Learning the hard – Candy Hatcher

LEARNING THE HARD WAY AT WASHINGTON ELEMENTARY

Palm Beach Post

July 30,1995

CANDY HATCHER

RIVIERA BEACH

You can’t teach innocence. No one knows that better than the teachers at Washington Elementary School.

Their children have seen too much blood, suffered too many losses. They’ve watched fathers go to prison, sisters die of AIDS, a brother shot and killed by police.

Some kindergartners can identify a 9mm pistol, but they have never seen the ocean. They can point out the crack houses in the neighborhood, but they’ve never been to the top of a skyscraper.

Washington’s teachers are used to hearing stories that mock the joys of childhood. They’re used to seeing living examples of life’s unfairness staring back at them every day. They’re used to wondering: What can you teach children to make them feel safe and secure and confident?

And then they listen to a child read, or they see him understand a math problem, and they have hope.

You could feel the optimism during Class Night last month, when 74 fifth-graders put on frilly white dresses and fresh white dress shirts, marched through the cafeteria to Pomp and Circumstance and announced in a song that they were ready to take the world by storm.

That night, all was right at Washington Elementary.

No one spoke about the low test scores or all the fighting. No one talked about how this small neighborhood school – Palm Beach County’s most segregated – will change next year, when several hundred white children come to a new Montessori program.

The principal thanked a few dozen parents and grandparents for coming, noting that usually only a handful show up. A teacher with tears in her eyes hugged the principal. Parents cheered for the woman who has singlehandedly carried the PTO the past three years. And each graduating fifth-grader who had a mother or grandmother in the room presented her with a red carnation, then a hug.

”This has been a wonderful evening,” Principal Jerome Smith said. ”Let’s go home and cherish this moment.”

Washington Elementary is five minutes from Interstate 95, but the road to the school leads smack through one of the county’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods.

The drive takes you by a low-income apartment complex, past pockets of small, neatly kept houses, past abandoned apartment buildings and businesses, two convenience stores and a seldom-used park. In five months of 1994, this section of northwest Riviera Beach saw two murders, 57 rapes, 480 assaults and 490 drug-related crimes.

At 29th Street and Avenue S, less than a quarter-mile from the principal’s office, you can buy crack cocaine any time you want. A 9-year-old was raped at a crack house there a few weeks ago. A parent who dropped her child off at summer school recently stopped at a stop sign on Avenue S and watched men surround her car and harass her.

Says one cop: ”You can get killed if you look at someone the wrong way.”

Hundreds of children, ages 4 to 11, walk past this corner to get to school. They bring their problems with them.

They are poor.

Nearly half live in or near poverty. Nine out of 10 families cannot pay $ 1.25 for their child’s lunch. Nearly 20 percent have no car.

They are troubled.

More than half live in homes headed by single women, most of whom became mothers when they were teenagers. For a lot of these kids, drug abuse, alcoholism, promiscuity or fights are a part of life. Families move frequently, and some children go to school only when they feel like it.

They don’t perform well.

Many of them have below-average IQs – in the 70s and 80s. Test scores in reading and math are far below district and state averages.

Teachers get these children for seven hours a day. They try to teach them reading and math. They try to make them feel safe and secure. They try to instill confidence. Then they send them back out to Avenue S – and home.

Michelle Beas remembers the day she interviewed for a teaching job at Washington 12 years ago. ”I drove up Avenue S, and I saw the school, and I stopped, and I prayed. I said, ‘This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do.’ ”

LISA GILINSKY, Kindergarten Teacher

Lisa Gilinsky has 31 children in her kindergarten class. Thirty-one children bouncing, shrieking, sulking, chatting, rebelling. All . . . day . . . long.

Sometimes they’re adorable. Like when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing The Alligator Song, wiggling and giggling and moving their arms like an alligator’s jaws.

