The caveat is that someone has to be listening. An imaginative writer practices his or her craft through an act of will, taking a leap of faith that someone does respond to the call. In studying and teaching the writers creation, literature professors like me serve as the “someone” who both listens and keeps the story circulating. If it is true that sharing one’s story can unveil and disarm unexamined prejudices such as racism, then my chosen profession serves a real purpose. My job is to pass on the story. (Tusmith, 126)
Recent advances in the sociology of knowledge, cultural and symbolic anthropology, cultural Marxism, and semiotics have led these (critical) theorists to see schools not only as instructional sites, but also as cultural arenas where a heterogeneity of ideological and social forms often collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance. Within this context, critical theorists generally analyze schools in a twofold way: as sorting mechanisms in which select groups of students are favored on the basis of race, class, and gender; and as agencies for self and social empowerment. (McClaren,p.160)
.By failing to look at the way in which the segregated school where teachers and students were black was a terrain of resistance when the issue was self-esteem, the civil rights activists who wanted to integrate schools so that black children would have equal access to quality education unwittingly set the stage for the colonization of young black minds by a poisonous pedagogy embedded in education at the hands of white colonizers. (Hooks, 84)
I am running along side a battered but functional Ford Fairlane station wagon pulling away from the front of our school. I’m on the passenger’s side of the car, my left hand rests on the open window door frame as I jog along side the car. I say to the driver, “Wait. Don’t go yet. Give me a chance. It will be okay.” He glances at me as he checks his rear view mirror and pulls away. It’s a hot day. We are both in short sleeved shirts, mine white and wrinkled, his un-tucked, crisp, white with a fine cranberry vertical stripe, open at the neck. A thin gold chain circles his neck. His sunglasses hide his eyes. “Get away from my car,” he shouts. His voice is not unkind. Just resolved. “You can’t understand. Even if he likes school, it’s not good for him. You’re good, but you are hurting him in this place. I can’t let it go on. It’s not about you.” He picks up speed. I have to let go. I’m left there alone. (UTPP Journal)
The end of the first round of UTPP training was difficult and contentious. Classroom placements, particularly in the elementary schools, had evolved increasingly tougher behavioral issues as the academic year wore on. Several of our elementary interns had come from highly structured, religiously inspired academic settings and the adjustment to urban classrooms was difficult to realize. The elementary schools were less on board in terms of what the Madison Area Project was advocating as good practice and the elementary principals were less supportive of the kind of risk being involved with UTPP interns entailed than Joe Bongo had been at Madison. It was also my impression, gathered from hours and hours of problem solving at the Thursday night seminars, that the elementary faculties were much less enthusiastic about doing much for the kids they were teaching, especially those kids who veered away from the norm of what a good elementary student should be (read: white, well behaved, motivated, interested, a good reader, etc. etc. etc.).
The UTPP staff had a hard time supporting the elementary interns, especially those who began to adopt the views of their mentors relative to children they were teaching. Even though an experienced, urban elementary teacher joined the staff of classroom advisors, the chasm between UTPP administrators and some interns grew. My young colleagues were failing in their work. From their point of view, the program and school administrations were failing to back them up. We (they) were in a lose/lose situation. On the one hand, their principals were putting pressure on them to get their classes under control and moving forward, where ever that was, and the UTPP staff was putting pressure on them to connect with their kids in ways that challenged what the urban principals wanted. In short, the disciplinary contexts were 180 degrees apart: discipline vs. facilitation.
The situation got more tense and difficult for all of us. No amount of Thursday night processing seemed to do anything but patch moment-to-moment issues. This inability to really change how the teaching felt to them, coupled with the fact that Mario and Gerry were leaving the Program at the end of the year meant our year ended with lots of frustration and dissention in the ranks. It was especially hard for some of the elementary interns just to survive each day in the classroom, much less survive as a “change-agent”. The rest of us did what we could to support them. The Thursday evening post seminar processing sessions ran later and later; ultimately, our group of interns became two groups – those who were looking forward to urban teaching jobs in the coming Fall and those who couldn’t wait to get their degrees and get out! When the program staff intentionally sealed us off from the new batch of UTPP recruits so we wouldn’t poison their enthusiasm, we all felt devalued and diminished. I thought our perspective on change and role and opportunity was a valuable one to hear and resented being cast aside in the same lot as our colleagues. On the other had, I had future employment to figure out so figuring that out rapidly became my number one priority.
As graduation approached, the Syracuse City School District had first shot at interviewing us for positions within the district. This was their perogative as co-sponsors of the Program. “Pete” Salmon, Superintendent of Personnel, did the interviews. The fact that he looked vaguely familiar was confirmed in our first interview. Pete had refereed many a Yellowjacket football game I’d played at the UofR. I’m glad he made this known to me as I would never have recognized him. Another small world story. But not as big as the small world story soon to come… .
Syracuse was struggling with a rising number of boys of junior high school age who were caught in a revolving door of movement across the junior high schools in the district because their behavior made them “uncontainable” in their neighborhood JHS setting. Starting in the Fall of 1965, the district began a special alternative education program for these males. The alternative program would be located in an elementary school with ample space and facilities (a full gym and wood shop), and would be fully individualized to address each of the boy’s unique needs. A counselor would be made available to the program and special resources for trips would be set aside. The stated goal was to get their behavior under control, get them out of the revolving door, keep them from getting shipped to reform school, and get them back into a supportive and supported public school setting. The program was to have a small number of kids and three teachers: an industrial arts teacher, a physical educator, and an academic specialist. Pete asked me to consider being the academic specialist. I would have complete freedom in setting up an academic program.
