The other day I saw a TV show about a high school glee club. It was imaginative and amusing entertainment, but as I looked at that fictional school with its full-time credentialed teachers, plentiful enrichment programs, a magnificent fully-equipped auditorium, and club rehearsal spaces replete with fine instruments and sophisticated electronics, I couldn’t help but think of a letter I received earlier this year from a parent whose children attend an all-Black, overwhelmingly-poor school. Here is a portion of what she wrote:

I started working on the Pen or Pencil Initiative at XXXX

High School in October, 2009. I usually go to the school

once a week to work with the students. What I found at XXXX

High School has been unbelievable.

First of all the facilities are some of the worst I have

ever seen. The bathrooms were filthy. I walked in to the

bathroom and had to immediately turn around and walk out.

The students told me that they did not use the bathrooms

because they were in such bad shape. A lot of the toilets

did not flush. Stalls are missing. Some of the sinks did

not work, or were leaking so badly that they had to

disconnect them.

There was no hot water, and in some cases no water at all in

the bathroom so that the children could wash their hands. In

some cases, there was no toilet tissue. So I concluded that

the “students could not wash their hands or wash their

booties”. The students told me that they would “hold” it all

day or call their parents to come sign them out of school,

take them home to use the bathroom, and then bring them back

to the school. In my opinion, it is not an environment

conducive to learning and growing for high school youth. It

is rather a very thuggish environment.

For Martin Luther King Day of Service, the Pen or Pencil

students and myself led a volunteer effort to repair and

sanitize the bathrooms (I paid for this), and then have the

volunteers clean, scrub, and paint all the bathrooms at XXXX

High School. Although the bathrooms were cleaned and

repaired on MLK Day, I do not know if the school has been

able to maintain them. The staff has said that they do not

have cleaning supplies, and with no hot water, it is not

easy to keep them clean. Also, on MLK day, we attempted to

steam-clean the carpet. It too was and is filthy. However,

with no hot water and 200 volunteers we could not get much

done.

Besides the facilities, I also discovered that the students

do not have textbooks. They have a few books in the

classroom, dated between 1984 and 1992 with most of them

torn and many pages missing, (not enough so that each child

can have one) and the students do not take any texbooks home

to do homework. My understanding is that they do not have

homework. (I personally have not seen a student with a

textbook).

The students have complained to me that they want to learn

and get a good education, but they feel that they are not

being taught by the teachers. The students have expressed

regrets about not learning very much at school. They have

also complained that the teachers are absent from school at

lot, and they get sent to the gym to sit until the class

period is over.

Additionally, there are very few computers in the classrooms

or the library that work. Probably, between 3 and 5 in the

library, and maybe 8 to 12 in computer-discover class. Some

students were assigned to this class, who are now being sent

home during that class period because there are not ample

computers.

Lack of ample textbooks, lack of ample computers — how are

children to learn?

The students have told me that they do not have enough

teachers for their required courses so they must spend a lot

of time in the gym and/or in PE for 2 class periods a day.

(One ninth-grader told me that she has only 2 academic

classes a day; the other time she must spend in the gym

either in PE or just sitting in the gym. Many of the

students in the 11th and 12th grade go home between 12 and 2

every day because they do not have any classes to go to.

Some of these same children are not passing the state

required test, and almost half of the senior class is not

graduating because they have not passed the required test.

Nevertheless, they are scheduled to end their school day at

12 noon every school day.

No music, no art, no band, no foreign languages, (at one

time, no English 1, because of a long-term teacher vacancy).

They do not have study periods or library periods or

activity periods.

There is no in-school suspension, and children are being

suspended from school on a regular basis.