But when the song is over, there’s always at least one who won’t stop wiggling. Today, it’s Vanna. Normally Vanna is well-behaved, but she is hyperactive, and her Ritalin prescription ran out a week ago.

Now she’s defiant, refusing to sit down. She crawls on her hands and knees; she is never still.

Gilinsky spends the morning coping with Vanna, reading aloud The Three Billy Goats Gruff and working with the children on math. Then comes the afternoon and a jumble of disruptions. These are all sweet children, she says. When they cause trouble at school, it generally means there’s trouble at home.

Dee won’t get in line for lunch. She’s moody and won’t participate in class.

She’s a crack baby – a textbook example with no attention span who alternately clings to adults and defies them. Dee and her three cousins live with Grandma, but Grandma is tired and is considering turning the girls over to foster care.

Jay throws food at lunch.

His grandmother, who kept him every afternoon after school, recently died. Gilinsky learned this in a meeting with Jay’s mother one afternoon after she had taken the child to the office for misbehaving. He was sobbing; she was close to tears. I need help, she told the principal in a quivering voice.

Johnny talks out of turn and says nasty things to a classmate.

He loves to learn, but lately he’s arguing and interrupting. His Grandma and Grandpa, who are raising Johnny, say he visited his mother recently – and saw things he shouldn’t have. She was taking drugs.

Gilinsky has always wanted to be a teacher – she’s known that since she was in second grade. The perky, expressive 29-year-old has been at Washington for nearly six years.

She loves these children, and tells them so. She has thought about other careers, but stays here.

”I have a passion for it. I’m happy here. I feel the kids need me.”

AUSTIN FRENCH,

THE COP

Officer Austin French – the first cop ever assigned to an elementary school in Palm Beach County – says God sent him here.

When French introduces himself to one class, a third-grader lectures him on the dangers of playing with guns.

”My brother found a .22 and I shot it in the woods, and I took it home and I played with it, and I shot it in the house. I shot my brother dead in the leg,” he says.

The big white cop works the classrooms here and at Lincoln Elementary. His mission: Teach the kids why drugs are bad and how to be safe, earn their trust and be a role model.

In quick introductions to each class, French shows off the toys on his belt – a gun, handcuffs, rubber gloves, a nightstick – and explains what it’s like to be a cop.

At first, the children are wary. One second-grader raises her hand and calls French over, then whispers: ”Did you ever arrest my daddy?”

”No, thank goodness,” French tells her. The questions became more brazen.

”Are you a macho man?” a third-grader asks.

Within two weeks of arriving, French is no longer known as ”Five-O,” a warning shouted on the streets that means ”a cop’s here!” Children yell his name in the breezeways after class. They wrap themselves around his legs or hold up a hand for a high five.

They show French their knowledge of the streets. Kids in nearly every class know his is a 9mm pistol. Some, who remember that Los Angeles police used a nightstick to beat Rodney King, wonder whether French ever used his nightstick. They understand he carries rubber gloves ”because somebody may have AIDS.”

They recount tales from home.

”Sometimes my mama goes away and she leaves me and my sister at home and we lock the door so no strangers can come in,” one kindergartener says.

”My Dad had pushed my Mama down the stairs.”

”My brother’s girlfriend stabbed my brother in the back.”

French tells the kids to stay away from guns. ”You’re not old enough to play with guns,” he tells one third-grade class. ”If you find a gun, you treat it just like a stranger. . . . You get away from it, and you tell someone.”

They talk about bad people who carry guns. Then there is silence. A raised hand. ”If we don’t want bad people to have guns,” asks a girl, ”why do we sell them?”

PAULA NESSMITH,

THE DISCIPLINARIAN

Somebody’s sitting in the chill chair again. It’s the same fourth-grader who’s been there several times this month, making excuses for taunting or hitting classmates or getting in fights.

Today, he’s in Paula Nessmith’s office because he hit a classmate with a 3-foot stick. Nessmith, the assistant principal, is the school disciplinarian, the one who deals with children when their teachers run out of ideas and patience.