It’s interesting to me now, that at the time, I didn’t question the fact that the program was to be only for boys. Syracuse had a successful program known as the “unwed mothers program” so I must have figured this was taking care of the female side of the disaffected and turned off JHS population. I liked the fact that Syracuse had taken on this highly controversial initiative. At the same time, I don’t suppose I gave a thought to the fact that there were bunches of young women in the schools who were not pregnant and who desperately needed a similar program as the boys. I can’t now re-capture my thinking then. But I can imagine that I was like a tail-wagging puppy dog, anxious to keep on with the good work, seeing myself working on racism wherever it was, and glad to be considered competent enough to enter into this new experiment. Was I naïve? Yes. Was I inexperienced? Not totally. Did I know how systems worked? Not really. Even as one of these new change agents, I was pretty wet behind the ears.
The job seemed unique to me. I knew I had done well in my classroom practice. I thought I had a pretty well developed range of skills relative to issues of control and curricular organization, and I thought I could relate to the boys pretty well. After all, my classes at Madison had been wholly urban, mostly Black, and mostly poor. I knew some of the kids who had been kicked out of Madison and one or two had been part of the Grace Church after school program. I didn’t worry about not being able to handle the task. We were going to discover our way through that first year and the goal was to establish an award-winning program. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I thought the opportunity and challenge would be well worth the effort.
GLS
Things got interesting, fast. Sam was the program director. He was also the district director of physical education, an older first generation Italian political insider whose daughter magically turned up as the counselor appointed to help us. At my first meeting with him, he ran several ideas past me including two that got my attention. One, he was interested in dressing all the kids in uniform – army fatigues – when they came to school so we could replace their street identity with the school identity; and two, he wanted the three teachers to be deputized so that any physical attack on us would be considered an attack on a law officer. He wanted the kids to see us as a part of a police force and he even mentioned the possibility of us “packing”. Third, the name of the program was to be the GLS program or Gamma Lambda Sigma. He thought having a fraternity name to identify with would be a good thing for the kids, that the fraternity name would give us a special kind of credibility. When I asked him about academic supplies, he said not to worry, there were plenty of those available and he could get them for us from the school warehouse facility.
Then we looked at the school. The school was a former junior high school, now an elementary school. It was in a very white, working and middle class south side Syracuse neighborhood. Several rooms at the rear of the school were to be the home of the GLS program. We had the gym, the shop, a locker room with benches and showers, two classroom spaces, and an office off the gym. As unused space, the entire suite of rooms was full of storage furniture, and boxes and boxes of who knows what.
As it turned out, the only real money spent on the GLS program that year, besides salaries and a few bucks for gas mileage, was the $10k spent on constructing steel fire doors that sealed us off from the rest of the building. The elementary school staff in the other half of the building was petrified to have us there. We needed to keep a low profile if we were to hope to keep that facility. “Low profile” evidently meant “invisible”. The first time I tried to duplicate some papers in the main office of the elementary school it was made abundantly clear that I and we were not welcome. I was not to use any of their facilities at any time. Period. We were to be totally self contained. Sam hadn’t mentioned we were considered pariahs!
This first year of teaching could be an entire book, especially with the GLS Program. My experience here deepened my understanding of racism and prejudice, but more importantly, my understanding of what I would now call privilege and white supremacy. Although I couldn’t grasp it at the time, what played out before me that year were individual acts of kindness and accommodation with a very tough group of kids, kids who individually had experienced the range of deprivation, degradation, and depravity that I’d only read about previously. These kids were tough because they were survivors, including survivorship in schools that were in no way equipped or desired, as far as I could figure out, to handle what these kids brought to school. Here are several vignettes from the year that highlight “capstone” learning incidents for me. But first, my fellow faculty members.
The GLS Faculty
Burt. Burt Pierce. Burt was the industrial arts leg of our three-legged faculty stool upon which GLS rested. Burt was as grounded a human being as I’d ever met. He must have been in his mid-fifties at the time. He’d had worked with kids alternative settings before, and was a surviving WW2 vet. He was gruff, he was fair, he’d look you in the eye and call a spade a spade, and he had the best interests of the kids in his heart. I think he was there because, like me, he wanted to be there. Burt’s entire industrial arts experience for the kids was to get them skilled enough in woodworking so they could build an outdoor utility building to sell for profit to plow back into providing resources for the school. The first few months of school, he worked on all the preparatory skills to get the crew ready for the building project. He’d done it before. It all seemed to work for him. Burt also had significant hearing loss and was constantly turning his hearing aides off and on to counter the shop noise. The more challenging days for us occurred when Burt forgot to turn those hearing aides back on.
Walt. Walter Bowen. Walt was the physical education leg of our three-legged GSL stool. Walt was also a veteran teacher and a veteran of the Korean conflict. I think Walt was in his mid-forties at the time. As with Burt, he’d had plenty of school experience but I think something had happened along the way and Walt was with us because of that “something”. I never figured it out and he sure wasn’t talking but I think Walt had some kind of monkey on his back. Later on, after I’d left GLS, I’d heard Walt had hit a kid at his regular school and that’s how he ended up at GLS. Sam had offered him this job until he reached retirement age. Walt was the kid of guy who had one way of looking at the world. It was hard if not impossible for him to negotiate with the kids who of course, always wanted to negotiate everything. When Walt had a bad day, his explosions would set off the rest of us, even Burt, but certainly the boys. Burt kind of took Walt on early and I think the two of them had understandings about when Walt would need to take a break. He’d go out back for a smoke (Physical Educator, right? Different times then.), Burt and I would split his kids, and then he’d come back semi-healed, ready to go again.
