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

14. What's Gonna Happen, Mr. Grismore?

+ + + 14 WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN, MR. GRISMORE? Iwalked out of Spencer Lloyd’s class on the Friday before Thanksgiving after watching his choir prepare for its upcoming holiday concert—the Christmas Extravaganza, he called it—which was less than four weeks away. I was amazed at how far Lloyd had brought the choir in such a short time. The students were more focused and sounded stronger than they had just a few weeks earlier. That seemed to be a pattern. Each time I returned to the class, the improvement was noticeable, even to me, a guy who loved music but couldn’t carry a note and didn’t know the first thing about singing. Many of the students were just starting to learn the basics of voice control and pitch, but they were improving. The class had spent the period working on the classic “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The students’ voices filled the room as Lloyd conducted furiously and moved around to hear the different singers, to make sure all of the students were doing their part. “Come on, sing it, sopranos,” he said. “Altos, come on, guys!” 138 searching for hope I was planning to write about Lloyd’s class and hoped that doing so would result in a few more people than normal attending the mid-December concert. He and the students deserved it. Every student in the building who took part in such an activity deserved that. The sports teams and the drama clubs deserved the chance to perform in front of full crowds. But they didn’t get them. The previous weekend, I had gone to see the two girls I wrote about earlier in the year, Kelly and Allison, in the school’s production of The Curious Savage, a mystery about an elderly woman’s fight to keep her greedy heirs from grabbing her money. The girls had claimed the lead roles and worked hard for weeks leading up to the performances. But fewer than forty people attended the shows, and as I walked out into the November evening after one of the performances, I found myself regretting that I hadn’t written about the play in the paper. The school seemed calm that Friday morning as I walked from the choir room and toward the main office. The next class period had already begun, and the halls had mostly cleared. I hummed “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” to myself. But the calm came crashing to an end when one of the doors to the main office flung open hard and a boy sprinted out, yelling as he did. His arms were cuffed behind his back, but he was moving fast. Not fast enough, though, because a pair of police officers caught and tackled him as he reached a door leading to the school’s courtyard. He was screaming, squirming, and crying as they dragged him back into the office. His brown hair was a mess. His face was red. It turned out that while I had been sitting in Lloyd’s class, the boy, seventeenyear -old Brent Walls, had been arrested with two friends after police received word that they were arranging drug deals in the locker room near the school gymnasium. The police found the three boys in there and brought them down to the main office for questioning. More than the others, Brent was acting suspicious and fidgeting as police escorted him from the locker room. Once they were all in the office, police had searched the boys. They found marijuana on all of them. Brent carried the biggest bag, but that was just the start of his problems. In one of his back pockets, police found something worse: a loaded semiautomatic handgun. After finding the gun, they had cuffed him and placed him in a chair—a chair that was too close to a door and gave him that last, unsuccessful chance at breaking free. When I walked into the office, Brent was back in the room with two police officers. I peeked in and saw his red eyes as one of the officers worked through the paperwork needed to have him sent to the juvenile jail facility. The mood was serious. This wasn’t a routine arrest. A gun—a loaded gun—had turned it into something bigger. What’s gonna happen, Mr...