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

24. I'm Willing to Run These Schools

+ + + 24 I’M WILLING TO RUN THESE SCHOOLS. Manual seemed to be in a leaderless rut by April. Principal Grismore was out of the school often and was frequently distracted by his new duties at district headquarters when he actually was in the high school building. Vice principal Elizabeth Owens had been selected to replace him as the school’s top boss. But she was a low-key, behind-the-scenes type of administrator, who would not ascend to her new role until summer and who spent the semester hobbled by a nasty back injury. This was particularly disturbing because schools like Manual desperately need strong and vigilant leaders. Paul Pastorek, who as Louisiana’s superintendent of education led New Orleans schools through a dramatic post-Katrina transformation, insists that strong school leadership—leadership freed from district bureaucracy—is key to success. Manual not only lacked strong leaders but also was hampered by a suffocating top-down approach within the district. “Whathastohappeninpubliceducation,”Pastoreksaidwhenwetalkedin2011, “is that principals have to run the school. The future has to be about pushing responsibility, accountability, and autonomy to the principals. There has to be I’m willing to run these schools. 219 a person who can bring a team of people together around a shared mission.” There was no such person at Manual High School. A large part of the problem was the absence of Sergeant Barrow. The man who in many ways was the adult face of the school, the man every student knew and many turned to for help, the man who was a constant larger-than-life presence in the hallways, had collapsed on the hard tile floor just outside of his office in late February. He would be out for months, with major injuries to his face and a long recovery from an emergency surgery to remove a mass from his lungs. Although he would return in time for the next school year, healthier and as energetic as ever, his absence in the spring of 2010 was deeply felt. No other police officer and no other administrator possessed his ability to manage the hallways and work so well with so many teenagers. The building seemed even more lifeless without him, as if a big chunk of Manual’s soul had been sucked out. Meanwhile, an effort to get more students into their classes had fizzled from lackofeffort.Thatinitiativehadbeguninthefallasagroupofteachersandother staffers joined together to conduct several hall sweeps each week after the start of class. With each sweep, dozens of students were corralled into an auditorium with threats of punishment ranging from in-school detention to out-of-school suspension. The students complained, but the effort temporarily helped with the problem and provided a spark to the best teachers in the school, the ones who participated in the sweeps and had pushed for them. They had desperately wanted to see expectations set at a higher level, and they knew their jobs would be more manageable if students knew there were consequences to their actions. The problem was that the parents of the students most likely to be caught didn’t seem to care, so the punishments carried little weight. Like many initiatives at Manual, this one faded away eventually. It was a lot of work, and Grismore was already trying to do two jobs. Thus, by spring the halls were more of a crowded mess than ever during class periods. On one typical spring morning I counted seventeen students trolling a second-floor hall ten minutes after second period began. Four other students stood just inside a bathroom. On the first floor at least ten more students meandered, missing whatever classes were on their schedules. There were five more students on the third floor. The funny thing was that these were students who actually showed up for school that day. I asked one who often wandered the halls why he skipped so many classes. He told me he would think about that, and I asked him again when I spotted him skipping class later in the day. “I thought about that a long time,” he said. “I have no idea.” I asked about his grades. The answer wasn’t surprising. “Rock bottom,” he said. Another student, named Austin, stood laughing with friends near a 220 searching for hope stairway. “Right now, I’m one of the leading skippers in the building,” he said, proudly...