And me. Charlie. Charlie Rathbone. The academic instruction leg of our faculty stool. Fresh from college. Little practical experience. Lots of enthusiasm. Seems smart. Might be soft on kids. Works hard, ready to help out, has some knowledge of shop and physical education and that’s helpful. Had taught math, knew social studies, and substituted in reading for his last month at Madison so he knew a little of that as well. Has good ideas about involving the kids in project work. Might work out. Besides, the only way we can go with this group of losers is straight back to school or straight out to reform school. Anything Charlie could do to get them interested in “studies” would be a good thing. Anything he could do to keep them busy, as a matter of fact, would be a good thing. Period.
The boys.
They’d come on the neighborhood bus from all over the city. Those coming from the North End had to transfer at least once to get the South End bus. Sam arranged to get them bus passes so the bus rides didn’t cost them anything. They had to arrive after the elementary school began because the elementary school administration had strictly prohibited any contact whatsoever with GLS. We started off the year with fifteen boys registered in the program. Over the course of the year, the numbers rose to twenty or twenty-one, cumulative. But it was a rare day we had more than fifteen kids in school what with no shows, return to adjudication, missed buses, and so on. We’d rotate small groups of the kids around to each of us in the morning. Break for lunch, brought by the kids or provided by us. Do some kind of project work in the afternoon and end before elementary school let out so the boys could take the early buses home or wherever they went after school.
Depression, economic hardship, dysfunctional families, histories of school failure, emotional disturbance, shell-shocked – each of these terms applied to every one of the GLS boys and each was an equal opportunity employer. The boys were mixed in terms of race, age, and ethnic background and every one of them who walked in the door walked in with multiple issues, multiple problems, and major resentments for having to be with us. We received no paperwork on the kids until way later in the year and that was probably a good thing. We also did not dress them in battle fatigues and we did not become deputized policemen. The boys showed up with varied modes of dress. Some of them knew about each other by reputation, if not direct contact. A few came accompanied by intense body odor, a sour, acrid smell that grows from accumulated and aged body secretions that ripened in clothes that went unwashed for weeks. These boys were neglected human beings. No wonder their shoulders carried a variety of chips.
Our first incident, and opportunity for a situation that needed group problem solving, resulted from the body odor issue. I began group meetings a la Wm. Glasser to start every day and though they began with fits and starts, the kids got to a point where they could lead the group and begin to work with some of each other’s issues as a group. That was year-long work, meaning we didn’t sequence from a few small successes to many large successes. After establishing these opening meetings early on in the year and getting to a point where we could have a discussion, where everyone would stay in the room, where the boys might even comment on what each other had to say, and where Burt and Walt could listen and reflect and not give the “how to be a success in life” lecture, we had a routine. But on any given day, the opening session could blow up and we just have to end it. Negotiating new power relationships with new entries to the program always set us back, having one of our boys come to school totally decompensated could set us back, having bad stuff happen during the day could set us back. But the meetings would get us started and it was through the meetings that we started to experience ourselves as whatever kind of community we were going to be with each other. We were building intentional relationships. The meetings were the first vehicle for exploring whether trust might be possible between and among us; trust that I could be me, trust that I wouldn’t get hurt, even trust that I could try on some different “me’s” to see how they might work with the others. And always, there was the issue that they were at least there. They had no other choice, really. Absence meant adjudication; still, for some of them, that was okay, too.
So the body odor issue became the first obvious issue to deal with. And it was the entry point for all of us to consider and share that everyone had issues to work with, some were just more apparent than others. The work the UTPP had done with classroom meetings was exceptionally helpful to me. Driekurs and Glasser had yet to publish their work on encouragement and democracy in the classroom but I’d read enough about group dynamics (Cartwright and Zander) and experienced enough classroom meetings with the UTTP staff to at least begin. I wanted to drive home the idea that working with us in our own way wasn’t going to weaken the kids. Our form of school, what would happen to them in school, was to be set by what they needed. It might also be set by what they wanted, once we could find out what they wanted. We got to the needs through the wants. We were not a totally free organization only dealing with wants. We had a purpose. Returning to school and realizing the benefits it offered for a better future was our goal. Of course school had been just the opposite for these kids but at the very least, our different initial approach with the meetings did catch them off guard.
It was also important for me to get them to realize they had skills and strengths they could offer each other that might help us all out as learners in the long run. Of course this had to be balanced with the fact that each of the boys was damaged goods and to a person they had elaborate defenses erected around their areas of hurt and disability. The last thing they wanted to do was reveal their pain and hurt to each other. But as the inevitable issues began to emerge, the occasional good day was one in which one of the guys reached out a hand to one of the others without having anyone else make fun of him for doing it. Giving, accepting, noticing, supporting. Huge challenges for kids who’d been hurt, ground down, and toughened by a system that simply would not work with them. It is to be noted however that each one of them was a specialist in figuring out exactly how to make the system exclude them. For the most part, in ways unique to each one of them, they were brilliantly successful.
Many stories could be told of my work at GLS that first year. The year was really an active introduction up close and personal into how the school system worked mostly to the disadvantage of these boys if in fact the system really wanted to help them in the first place. That remained an open question to me as the year wore on. Here are some things I learned that first year.
Four Lessons from the boys.
Lesson One. Not every boy who ended up in GLS deserved to be there, that is to be housed in a special program for students with behavioral/academic issues.
Ricky Furbeck was the shortest boy in the program. He was also the cutest. He wore almost preppy clothes, except for his sneakers. Plaid shirt untucked, khaki pants, and smelly sneaks. Ricky showed up about a month after school started. The sheath of referral papers that came with him reported a history of stubbornness and explosive anger. He wouldn’t do what he was asked to do. And then when pushed, he’d get inappropriately angry and push back. He probably had a history of hitting teachers that got him into the revolving door and that’s how he ended up with us. He was just twelve years old when he came to us. A very oppositional young man.
