Continued from Part One…
Enough Theory — Time For Boots On The Ground
Como closed its ISS (in-school suspension) room, a place for kids who continuously disrupt class. A tough-love lady took their phones and my lesson plans, sat them apart in a spare, unadorned room, and made them work. Without ISS, these kids stayed in class 100%. Kids need breaks, especially SpEd kids, some of whom cope with trauma. The next year, 2013-2014, administrators observed me twenty-four times, after I reported that initiatives hurt some of my students. But administrators never gave me feedback after leaving my room. Como was wild in 2014 and 2015. We made news constantly. The public saw mayhem. SpEd policy blamed every ounce of it on our white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility.
Then, from the district Rights and Responsibilities book, Saint Paul schools erased willful disobedience, minor stuff.
Teacher Tip: STOP ALL MINOR STUFF
Every teacher on earth knows, if you don’t immediately stop boys’ slap fights, taekwondo kicks, or shadow boxing, someone will get hit in the face, it’s guaranteed, and they will hit back, and you’ll have a fight, and then the day is ruined, you’ve sent a child to the office, and onto the school-to-prison pipeline, because you’re a white supremacist teacher. It was a stupid, deleterious mistake to remove low-level misbehavior.
Maybe no one can prove that erasing rules like, “No Running” from a swimming pool makes kids run, and “No Throwing Food” causes food fights. As they say, “We don’t know, but we know”: kids learn fast.
Outside school, Twin Cities’ tensions were heated. At the 2015 Minnesota State Fair, BLM blocked an entrance, bullhorning cops, “Piggies in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” A Saint Paul cop was later fired for posting, “Just run them over”(protesters). In December, Minneapolis cops killed black Jamar Clark who was jostling with paramedics while they tried to aid a woman after he allegedly cracked her foot in a door, split her lip, and slammed her head against the floor.
My union, with whom I lobbied on SpEd issues, moved to strike. “It better be for safety,” I said. “For safety,” organizers said. But they caved. They dropped the strike and settled on “restorative practices” like talking circles to welcome back disruptive kids, so they could hear feedback from the class about their behavior.
That broke me. Teachers make a thousand decisions a day and we don’t have time to circle up around every incident. I had many kids in gangs, girls with knives in backpacks, a foiled suicide attempt, and a threat to get me at two o’clock (the only threat I ever had). If you asked your classes, what is one behavior at Como that you could not get away with, what would it be? They would answer, “Kill somebody.”
At a SpEd meeting in December 2015, coworkers told me most of the Como football team paid a white girl for a line-up of blowjobs on school property. My jaw fell off, and I grabbed my chair. I remembered a shouting ruckus in class during football season. Not till coworkers told me did I realize: “That explains why a girl in class was screaming at her running-back boyfriend for doing that whorin’ train with the team!”
I already held deep real talks with my kids about how our need to express ourselves does not guarantee or even predict how others in class hear us: especially with the B-word, N-word, or both F words. We talked about some of their dads in prison, and generally, cops being rough and mean with black kids. Eastside cops would roll up on my black kids on Rice Street, and throw them on the hood. “For what?” I’d ask. “For no damn reason!” they’d tell me. I didn’t believe it until I asked everyone in every class for days, “How about you? What about you?” I knew where they slept last night, what they ate for breakfast if they were pregnant, sold their own brand of clothing online, just endless details. Trust. I had their backs.
Teaching me to ape Robin DiAngelo’s self-flagellating words, and some franchise’s restorative script felt like showing me how to put my pants on — no, worse: my pants were defective. I had had enough of the “school-to-prison pipeline” by February 2016.
Why? for singling out teachers like disconnected dots. Connect the dots: connect the neighborhood to jobs, connect homes to missing dads, connect mental illness to fentanyl, weed, weapons, 911 calls, and cop encounters. Don’t ever come at a teacher with that pipeline nonsense. How does a pipeline start in kindergarten, but it hasn’t already roared through that child’s cradle, that baby (often) born to a baby, who was also (often) born to a baby? I didn’t need Michelle Alexander’s data. Getting up here in my school, was my attitude. Let’s talk about behavior, the antecedents that led to that beating, and blood all over. How was school the bad guy? We scrambled nonstop to be relevant, and to keep our black kids safe, fed, and clothed, just like every other kid in need.
Furious at the cognoscenti sabotaging us, stressed out, denigrated by insinuations of my “systemic racism,” surrounded by gory mayhem, and appalled by the district’s illegal flouting of kids’ IEPs, I let her rip on February 29, 2016:
In a discussion in a private Facebook group of 2,500 members, I decried the school-to-prison pipeline. I demanded evidence or an apology. I knew no teacher in twenty years who hurtled a child towards jail. Then, in answer to a question about electronic devices, I said district-owned iPads were being abused to bully, game, set up drug deals, fights, and sexual encounters.
Within hours, Black Lives Matter screenshot the comments, sent them viral on social media, and called the school board, union, and newspaper. My Como coworker Kristy Pierce helped. BLM threatened to march and shut down Como Park if I were not fired.
Rather than shut down my school, BLM scored a meeting with the superintendent, without me. The group of BLM and Superintendent Valeria Silva decided to suspend me pending investigation. On March 7, as my principal walked me to meet HR in the office, we passed two black boys punching a teacher in the hall (the linked video shows my shiny bald forehead as I approach). The boys had invaded his computer lab to collect on a drug deal. Our principal yelled and dispersed the scene. He went to the hospital, and I took over his class — me, the guy in trouble for calling out drug deals — I subbed for a coworker, hurt while interrupting a drug deal. When computer lab ended, the school took my badge, keys, and laptop, and walked me out to the parking lot. That was to be my last day at Como Park.
To be continued in Part Three…