As she does with every child sent to her, Nessmith asks this boy to explain why he is in her office. He offers excuses:

”I was just trying to keep the licks off me, that’s all.”

”I had to defend myself with something.”

”I don’t try and give problems to nobody.”

He sounds pathetic. If you don’t know him, you’re inclined to believe everything he says.

Nessmith used to believe him. She doesn’t any more.

She calls the boy’s mother but reaches only an answering machine.

She turns to him. ”Too many times you’ve told me a story that sounded so believable, and it wasn’t right. . . . You get yourself in trouble all the time, and you’re not learning. You can’t get along with other kids, and that makes it miserable for everyone.”

How can she reach this kid? Boys Club won’t take him because he’s caused too many problems. Taking away privileges won’t do any good – that requires support from parents, and this boy plays his mother off his grandmother. Grandma gives him anything he wants.

Nessmith doesn’t know what else to do. This child has been in her office more than any child, but 95 others also have misbehaved enough to be sent here this month.

Discipline is Washington’s biggest obstacle to learning. ”It can’t get any worse,” says Principal Jerome Smith.

The school handles nearly all problems itself, although two Washington students have been arrested since February. One, a 6-year-old, kicked a teacher in the head and was charged with battery on a school board employee. The other student threw a firecracker in the bathroom and was charged with criminal mischief. Neither child was suspended.

The district doesn’t like to suspend elementary students, and Smith agrees with that. Sending children home to an empty house won’t solve their problems. ”We’ve tried conflict resolution, assertive discipline. For some, it works. For some, they couldn’t care less,” the principal says.

Teachers say the kids know they can get away with behaving badly. ”Students used to be sent home for fighting. Now a kid knows if he hits somebody, unless it’s real severe, he’s gonna stay,” says a teacher.

Parents say they want the school to be the disciplinarian. The school will straighten you out, they say. But the school doesn’t want to be the bad guy. ”Discipline isn’t beating the kids. It’s having rules and expectations and enforcing them,” says the school psychologist.

Teachers say Paula Nessmith has helped. The 56-year-old grandmother has been assistant principal here for three years. She’s a high-energy administrator with a sense of humor, a Palm Beach County School Board member for four years in the ’80s who went back to school for her teaching certificate and her doctorate. She wanted to make a difference in the classroom. On weekends, she’s on a Harley cruising South Florida. She lives on five or six hours of sleep.

Some days, when she sees 12 or 13 kids, that isn’t enough.

”It gets very discouraging. I have to remind myself that I deal with a handful of behavior problems, and they’re 50 out of 600. When it gets real discouraging, I go into a classroom and have someone read to me.”

Then little Joseph Ferguson comes to visit.

He climbs in Nessmith’s lap and, on command, starts reading. He’s in kindergarten, but he reads on a first-grade level.

”He delights in learning,” Nessmith says, wrapping the child in her arms. ”I’ve never been anywhere where I’ve gotten more hugs. There are days when you can see that little ray of sunshine.”

LORI ARMBRUSTER,

THE COUNSELOR

It’s time for ”group.” Time to talk about the best and worst things in life.

For the eight girls sitting with Lori Armbruster, the highs are simple pleasures: a class lunch, an upcoming day trip to Miami, being in group instead of class, a new radio, and ”Mom is home. For good.”

The lows aren’t so simple. One girl worries about her mom and little brother. ”I always say to her before she go out: ‘Don’t get drunk and drive home and be smoking, ’cause you gon hurt the baby.’ ”

Another mumbles something about a sibling. She is the youngest of seven, but two are dead. Her 18-year-old sister died of AIDS a few years ago, and her 23-year-old brother was killed by police. The child reports this matter-of- factly: ”They passed.”

With prompting, though, she will tell everything she knows about the night last summer that her brother was waving a knife around and police shot him. ”He didn’t make it.”