More than the other boys, Ricky would stare at me when I was working with the group. That was pretty unusual because a lot of the boys would purposefully not look you in the eye. They’d avoid eye contact. But not Ricky and not with me. Bert was another story. Bert told me Ricky was ignoring him. That he’d be explaining something to his class and Ricky would just keep on doing what he was doing. Sometimes the other kids would clue him in and then it would be okay. Ricky had begun to drag his feet with Bert almost immediately. How could anyone not like shop? How could any one not like Bert, for that matter. I just didn’t get it.
Then after just a few weeks in school, I began to wonder if Ricky had a hearing deficit, mostly because of how he’d seat himself in my class. I’d begun to notice a pattern in his stubborn behavior. If he was looking at me when I wanted him to do something, he’d usually be compliant. Even interested. But if he didn’t see me, he’d not do what I asked and then he’d get very upset very quickly if challenged on his “disrespect” (Walt’s favorite word). I asked Sam (Director Sam) if there was a way we could get Ricky’s hearing checked and this was the only time I could say with certainty, besides expulsions, that Sam operated with haste. Ricky was almost totally deaf in one ear and had significant hearing loss in the other. For all intents and purposes, this young twelve year old beautiful child was, pardon the expression, deaf as a doornail.Here was a boy who’d been through seven years of school without once having anyone pick up on his hearing issues. How was that possible? For whatever reasons, he was unable to argue on his own behalf and evidently had no adult in his life to advocate for him. Not a real surprise. Nor was his lack of success at advocating for himself. Teachers probably thought this recalcitrant little kid was just trying to lie his way out of trouble. Most of our kids had no adults who would advocate for them. So here he was, relegated to a program with kids who were much bigger and I dare say much more of a threat to him because of his size. Sam was able to get services for Rickey – I have no idea how – and I heard later on in the year that Ricky was making it back in the regular system even though his reading scores were more than two years behind where they should have been. It was his behavioral outbursts caused by situations he’d find himself in because of the hearing loss that had gotten him the transfer to GLS. It should never have happened.
Lesson Number Two. It was wrong to think that just because I was older, I understood my “place” in these kids’ world. Or as Hamlet said, “There is more to this world than meets the eye, my dear Horatio.” How small is the place we occupy in our kids’ world.
Donny Steele was another boy who came to us after GLS had opened its doors. Donny lived on the North End of Syracuse, had been out of town for a while, and had just returned from reform school. He had a parole officer and I knew he checked in with him periodically. GLS was to be his gateway back into the school system. (Now we’d become a way station for those coming back to school as well as a holding place for those who might be on their way out.) Donnie had slicked back hair and looked like he’d walked out of West Side Story. Pegged pants, Ducktail, rolled up collar, black pointy shoes, and usually a button up dark shirt unbuttoned down the front to reveal some expanse of his smooth white chest. He seemed to know how to be a good kid when he wanted to be. The other boys treated him with some respect which made me wonder about his rep on the street. But mostly, except for the fact that he seemed to need a cigarette constantly, Donnie toed the line enough for us. And he genuinely seemed like he wanted to get back into the school side of life.
One Monday morning, not too long after his return, I was doing my usual early morning school routine: getting some coffee, checking in with Burt and Walt, making sure we knew the plans for the day, and getting my classroom in order. This particular day the sun was out, shining brightly as a matter of fact and the kids seemed to be in good spirits as they straggled in to school. Donnie met me in the hall and asked if he could talk with me. I said sure and headed into the locker room with him. He asked to speak somewhere else. Evidently, he wanted this to be private. So we went into the big corner classroom on the parking lot side of the building, just inside our exit door. This was a larger-than-usual classroom with individual wooden desks and chairs and large windows on two sides. The windows were closed, all but one. The coffee pot was in this room so the air was filled with a morning greeting of Maxwell House regular. When we got into the classroom, I closed the door and it clicked closed behind us. Donnie turned to face me. He seemed upset and said he needed to leave school that day, that he had to get rid of something, that he’d be in real trouble with this gang of kids if he didn’t. His eyes blinked uncharacteristically as his story spilled out. He talked about being back in town only for a short time, that this was his old gang, that he was trying to get away from it, that they were waiting for him the night before and that he’d been cornered on his way to his neighborhood grocery store and they made him do something to prove he was still loyal, and that they’d do something really bad to him if he didn’t do what he asked. When I asked what that was, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a revolver that he said was loaded. I could feel the sweat start to drip from my armpits and it wasn’t even 8am yet. So here we are, it’s morning, I haven’t even had my first coffee of the day yet, and I’m standing in this remote classroom with this tall lanky white boy who’s standing there pointing a revolver in my direction. I know guns more than a little bit and this baby looks perhaps .32 caliber, maybe .38. I’m nervous. This is another first time incident for me, having a gun pulled on me. I haven’t the slightest idea why he keeps waving it in my direction. I’m not sure he even knows that he’s doing it. All I know is that he and I are face to face with a loaded revolver waving in my direction and we are having a conversation about what to do with it. I remember self-talking myself to stay calm. At this point the room seemed about ten feet square and getting hotter by the second. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, everything seemed to be closing in on us. My mind raced as I ticked off a list of options that I can still remember: jump Donnie to take the gun, talk him into giving it to me, talk him into placing it on a table, not asking him if it was real or if it was loaded because of what that might signal to him about my intentions, running out the door. What I chose to do was to continue to find out more information about how he got the gun and what he needed to do with it and how I could help him. I couldn’t let him out of the building with a loaded gun on his person. We started to get some place in our conversation. The room now seemed to be getting larger. We were in the part of our conversation about phoning his parole officer to help deal with his dilemma when Walt walked in the room to get a cup of coffee. Walt took one look at Donnie holding the gun on me. His face turned red instantaneously and he yelled, “Donnie. Jesus Christ, Donnie. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” At that, Donnie turned whiter than his T-shirt, panicked, and started looking around the room for an escape. Red-faced Walt was blocking his only exit, the door we’d just come through moments ago. I see where Walter’s eyes dart and where his mind goes and shout to him, “Walt, it’s all right, leave us alone,” but Donnie panics, streaks across the room, and takes a swan dive out the open window, shirt tails flopping behind him. He must have landed on the pavement with a tuck and a roll because by the time I get to the window, he’s a streaking shadow at the end of the parking lot, turning the corner into the street. It’s still a bright, sunny day but the feeling of it has all changed. “Damn!” Walt has completely lost it by this time. He shouts to me he’s going to jump in the car and go after him. Burt, attracted by the noise and shouts has burst through the door by this time and together, we both manage to caution Walt against running through our tree lined south end middle class neighborhood after a kid with a potentially loaded gun. We call the police, report the incident and wait to see what happens. We also try to notify Sam.
