If you’re from the Philly area, you’ve likely heard about Bartram High in the news: fights, violence, staff being attacked. That’s likely all you know of Bartram. So read this Inquirer piece [1] by Kristen Graham about Gionna Hawkins, a 14-year-old Bartram student described as doing her best not just to make it through but thrive.
Make no mistake, this story about Gionna is no celebration of Bartram. She’s had her cellphone stolen. She was picked on and threatened when she started school. She has no science teacher. But here’s a kid, according to the article, who has “taken advantage of everything Bartram has to offer. She’s a cheerleader and freshman class president. She helps lead an after-school program focusing on music, art, and fashion. Her schedule is packed with honors courses, and her friends know she is a stickler for proper spelling and good grammar.”
There’s a photo of her, smiling, braces, pen in hand. Just a kid trying to climb the ladder in life. Her mother, just a parent trying to raise her child, has a voice here too. Dawn Hawkins says this about the problems at Bartram, “It starts at home. The parents should be accountable for their children. If that starts to happen, maybe the kids will change.” Dawn Hawkins thought about other schools but says her daughter thinks she wants to “stick it out at Bartram.” Then Dawn Hawkins makes this remarkable comment: “And I guess they need kids like that.”
Bartram is a difficult place, and nothing easy is going to fix the underlying problems of some of its disruptive students. But while well-meaning people lament these schools and rightfully look to government, someone to fix things, they often don’t do what they could do: Stay. Get involved. Work locally. Offer something other than a broad-brushed narrative of hopelessness. Because even in a school like Bartram, where there are many tough stories, there are a host of others stories we seldom hear, narratives of success and maybe even happiness.
My kids are fortunate. They don’t leave each morning for school scared. They’re happy and thriving in safe, stimulating academic and social environments. I wouldn’t have it any other way and wouldn’t expect you to either. But most schools people describe as having “problems” are nothing like Bartram (remember, no science teacher). They are issues of test scores and family income that become scrambled up into overarching mistaken perceptions and thus generalizations about whole districts and groups of kids. If we’d ever step foot into these schools, we’d be shocked, seeing kids walking the halls, going to class, smiling.
I think about the common tale in our culture of the kid who is “saved” by going to a “better” school. You’ve heard this story many times, the narrative of how hard-working parents sacrifice to send their kid to the school across town (I just encountered it again for my class this spring in Richard Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory [2].) Yes, these are good and worthy anecdotes about those kids, their teachers, their schools.
But in these narratives, forgotten is that these kids weren’t “saved” from the desert or remote cliffside caves, spared from dehydration or death by bears. Damn it, those kids were “saved” from another school district. And when they left, the other school and all of its kids, parents, and teachers remained. Those “saved” kids usually had good things going for them in the first place, as did their parents, who, if nothing else, cared. Now they are gone.
Multiply that out, and, if you care to, think big, just for a moment, about the U.S. system of schooling.
Most of us do what we perceive as best for our children. We wouldn’t put them in danger. But for those who can afford a decision at all, we must remember that a school community is composed of the pride and effort of its people.
Dawn Hawkins may be thinking more nobly than most (writing a check is easier than being noble), and maybe she has fewer choices. But it is true every time a good family leaves a “bad” district, the district remains. The parents’ energy, as it naturally should, flows elsewhere. They have to explain such a decision, so the “better” school narrative grows, sometimes accidentally, but insidiously nonetheless. The prophecy can become self-fulfilled.
I appreciate the Inquirer for working outside the easy story of the violent school. It takes time and effort to create and learn another narrative, and Graham’s piece disrupts the one-Bartram-student view. I think it also helps us see how complicated and difficult it is to stay where you might very well be needed.
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[5]Scott Warnock [6]
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