Armbruster listens, encouraging the children to talk about their feelings. She is the guidance counselor, the specialist in crises, a bouncy, beloved peacemaker who helps children feel better about themselves.

Each week since January, Armbruster, 33, has worked with two groups of girls on behavior and self-esteem. The girls’ grades are better. One who was failing science is now making an A.

”We don’t have a divorce group. Death is more a part of my groups,” Armbruster says. ”People being in jail. You never hear of ‘My mom and dad are getting a divorce and I’m so sad.’ It’s ‘My dad’s in jail.’ Or ‘I haven’t seen my mom.’ ”

One fifth-grader in the group was born in prison. Her mother has just been released. The girl has been shuttled back and forth among her older sisters and her grandmother, moving whenever she gets angry with whichever relative she’s living with.

She has lots of clothes and jewelry, but not much attention.

Last year, she was one of the worst discipline problems in fourth grade, fighting and talking back. She missed a lot of school. She didn’t like herself.

This year, she was asked to join a group.

In one session, the 11-year-old was told to list things she liked about herself. She refused, and Armbruster told her not to come back until she had something good to say about herself.

She didn’t come back for two weeks.

She has decided she likes her hair and her clothes. She has settled down in school, contributing to discussions and earning an award for most improved in her class. The girl was voted class queen, and some in her group have described her as a role model.

She says she wants to be a teacher.

KATHY GROOVER AND FLORIA GARBUTT,

TEACHERS

Kathy Groover’s class is one of Washington’s success stories.

Here some of the highest achievers in fifth grade are multiplying fractions and reading books about black heroes such as Jackie Robinson. They’re talking about role models, how to work together, and what it means to be a family.

Groover’s been teaching 20 years, and she has ground rules: ”You are going to respect me, and I’m going to respect you.”

She lets her students know she came from the same background they did. ”I’m the mom. I’m the person they come and talk to.”

Groover, 41, encourages questions. She asks them constantly. When the school sends out notices about fifth-grade Class Night, she tells the class that attendance is mandatory. ”What is the meaning of mandatory?” she asks. Several raise their hands. ”You have to be there.”

Her tone is patient and encouraging. ”There’s nothing wrong with not knowing,” she says to one child when he can’t answer a question. ”What’s wrong is when you don’t try to find out.”

This afternoon, the class is having a civics lesson. The main writer of the Constitution? Thomas Jefferson. The Bill of Rights? The first 10 amendments. Why do we have 100 senators? Two per state.

The two major political parties in the U.S.? ”White and black?” The class convulses in laughter.

The basic belief of the Declaration of Independence?

”That all men are created equal.”

The class is a study in discipline, even when Groover leaves the room. The kids who need help in math seek out the ones who understand it. They work in teams.

Next door is Floria Garbutt’s class, 16 fifth-graders targeted as potential dropouts. Garbutt has taught most of these children for two years, and she’s tired and frustrated.

”It’s not their ability. They just don’t focus. Anything they have to read, they don’t want to do it,” she says. Garbutt, 59, has spent her entire teaching career – nine years – at Washington. She loves her students and wants to stay, but two years as a dropout prevention teacher are enough. ”I told them, ‘Just let me out . . . It’s really taken its toll on me.”

To get into this class – and its fourth-grade equivalent – kids have to have a 2.0 GPA or worse. Some are among Washington’s worst discipline cases, with more problems than the other kids.

Three of 15 in the fourth-grade class have fathers in prison. Thirteen cannot afford lunch. The best reader in the class of fourth-graders reads on a third-grade level. Ten minutes is as long as they will pay attention, even on a good day.

Still, teachers believe there’s a place in the world for these kids. ”They’re not destined for the streets,” says Alice Hampson, who teaches the fourth-grade class. ”It’s our jobs as teachers to help them reach their potential.”

CHERYL ROGERS,

MOTHER

For years, Cheryl Rogers was Washington’s only PTO member – the president, organizer, fund-raiser, cook and purchasing agent.

