Gay

This is part II of a post that begins just below this one.

Gay is 51 years old. She graduated from a local HS in 1974, 2 years after the mouse came to town. She has two daughters all grown up, and she has been working at the "Special School" for 32 years, or the better part of her life, if you will. She works as a low level security officer in her non-school hours, and is one of the sweetest, soundest human beings you'll ever want to meet. Gay has used public funding for the less financially privileged properly...using the rules and regulations to help her not only purchase - but significantly upgrade - her home in the middle of "Urbancrimeville". Gay believes in God, sincerely loves and cares for the kids in the school, and is totally at a loss to explain how this African-American society she lives in has crumbled to the depths that it has. She has a few ideas though, and none of them take the shape of the "Katrina did this and Katrina did that, and the government doesn't care about black people" syndrome.

Gay knows damn well that many if not all of her neighborhood's wounds are self-inflicted.

The day Jamaal and Shaniqua entered her classroom at the special school is as clear in her mind as 5 minutes ago. Both of them came to her rebellious and slow. Neither could do mathematics, read, or communicate properly on the grade level they were in. Gay had seen this before, and she knew her charge: Do what she could with them...provide social guidance....and advise both of them that the end of the road seldom comes decades later for these kids. Somehow she has to get through to Jamaal and Shaniqua before there is another teen funeral. Gay had been to over 25 teen funerals in the last 30 years, 12 of whom were her former students. The wall was high, and increasingly in the last decade, instead of simply teaching the children how to climb it, both Gay and her students were being blocked from even attempting to scale it.

$500 checks per kid provides a substantial stumbling block to progress, as does the lure of cash - BIG TIME cash - on the street. Ecstacy, crack, and pot are a booming business in Urbancrimeville, and you don't have to be 16 to hold a job. You can open up a thriving business before you even reach the "een" years.

If you reach it at all.

Jamaal and Shaniqua were 100% representative of their age and grade level. Poorly managed at home. Foul mouthed. Renegade and recalcitrant. But still with a faint sliver of hope still hanging in there. Remember, the E in EMH stands for "Educable", which implies hope in and of itself. Gay knew however, that she had limited time to affect a change, and this clock ticked very, very, fast. Jamaal and Shaniqua were mischievous at this point. The next steps were fraught with danger.

Gay could not bring any personal effects into her classroom. For you and I, the thought of stealing a piece of bubblegum at age 8 brought every emotion into play. Should I? Will God punish me? What happens if I'm caught? The mere notion of taking that one 2 cent piece of double-bubble gum from the local store brought out the highest levels of consideration. We thought about it, and worried over it.

Not here though. It isn't even stealing in their minds. If Miss Gay brought in a sandwich and a bag of chips for lunch - then turned her back to write on the blackboard? Goodbye Doritos. Goodbye pens, pencils, white-out, paper, erasers, anything and everything. And don't even THINK of anything of value, like a cell phone. Stealing aside, miss Gay could be physically harmed - even killed - over a cell phone.

The children are forbidden to bring more than $20 cash into the classroom, yet every day, someone comes in with a "stack". A stack is a huge roll of 20's and higher, a symbol of toughness and "respect", the absolutely highest calibre word in Urbancrimeville. Everything is about "respect", warranted or not. And the ultimate in respect is cash or bling, and there is only one or two ways a 12 year old in Urbancrimeville can have huge amounts of cash or bling, and neither of them are good. There is a small garbage can outside of Gay's classroom, and every day it fills up with brass knuckles, pen knives, even the occasional firearm. The kids all wear big belt buckles, even though their 3 sizes too big pants are hanging down to mid-thigh. You can hot glue a lot of Ecstacy pills, small plastic bags of crack, and pot joints (called "Blunts) behind a big belt buckle. School or not, many still have their business to run, and the store is open 24/7. In this special school, they don't want parental involvement, because they know in 99.9% of the cases, the parents started the circle of despair to begin with.

Call it the "Anti-PTA". Call it whatever you like, Gay and the school administrators had learned from years of experience what works and what does not.

Next post: Jamaal and Shaniqua get a little older.