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

5, I Hate this School

+ + + 5 I HATE THIS SCHOOL. Iparked my car in front of Manual at about noon and walked toward the front door one day early in the school year. In recent days I had filled several notebooks as I wandered the school in search of column material , meeting dozens of teachers and students along the way. My initial column on the school, which I’d written the night before and had spent the morning polishing, would be running in three days. But there’s always another deadline, and my next one wasn’t far off. As I approached the school, one of its doors crashed open. A man in a T-shirt and jeans barged out, his teenage son trailing him. The man was furious and mumbling to himself. As they walked, the boy, who I would later learn had been sent home for violating the dress code policy, meekly asked his father if he could drop him off somewhere. I had already seen many parents leave Manual in anger. Actually, most who came into the school did so because their son or daughter was in trouble, meaning they invariably left irritated. So this wasn’t a particularly noteworthy scene. Not yet, anyway. That changed within a second. The man stopped and I hate this school. 33 turned to his son with a face filled with fury. “I ain’t dropping you off nowhere, motherfucker,” he said sharply. I turned and stared at the two. The boy was perhaps fifteen. He didn’t look scared, just irritated. His father, like most parents I came across at Manual, was probably in his mid-thirties. We all stood there for a second as the father and I made eye contact. I was stunned. Had I just heard a man call his own son a motherfucker? Apparently I stared too long. The man pointed at me. “Get your nose out of my business, bitch,” he said, before turning and walking fast toward the work van he had parked a few more steps away. He yelled at his son to get in and before long sped off. I remained on the front steps of the school for several seconds, still stunned. WhenIfinallywalkedinside,Imentionedtheincidenttoasecretaryatthefront desk. She shook her head and told me she wasn’t surprised. Parents can be a problem at Manual. The man was likely upset over being called from work to pickuphisson.Parentsaroundheredon’thavejobsthatmakeaccommodations for their parental responsibilities. That’s money out of his paycheck. But I was new to life at the poverty-stricken school, and that moment stuck with me during my entire stay at Manual. I saw it as a symbol of the lives many of the students lived. I wondered why a father couldn’t see that his son’s own problems with teachers and school rules might stem from the way he behaved. I wondered whether a boy spoken to like that by his own parent could ever develop the social skills needed to survive. And, I thought, if a father talked to his son like that on the grounds of a high school, and to a man in a suit who could have been a teacher or vice principal, how does he act at home? It wasn’t the worst thing I would see during the school year. Not by a mile. But it was the biggest lesson I’d learned up to that point about life at the struggling south-side school, a school to which many students go through the front door each morning carrying baggage that is far heavier than their backpacks. Unfortunately, I would encounter many other lessons in the opening weeks of the school year—lessons that seemed to have at their core the common denominator of anger. That same week, I sat in an English class without knowing that just two floors up school police were responding to a violent hallway disturbance. When they arrived they found a teacher holding back a fifteen-year-old boy who had just attacked his ex-girlfriend. The attack came a day after the girl told school officials the boy had been harassing her. The boy responded by finding her, screaming at, and choking her. When police arrived, the girl’s neck was marked with bruises. 34 searching for hope “You got me suspended,” the boy screamed as he shoved the girl into a row of lockers. He stopped choking the...