”Last year,” she says, ”I actually resigned, but since no one came on, I continued doing things on the side. I still had fund-raisers, still had dances. I just didn’t have PTO meetings.”

Meetings were a waste of time. She tried one at the housing development directly behind the school, but only a handful of parents showed up. The school provided free breakfast one Saturday morning for parents and children. Same story.

In March, when children from another school said a man was trying to kidnap kids, more than 100 Washington parents came to a meeting on school safety. They agreed to work together to make the neighborhood safer. But their plans never materialized.

Washington planned another parents’ meeting for May to discuss discipline. Fliers were sent home with every child. Three parents – all with well-behaved children – came.

Teachers say they would gladly cope without the extras – teacher aides, extra playground equipment, lavish media centers – that other schools get with money raised by their PTOs. They just want moms and dads and grandparents to come and show kids that they think school is important.

Rogers, 32, a single mother with three children and two jobs, says she will always be involved in her kids’ schools. ”As long as my son is there, I’ll still be there.”

Her two older children are good students and well-behaved. It’s Kevin she worries about.

The 8-year-old is a troublemaker: sneaky, resourceful and stubborn.

Rogers fears for him. She worries about bad influences. ”I don’t want him to be a street punk. If I don’t keep a tight rein on him, he’s gonna turn out to be one.”

THE LEADERSHIP

Washington’s teachers provide love and stability to children whose lives are so full of trauma they don’t know what normal is.

”We have to be a social-worker school,” says Barbara McCray, a school psychologist based at Washington two days a week. ”Not only (must we) provide education, but there must be programs to deal with the everyday, nut- and-grind survival out there.”

Only four teachers are not returning this fall. Generally, once they’ve taught here for a year, they stay. All are missionaries, and differences in race (31 of 36 teachers are white) and class don’t matter when it comes to helping kids, they say.

Alice Hampson has taught at Washington for 10 years. She says she feels the need to be there every day. ”I look at it like, I have all these kids I can help.

”It’s the hope, not the pity, that things can be better for them. It keeps all of us going.”

They keep going in spite of low test scores and ineffective discipline and laid-back leadership.

Many parents and children look to Principal Jerome Smith as a role model. Teachers say Smith is a good man, that they would trust him with their own children.

But they complain privately that he’s never in the classroom, that he spends too much time away from the school, and that he delegates or defers too many decisions.

An aggressive, assertive principal is imperative in a school without involved parents and influence. Says one teacher: ”We’re not the sort of population that writes campaign checks or makes phone calls to the legislators.”

Jake Sello, a former principal and the district’s integration coordinator, says teachers take their cue from the principal. ”The principal sets the tone in the school,” Sello says. ”If there’s a problem in the school, the principal is the one who sets that tone. It takes charisma, it takes creativity. You’ve got to be the kind of person who makes things happen for children.”

Smith’s 1993 evaluation notes problems. ”Though Dr. Smith delegates responsibility, there is a need for the assertive assumption of overall responsibility, directions and school focus,” a supervisor wrote.

”Dr. Smith is an experienced principal who must demonstrate less laissez-faire and more assertive and facilitative instructional leadership,” the evaluation said. The supervisor suggested that Smith work harder to improve test scores and energize his staff.

Smith describes his leadership style as ”very conservative.”

”I’m here as a facilitator to assist teachers,” he says. ”I will not go into anyone’s classroom and make drastic changes without talking to them about it.”

He bristles at the suggestion that he rarely goes into classrooms, saying he is visible and available for teachers, students and parents. ”I’m in three to four classrooms every day,” he says. Teachers have complained in surveys that they don’t have enough say-so in decisions at Washington, he says, so ”which is it?”

Smith says he is one of five black male role models at Washington. The others are a permanent substitute teacher and three custodians. He says he understands the kids’ problems, because he came from a similar background.

”I was voted the most likely not to succeed in high school. I was one of the have-nots. I was determined to show them . . . I’d make it,” he says.