A little over an hour later, a uniformed officer arrives at the front of the school, gets directed around back, and comes in asking for me. (I’d love to have heard the conversation in the front office after he’d left.) He says that police stopped the south end city bus and found Donnie. Evidently Donnie was not an unknown quantity to SPD. I am to “go downtown” with him and make a statement relative to the incident. Another new experience for Charlie. So, we regroup the kids who by this time are about as excited to be at school as they’ve been all year. Several of them wave goodbye from the locker room window as I climb into the black and white and head off “downtown”. I’d never been in a black and white before. The policeman with me makes small talk as we travel down South Salina Street. I’m nervous. I’ve never given a statement before. Does this mean I’m involved with the incident? Am I now a suspect? What is going on? Will I see my friend Willie Gilbert again? When I get there, I’m ushered into one of those little rooms where suspects are questioned. It looks like every interrogation room I’ve ever seen in the movies. Plain steel table, three steel straight back chairs, it smells kind of like men smell, musty and slightly acrid. Cigarette smoke for sure. And yes, there’s a mirror on one wall except it probably isn’t a mirror. A plainclothes detective enters and introduces himself as Sargent DeStiola. His badge is clipped to his belt, just to the right of his belt buckle. His suit is dark, and I think, expensive. A lot more expensive than mine, anyway.
He seems nice enough. When I ask what’s going on, he says they’ve talked with Donnie and want my side of the story. I ask am I under suspicion for anything and Sgt. D. gives me a very funny look. No. Not at all. They just want to know what happened. Sgt. D. asks me a bunch of questions, takes a bunch of notes, and tells me that Donnie had a long history of gang involvement before he went away and that gangs will often reconnect with members who have “been away” and force them to prove their loyalty “or else”. “Or else” was often anything from shunning to murder. He said Donnie had a right to be scared. He also said they’d confiscated the weapon, that it was a very realistic blank revolver and that though loaded, it couldn’t have hurt anyone except for point blank firings. Donnie was next door. If it was okay with me, he’d invite him in, the three of us would have a little chat, and then he’d drive us all back to school. And by the way, he did look familiar for a reason. Sgt. D. had been a referee for many of my home college football games. Said he’d remembered me and recognized my voice instantly. Said he’d worked with Donnie for years, that he really liked the kid, and that he hoped we could do something for him. That he deserved a few good shakes in his life. Donnie came in, head hung low. He never made eye contact. I understood that. I wouldn’t have either had I been in his shoes. We talked. We established, with Sgt. D’s help, that neither of us had any intent at any time to hurt the other person, that we were just trying to find out what to do, and that Walt’s behavior had thrown us both for a loop. I had the feeling this conversation was for my benefit to reassure me that even though Donnie’s gun could have hurt me, that had never been Donnie’s intent. He merely was trying to figure out how to get rid of it and how to save face with the gang. His relationship with me caused him to come to me.
With that done, we left “downtown,” got into Sgt. D’s unmarked car and made our way back though the streets of Syracuse to school. Donnie and I were both sitting in back, next to the doors with no handles. A very strange feeling came over me. Time seemed to slow to a crawl and while Sgt. D and I made small talk about college football, another part of my mind was having its own conversation with itself. I distinctly remember three thoughts going on simultaneously as I sat in the back of that police cruiser. One, how weird this whole system was. One moment a kid’s holding a gun on me and the next, we’re friends riding back to school in the back of a police cruiser. Anyone seeing us might have thought we were two crooks being driven to prison! Two, maybe Donnie had this all planned out. That one way or another, he was going to get Sgt. D. to intervene on his behalf. And bingo, he’d been successful. And Three, I was nothing more than a pawn in the much larger set of contingencies that Donnie faced everyday in his life. None of this had been about me. My initial instincts had been pretty good. In fact, even right on. After we got back to school, the kids wanted to know from Donnie how he’d gotten back to school so fast and thought the whole story was just so cool. Walt wondered the same thing and after hearing what had gone on, walked out of the room muttering “Jesus Christ” to himself once again, and headed off for a smoke. Burt just shook his head and laughed with me while we listened to the animated sounds coming from the locker room. One thing I could always count on was Burt’s perspective. He was a wise man. And, we all realized Donnie’s stock had risen with the group that day.
