Outside of the Voice office on the fourth floor of the Leavey Center, there is a bathroom. Every time I go to the bathroom, there is always toilet paper, soap and paper towels. The bathroom is clean and has locks on the stalls. This surprises me.
It surprises me because until I came to Georgetown the schools I attended never had such amenities. In elementary and middle school, there wasn’t soap or paper towels, and in high school, there were no doors on the stalls my first year. In the afternoons of senior year, my younger brother would often be in a hurry for me to drive home?he preferred to hold it all day rather than use the disgusting school bathrooms.
It wasn’t just the school bathrooms. In elementary school, we didn’t have a gym, so P.E. consisted of either walking around a track, jumping rope or playing with a parachute. If it rained, the class was relegated to quiet ball.
In high school, the lunchroom was about half the size it needed to be, even with three separate lunch shifts. Booths designed for four sat six, and people sat outside all year, even in August, with the hot Florida sun beating down on them. If it rained, we had to run to the lunchroom, or else have nowhere to sit. The lunch line was so long, that if we waited in it, we had about five to 10 minutes with your food before the period ended.
No one really seemed to think that any of this was a problem. Things were just that way; no one tried to change them because it had never been any different. My junior year American history teacher explained that counties spend between $1,000 to $12,000 per student per year in a public school. My county spent about $2,000. Education just wasn’t a priority. I don’t know if it was a Southern issue, or my region, or why it wasn’t fixed. But I did know that once a system is in place that is mediocre, the tendency is to spiral down.
Parents that couldn’t afford private school weren’t left with many options. The parents within the public school system that had enough money, resources and education to demand better for their children were placated with gifted programs and magnet schools.
I went to a magnet middle school across town. Every day I rode a school bus from my house to my district middle school, and then a separate bus from my district school to the magnet school. I spent three and a half hours on a bus every school day for three years. When I got to school, we were involved in an experimental curriculum called “streams,” with every class centered around a common subject, such as the environment or art history. This theme-centered curriculum tended to leave out important math and grammar lessons that I would need later in high school. I went there because it was my only choice. My parents couldn’t afford to send my brother and me to a private school, and my district middle school was dangerous and falling apart.
For high school, I decided to attend the International Baccalaureate program in my county. It was placed in what was considered the “urban” school in my town. I went there because it was where I could take the best classes with the best teachers in the county. What the program did, however, was create a brain-drain from the other six high schools in the county and produce an enormous amount of tension between the students in the “regular” high school which was 80 percent African-American and the students in I.B. who were nearly all white. The logic was that the presence of students in accelerated classes would encourage the rest of the school to do better. In practice, the I.B. program had the best teachers in the school and separate classes, giving an observer the ability to randomly walk into a room and determine by its racial make-up what kind of class it was. Instead of being labeled as an at-risk school, my high school’s test scores were misleadingly bolstered by the students in the I.B. program and the school didn’t fix the fundamental problems that caused it to be an at-risk school.
Granted, I took advantage of what was available to me. I took the best classes I could; I sucked up whatever resources were thrown my way. But I knew how unequal the system was. I knew that I was in the good classes because I was white and somewhat affluent, and my parents made an effort to be involved in my education.
When I came to Georgetown, I was involved in a Prelude class that discussed Jonothan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities. I read about schools that were flooded or about students who stole chicken nuggets from school to have something to eat over the weekend. But the book didn’t open my eyes to anything. I didn’t read about a problem that I was shocked to find out existed. I saw first-hand that it is hard to care about your education when it seems as if adults don’t care enough to provide decent facilities. I want members of the school board and tax payers who refuse to pay more to spend just one day crammed into a smelly, undersized booth for lunch or in a disgusting bathroom to relieve themselves. They would never work in those conditions. It is beyond my comprehension why they expect kids to.