Smith, who has been a principal for 15 years and was an assistant principal and teacher before that, makes $64,462 a year.

Since he came to Washington in 1990, there have been improvements. The office and two wings have been renovated. The school has added a media center and resource room, installed computers in every classroom, added in-house TV broadcasts and put in sprinkler and security systems. The coverings over walkways between buildings have been replaced. New playground equipment has arrived but isn’t installed.

Smith, 62, expects to stay at Washington – for a while. ”At 65,” he says, ”I’m going to pasture.”

A MAGNET SCHOOL IN ’96

Soon, everything will change.

Next year – fall 1996 – Washington becomes a magnet school to attract white kids and satisfy a 1990 federal complaint that Palm Beach County schools are again segregated.

The lure will be a Montessori program – unstructured classes that emphasize creativity rather than rigid control.

There will be more teachers – and a mix of grade levels – in each class. The district will spend nearly half a million dollars to bring in portable classrooms, paint buildings, landscape and sod 6 acres and build a new school entrance on Congress Avenue so children won’t have to travel on Avenue S.

More than 20 years ago, there were more white kids here than black, bused from Juno Beach and Palm Beach Gardens. Gradually, one busload at a time quit coming and just the neighborhood children remained. The buildings became dilapidated; the playground grew weeds. Teachers raised money – and spent their own – for such basic equipment as air conditioners.

”It looks like every time Palm Beach County allows a school to become 70 percent black, it goes down – in everything,” says Sello, the integration coordinator.

These days, the buildings are in better shape. The school has two white kids, eight Hispanic or other minorities, and about 600 black children.

The principal says he has no complaints about the way the district has treated Washington. ”Everything that I’ve asked for, we’ve gotten,” Smith says. ”I can’t make Washington a new school.”

But that’s what district officials want. They’ll revamp the buildings and grounds and train the teachers in the new philosophy. Within a few years, they say, the school will be only 40 percent black. And they promise that black students won’t be bused out.

Parents don’t trust what they’re hearing.

They’ve watched their high school kids bused off to Palm Beach Gardens High when Suncoast became a magnet school. They feel helpless, and they’re angry that it took bringing white kids into the neighborhood for the School Board to recognize that Washington needed help.

Teachers have mixed feelings.

Most say they’ll transfer to another school because they don’t care to spend a year of nights and weekends in training classes.

The school and neighborhood deserve the improvements, they say, but not Montessori’s unstructured approach. Washington students crave structure, a schedule. They like to know what they’ll be doing and when they’ll be doing it. Anything out of the ordinary throws the children into a tailspin, they say.

Teachers are skeptical because of the dramatic changes, Smith says. He likes what he’s seen at other magnet Montessori programs, and he will go through Montessori training and apply to remain the school’s principal.

Montessori could be just what Washington needs, Smith says. ”What we have undoubtedly is not working. . . . If it’s not working now, why ride the same wagon?”

THE CLASS OF ’95

Tonight, no one’s allowed to worry. Forget about Mama working all the time or the drug sales outside. Washington Elementary’s Class of ’95 is decked out and determined to succeed.

One-fourth of the fifth-graders want to be lawyers when they grow up. William, in particular, wants to be the next Johnnie Cochran.

Six, including Earl, aspire to be professional football players. Two, including Jacquese, plan to teach. Michael would like to be a social worker. Venus, one of nine future doctors, has her heart set on practicing gynecology.

Charles Smith, the class valedictorian, encourages his classmates to take school seriously. ”Education teaches you how to think, solve problems, make judgments,” he says. ”Challenges can make your life interesting if you do not run away from them.”

The children stand, and in a final salute to parents and teachers and each other, sing about the future.

Gather my friends and neighbors, let’s make a plan.

The future of our world is here in our hands.

We can fight all the evil, we can fight all the hate,

If we do it together, it won’t be too late. Some of the children’s names in this story have been changed.