It was probably this incident alone that helped me realize that the life these kids led was a life shared irrespective of race. I knew this as an abstraction, but the morning of Donnie’s question, the leap out the window, the ride downtown and back, and the interposition of Sgt. D. cemented in my mind that race was just another factor in what determined the life circumstances of the GLS boys. It wasn’t the factor that determined the situations these kids found themselves in, at least as far as our school was concerned. We never had an inter-racial conflict at school. The kids – they were Irish, Italian, African American, Polish, and those you might call just poor white kids – were pretty much united by circumstance. If race did play a factor, I couldn’t see it. Any of the tormenting that went on across groups of kids at school, involved mixed groups of kids. As I wrote earlier, for the boys of GLS, the oppression that typified their life circumstances was an equal opportunity employer. I suspect race was a factor for the Black kids in other parts of their lives. But in terms of relationships at school, I never heard much about it during the entire year at GLS.
Lesson Three. We weren’t the worst of the worst. Even among ourselves, we had expected levels of safety, and lack of safety. We discovered these inductively.
Steve was with us from the beginning, although he didn’t show up until two weeks after school started. Steve was an impenetrable powder keg, under unfathomable pressure, with few hidden sub-surface cracks. He spoke few words to anyone. Was just basically there. And getting him to do anything pushed us all, kids included, to our limits of patience. He got to the point where he’d finally joke with the boys some over a morning cigarette. But not very much. He was and remains the toughest kid I ever met or worked with. He was average height, very dark, lean, sharp musculature, and constantly wore a black doo rag. He looked at you with squinty eyes that were one minute sleepy and the next minute sinister. He wore heavy healed, dark boots and no one doubted his willingness to use them on anyone he perceived to be a threat. The boys said he carried a knife but we never saw one and he never showed it. Steve was a kid you didn’t want to get out of your line of vision for very long.
One day late Fall, Burt asked him to leave shop because he was not being safe with the chisels. It had taken Burt a full month after Steve arrived to gain enough trust with him to admit him to the shop and use the tools. But Steve had pushed the limits of use almost immediately and Burt had asked him to leave. Steve left all right, screaming insults over his shoulder at that “bald-headed motherfucker” and continued right out the back door of the program. The language didn’t bother us so much, the flight from school did. But just as we were gathering to decide our next steps, Steve came back in and hung out in the smoky, dingy, smelly locker room until the end of the day. And then he just left.
Next day, the first word of it came from one of the kids. Steve had brought a chain to school and he was going back after “that cue-ball headed motherfucker.” He was going to, in his words, “rack him up bad.” This was all in the locker room, before school started. Larry, the second toughest kid of the group, dared him to “rack him up”, I’m sure with a curling snarl on his face. I was standing outside my classroom when Steve took off down the hall and flew across the gym, a short cut to the shop, chain in hand, headed for Burt. It didn’t take but an instant to put together what was going on. I knew Burt was in the shop and I knew he’d not know what hit him, especially if he had his hearing aid turned down. So I took off across the gym and came out the opposite side door, just opposite the shop and just ahead of Steve. Steve’s boots meant he couldn’t cover the territory as fast as I; plus, I had the advantage of the hypotenuse. Steve didn’t stop his running and neither did I. I laid him out with a perfect cross body block, the first of two times I ever hit someone at school. He went flying. Burt came rushing out at the noise to find me struggling on top of Steve, the chain still in Steve’s hand. Steve had totally decompensated. It took four of us to hold him until he started to breathe easier but we knew this was his last morning at GLS. We, boys and teachers together, all except Walt, watched as the black and white slowly drove out of the parking lot with Steve handcuffed in the back seat. He was off to Industry, NY, the state’s upstate juvenile detention center. I never heard from him or of him again.
Larry and Ray told us that was a good thing, what had happened to Steve. He was no good and he was dangerous besides. Unpredictable. And he’d hurt a lot of people. I guess the kids did care about what happened here. At least they needed a greater degree of safety than Steve’s presence was able to provide. Walt was sitting in his office off the gym, his short legs propped up on his desk, smoking a Marlboro as he often did before school started. He’d missed it all until we were constraining Steve. He thought I was just running a lap around the gym, getting some early morning exercise. That guy was so weird!
Lesson Number Four. Anger that boils out of you comes from deep within and has its own energy. Tears of release confirm a common humanity. Thinking you control your own destiny is a marker of privilege. Violence protects.
Eddy was almost as short as Ricky. Eddy had a chocolate colored rubbery face, a face that would take on many expressions. Eddy was exceedingly polite, until he snapped. There was something about Eddy’s life that victimized him. We worked hard trying to get him to stop fishing for torment. Eddy could be a very likeable kid. But like Robert, he sometimes came to school with that sour odor that put everybody off. Like Robert, it was a long road to hoe to be able to say to them when they walked in the door, that this was a shower day. But that’s what I learned to do. Very direct, eye to eye, matter of fact. “Today is a shower day.” We had ensembles of clean clothes stored in one of the lockers available for anyone at any time. Sometimes things would happen at Eddy’s home and we wouldn’t see him for two or three days. Other kids reported seeing him on the streets downtown, near the Projects. Like with the rest of the kids, I had no idea really of what went on in Eddy’s life outside of school. I do know he slept in alleyways sometimes. And I had heard he was regularly sexually abused. Like Robert, in some ways, except we also knew that Robert was an abuser as well.
Late in the Spring, Eddy was jumping on the trampoline. Walt for all his issues, was pretty resourceful about getting equipment. This was a nice trampoline and the kids loved bouncing on it. Some of them actually got pretty good at tumbling and flipping and going way higher than I even wanted to look at. Eddy wasn’t one of these. His bounces were awkward and uncoordinated and you never knew just which way he was going to fly. You had to watch extra close and be ready when Eddy’s turn came.
