood home, sharing it with my grandparents and an uncle who had recently returned from military service during the Vietnam War. It was a cramped house but I loved it, and I loved Gary. At the age of five I was oblivious to most of the problems that had plagued the city. And as the mid-seventies settled in there were still remnants of Gary’s glory days to be found.ThelongstretchofBroadway,theonce-bustlingstreetthatcutsdownthe middle of the city, continued to be home to a few family restaurants and dime stores—businesses that wouldn’t last much longer but were hanging on in 1974. Lake Michigan offered recreation on the north edge of town. And even some of the city’s problems—such as all the empty buildings—provided my brother and me with endless summer playgrounds. One of the many neighborhood corner stores that for years had peppered the city sat at the end of our block. It gave us a friendly place to buy candy and sodas and kill time—until the longtime owner was shot in the last of several robberies, that is. Kuny Elementary was a short walk from our back door. The school was built after my mom’s time in Gary schools in the 1950s, and it seemed new and bright. I went there for just one year, before my mom married a man after a brief courtship and we moved to another part of town. My brother, Jeff, and I attended two other schools in Gary over the next four years, taking a city bus to one of them, before moving to a nearby city in 1979. In Gary we left behind a city that over the next decade-plus would compete repeatedly for the title of Murder Capital of the Country and serve as an example of what can happen to industrial towns that rely too heavily on the jobs of yesteryear. The schools we left behind eventually emerged as some of the worst in the state. My only hint of that decline was that the stellar grades I had received in Gary schools instantly turned into a string of Ds and Fs when we moved to a better district. I thought about my education and childhood often as I talked to Manual students. By the time I met them, my wife and I were living in a nice house and enjoying comfortable salaries. We were college graduates and frequent travelers, and my final days in Gary schools were thirty-year-old memories. Our Indianapolis home was only nine miles from Manual’s front door, but like I knew I didn’t want that. 171 most professionals in the city, we were living in a different world than the one occupied by the kids I’d spent the year profiling...