On this day, Eddy was having a particularly hard time of it. His jumps were more erratic than usual. Usually, he’d shake it off and the wonderfully rubbery face would twist up in a bunch of smiles. Most of the time, just being able to do what he wanted on the tramp was sheer pleasure for Eddy. But this was not one of those days. As his jumps got worse, his stubbornness kicked in – I think he wanted to put a good string of jumps and seat plops together before he got ended his turn. The other boys got impatient with him. Understatement here. These boys in the best of times were not known for their patience. In this moment, patience had gone. Several began to yell. “Just get down, will you?” “Come on Eddy, you’re done.” And then it got more personal. “Eddy, you’re terrible. You can’t even bounce.” Eddy’s face set into a deep frown as he reasserted his effort to succeed. Everyone was getting pissed and Walt started to end it. Eddy started to argue with Walt and Walt, pointing at him with his index finger, ordered him off the trampoline. “Off, now.” Eddy screamed at Walt, “No, You can’t make me,” which was really foolish ‘cause Eddy was so small, most anyone there could physically make him do most anything. And that was probably what triggered it. Eddy felt physically threatened and when Billy yelled, “You stink, Eddy,” Eddy flew into a rage. He jumped off the trampoline and started to chase Billy. Billy was the tallest, most dapper kid in the program, a kid who showed quite a bit of good schooling actually, and Billy just laughed at him. Out of Eddy came a sound I don’t think I’d ever heard before. It was part scream, part whistle, part belch. He grabbed a spare turnbuckle from under the tramp and heaved it at Billy. This was a piece of equipment Walt had left lying next to the tramp because it wasn’t needed in the set-up. It had some heft to it, probably four or five pounds, and Eddy threw it at Billy like it was a piece of kindling. At that, Billy turned and started to come at Eddy. Walt moved to Billy and I moved to Eddy. Eddy ran from the tramp and headed for the door. I made it to the staircase and blocked him. He screamed again and turned and ran inside Walt’s office. I made it in there with him before he could lock the door. The air reeked of Eddy’s peculiar odor. He screamed at me to get out of the way, to let him leave, and if I didn’t move he’d kill me. He was way out of any semblance of self-control. It was as if another force altogether had taken over his physical presence. He came at me repeatedly trying kick and hit; I held him off for a while, my hand on his head. When he started to bite, I wrapped him up like I’d been taught, holding his arms, his body facing away from mine, my head to the side to avoid head butts and black eyes. He screamed uncontrollably, he spit, he cried, and I kept saying to him quietly, “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not going to hurt you. Get your body under control and I’ll loosen my hold.” He hated being pinned that way. I would have, too. Minutes went by. He began to quiet, I let him go and he bolted across to Walt’s desk, grabbed and threw Walt’s ashtray at me. And missed. He picked up a book and threw that. And missed. He picked up Walt’s chair, and it clattered just off to my side. I wasn’t taking evasive action. I was watching, somewhat stunned, not quite believing the apparition that had come to pass in front of me. Everything Eddy threw at me missed. It dawned on me I think he wanted it to miss. This was not a very big office. I wasn’t very far away from him. In the midst of his rage, he always missed. I moved to block the door and tried to adopt a more casual, non-threatening pose. “Eddy, I’m not going to hurt you. I like you. Calm down. No one is going to hurt you. You are safe here. No one’s going to hurt you. We like you. Calm down.” And on and on. Until his little shoulders began to shake. His body started to shake. He started to cry and moan something. I couldn’t tell what. He was a mess. He stunk. His face was covered with tears and mucus and spit. He was full of sweat. Me, too. We were a fine pair. I got the feeling that I was now facing a vulnerable little boy who needed in the worst possible way to be held close. So I did. I walked the very few steps to him talking calmly all the way, righted Walt’s chair, gathered Eddy in and held him in my arms, cradling him like a little child. After a moment, the tension that was his body started to ease and he melted in my arms and wept. He wept for what must have been twenty minutes. Walt tried to come in at one point and then decided to leave us be. When it was done, it was done. Eddy calmed himself. He took a shower and put on dry clothes and left the school to catch a bus ride home. He was a tired boy, exhausted from the takeover of his being. This powerful primal force existed in the same body as all his vulnerabilities. I’d never experienced this kind of decomposing before. And I’ve never forgotten it.
Years later, when reading Carl Rogers and what Rogers wrote about the need for unconditional positive regard as a pre-condition for anything to occur in the client – therapist relationship, I thought of Eddy Copes. Something evil was present in Eddy’s life. All he wanted was to be respected for who he was. I think I gave him that in those excruciating moments we spent in Walt’s office. The guys were pretty good with him when he returned to school. We talked in meeting about the events of that day. About how hard it is to re-enter. Some even apologized. Eddy said he was sorry to Billy. Billy said it was no big deal like everything else in Billy’s life. But Eddy left the program before the year was out. We’d heard he’d moved. And then we’d heard he’d gone crazy on someone and had been put away. We never knew what that meant. Eddy Copes like many of the kids at GLS was a kid who led lives over which they seemed to have little control. Tragedy lurked nearby, looking for Eddy. He didn’t really go looking for it. It just happened to him. We knew he needed assistance way beyond “school.” We had no connections to agencies other than the police and Eddy wasn’t exactly their expertise. No wonder so many of our kids were known as fighters. In the face of fate, the only way they could ward off the unpredictable was to put up as big a front as they could before tragedy got to them, especially if they were little guys like Eddy Copes. Letting their defenses slip was such a risk for them. Much bigger than I ever understood at the time. But I was getting smarter.
What was GLS?
I was involved in a holding company. As the year went on, I felt less and less commitment to our program from the school district. I wasn’t ever really going to help these kids with reading. Sure, I’d used several SRA kits pretty successfully, and I’d been able to integrate Burt’s shopwork and my mathematics. I’d also been able to do some pretty impressive cartography with the boys but my academic program felt like a drop in the bucket in terms of what these kids real needs were. And in that sense, I felt like I personified a lie to them. We would be able to keep them there with us. For some, we were a safer haven than the schools or jail, especially if they bought into the program. But we were isolated outside any set of services we needed to really dig at the root of what was going on for these characters. And that felt unethical to me. I thought we were promising the kids a future we had no way of delivering on.
But Burt got the out-building built and sold. I think he sold it to himself! We took a few trips up to Sam’s camp on the Tug Hill Plateau. Larry, who knew road signs only by their shape, nailed a running rabbit on the first day he’d ever held a bow and arrow. Bernard became much more skilled 
at hitting a fastball, even with a cigarette in his mouth. Walt’s times away to cool off seemed more frequent and took longer. I don’t know if he ever made it to retirement. Robert Beebe transferred into a “regular” Junior High school successfully in the Spring. And by the end of this first school year, I’d decided I wanted out of GLS. I was working 50 to 60 hour weeks to basically stay in the same place. I’d talked with Pete. There were no further resources planned for the program even though the district considered the program a measured success and had plans to grow the size of the program in its second year. On the other hand, funding was a year-to-year proposition and there was no guarantee GLS would be funded beyond the second year.
I’d literally had to steal from the district warehouse (with the kid’s help and amazement) what classroom resources we had, and my perspective was that I was participating in an operation that was not making life better for anyone. We were a school this band of kids could attend as long as they played by the rules. They’d be in school until they were sixteen and then most would drop out to the streets. So what good were our efforts? I felt like we were selling the kids a bill of goods we couldn’t really deliver on. At the end of the year, I applied for and was granted a transfer to teach social studies at Roosevelt Junior High School, a real urban junior high school.
As it was, several years down the road, the GLS program moved to the same building as the unwed mothers program and the district appointed a real counselor to direct the program. My friends in the district told me GLS was funded for quite a few years after I left Syracuse and it became the alternative junior high school program for the district. I don’t know whether my leaving and the long set of recommendations I’d left behind proved helpful or not. But I moved on to yet another station in my teaching career.
I wasn’t quite the tail wagger when that year ended. The kids of GLS had showed me a slice of life that I didn’t know was out there. Well, I knew it was out there in the same way I know the moon is in the sky. I can see it, and I can predict its cycles, but I haven’t the slightest idea what its really like. What it looks like up close, what it feels like, how it is to walk its surface. In the same way, I knew some kids lived in desperate straits just like Martin Deutch, Harry Passow, and others had described. But I hadn’t encountered it up close and personal. Donnie, Rickey, Ray, Larry, Steve, Billy, Eddie and others showed it to me every day up close and personal. I knew their lives in a much different way at the end of the year than I had when that year started. And still, there were layers and layers of life still hidden to me that they experienced every day. They showed me the resilience of resistance. They were survivors, and in their own way they’d managed to save face in a system that was designed to expose their deficiencies for everyone to see. Some also showed me the white hot anger that abuse feeds and nurtures. I’d come face to face with a kind of love and hate that was new to me. I might have stayed if I’d had some larger perspective about my work. But neither Bert nor Walt were into solving anything beyond the immediate problems of what to do today. And I had no other referent group to process my work that year. I was lonely. I was cut off. And I felt frustrated at my inability to do anything really helpful for the boys of GLS. I might have stayed if I had some larger perspective on what my work was all about. But I didn’t. So for right or for wrong, I moved on.
At the time, I thought my work was doing the kids a favor. I was working to get them back into the schools so they could successfully pursue the benefits of an education. In hook’s words, the GLS program was all about re-socializing or re-colonizing the kids of poverty to get them back in the system, to make them conform to a culture that was all about excluding them, and color seemed to make no difference. Still, as I see it now, white and Black kids re-entering the system would have re-entered to different advantages. Would Al, an ethnic Italian, been as mentoring to Larry, a Black, as he was to Donnie, a white Irish kid? It’s a fair question to ask. I don’t know the answer. I do know that for our kids, personal alienation was the bottom line of public school attendance. At least at GLS, they could voice their disaffection with the system that drove them out and they could make a run at getting better at approaching the school on its own terms if they wanted that. Where possible, the choice to rejoin the public schools was made with more open eyes. But truthfully, their academic readiness was so out of line with what was expected of them that going back in meant a school life of constant degradation. Or, a life of notoriety earned by the kind of active resistance that pushed as many boundaries as possible while remaining “appropriate.” In that whole year, only two boys attempted re-entry. We never found out if they made it.
Maybe GLS in its first year was to the system as lower reading groups are to higher reading groups. The predominant patterns of migration from group to group are always down, not up, and my hunch is that pigmentation “sets” this pattern even more. Systemically, the number of kids who fail to rise disproportionately favors blacks over whites. White kids, back then anyway, had a great chance of rising out of programs like GLS than black kids. I know this is an empirical question, an empirical question I probably wouldn’t have raised at the time.
Depending upon how you wanted to spin this program, GLS was either a holding tank, a cheap repair shop, or an alternative school. As a holding tank, you aged to sixteen and dropped out; as a repair shop, you got fixed and went back into the system; as an alternative school, you completed, got your equivalence diploma and went on to community college. In this first year, I’d worked in a holding tank.