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As Celeste was in her second year at the Montessori school in Toledo,
Ben and I accepted job offers in Milwaukee, a city with a racial
and economic profile in many ways similar to Toledo. Indices of
segregation and urban poverty are high in both cities; the public
schools are weighted down with aging buildings and low teacher-
student ratios, burdened by high-stakes testing and starved by continual
budget cuts. Close to the university where we would teach, our new
neighborhood was far less diverse than Toledo's Old West End. But
the East Side of Milwaukee comes with an integrated, majority-Black
public primary school that we could walk Celeste to every morning.
I had to enroll Celeste in school in Milwaukee from Toledo, as
I was pregnant the winter before we moved. As I researched our options
from afar, it became clear to me that the school, once a neighborhood
school and now a city-wide magnet, was an unusual place. Its description
in the public school handbook emphasized a commitment to the arts
and social justice. I talked to white and Black parents who spoke
of their kids' good experiences there. They spoke of links to the
university, about committed teachers, and a visionary principal.
I was delighted that Celeste could attend an integrated public
school blocks from our house and workplace. But I was also terrified
of it. How would she fare in an urban school where rules are, of
necessity, emphasized; where students line up to go to class or
walk through the hall? What would it be like for her to be in the
minority? My basic assumption is that the task of grade school is
to make kids like school: what if her new school prepared her to
hate and fear it?
The first time we saw the Hartford University School was in the
early spring of that year, new baby Sylvie in tow. Celeste was already
enrolled there, and we were there to meet the principal and tour
the place.
The school hunkers on a corner block in the midst of the university
campus. It's a big, dark, brick building, left over from a time
when elementary schools looked like the factories that most kids
left them to work in. The school building is surrounded by asphalt
playgrounds and chain-link fences. It looked so unlike the Montessori
school, which was low and new, with flowers planted by each classroom
growing outside it.
We pulled into the school parking lot, which shares the asphalt
with basketball hoops and a small playground. A few middle school
kids were shooting hoops in the cold. "Mommy," said Celeste
urgently from the back seat. "This can't be my school! Everyone
is brown."
"Well, sweetie. Let's go in and see it, OK?" I tried
to sound reassuring, but my throat felt tight.
We went up the stairs and met the principal, Cynthia Ellwood, a
dynamic and attractive white woman, in her sunny office. Hartford
smells like a school: like cleaning fluid and missing home and tons
of kids laughing, all at the same time. We toured the school, with
Cynthia greeting each student by name. Celeste liked all the art
in the hallway; and, especially, the water fountains.
But I wondered. In contrast to her old school, the new school was
predominantly Black, with a few white, Asian, and Latino students
sprinkled in each classroom. That day, I counted at most two kids
per class that were not African-American. Did those other kids feel
besieged? Were they picked on? How would Celeste do in a public
school where kids march through the hallways in line to the cafeteria,
instead of sitting at small tables in their classroom?
I talked to Cynthia who, as principal, who was used to calming
the fears of anxious parents. These were unusual conversations among
white people, in that we addressed race and my fears about it directly.
"She's your child," she said. "You should do what
your intuition tells you is best for her. Of course, as another
parent I was touring with last week said, your intuition may be
derailed by your underlying assumptions about race."
And there it is. There are lots of things I know intellectually
about race and justice; there is my strong desire to have Celeste
grow up in an integrated community. Then there is the work of parenting,
which I do almost entirely by feel. I felt at that moment a clutching
fear for her that, at the same time, I didn't trust. I decided to
assume that Cynthia was right, that my intuition in this situation
was derailed by something else: my own, deeply held, racism. And
that racism was what Celeste had been studying, all this time.
Not that there aren't serious issues that come with an urban public
school. In the Milwaukee Public School system, the student-teacher
ratio is officially 30:1; in practice, it is often closer to 40:1.
At Hartford, along with some of the other grade schools in MPS,
there is special funding to keep this ratio at 30:2 before 4th grade.
Six blocks north of us, the suburban schools of Shorewood sport
ratios closer to 20:1.
These inequalities between MPS and suburban schools, of course,
have everything to do with a seemingly intractable cycle. Public
schools are funded by property taxes. Central cities have lower
tax bases, and fewer resources. As a result, many people who could
support city schools with their tax dollars and their investment
in the system flee to the suburbs. In our neighborhood, many people
go to extraordinary lengths to keep their kids out of public school,
opting for charter or private schools, driving miles away. Few of
the people we met in the park or out strolling the summer before
Celeste started at Hartford sent their children there, though many
adults remembered having gone to it years before, "when it
was the neighborhood school." Hartford is still in the neighborhood,
but it is widely perceived as no longer a school appropriate for
middle class, white, East Side kids.
I was very torn about this decision. I liked Cynthia immediately,
and I believe in what she is doing at Hartford. But I also do not
believe in having my kids act out my intellectual politics. I don't
want Celeste to suffer because of the social inequalities that surround
us. I don't want her to be the only white kid in a sea of non-white
faces; I don't want her to feel alone and scared in a towering institution.
A lot of conversations and some sleepless nights on my part later,
Ben and I decided to stick with the decision to send Celeste to
Hartford. I have watched carefully to see how she is making the
transition from Toledo in general, and to school in particular.
And I can only describe her as thriving there.
She seemed initially happy day to day. By late fall, the astounding
leaps of learning that I had observed the previous year at the Montessori,
had picked back up, and she was chatting merrily about letters,
starting to sound out street signs. At her fifth birthday, in October,
she invited her new friends from school to a party at our house.
Almost all of them were white. But by early winter, she was requesting
play dates with kids outside of this circle, and some of these friendships
were with Black kids.
Right before Christmas break, there was an incident at school that,
initially, confirmed some of my worst fears. I got a call at my
office in the late morning that Celeste was crying uncontrollably,
and I should come pick her up. When I got there, the teacher's aid
told me that someone had teased her at lunch and then she couldn't
stop crying. Celeste was very upset and complaining of a stomach
ache, so I took her home.
As far as Ms Wilson, the teacher's aid, could piece it together,
Celeste had been sitting in a different place than usual, away from
her friends. A little boy named Rodney had teased her, and then
she had started crying uncontrollably.
In the week that remained of school, Celeste mostly wanted to stay
home with Sylvie and Ben and me. She would go to school only if
we promised to pick her up before lunch. Lunchtime is when the kindergarten
students eat with the first graders, and the teachers go on break.
This translates to a lot of noise, and the absence of adults to
go to for reassurance. After Christmas,
I decided to accompany Celeste to lunch, to help her get used to
it again. I don't think my presence helped her very much. It made
her much weepier, and she did not want me to leave when lunch was
over. What eventually helped her was the patience of her teacher,
who skipped her own lunch a few times to sit with the class, and
the constancy of her friends, who surrounded her. Going to lunch
at Hartford did help me, though. I realized that I had somehow come
to imagine Rodney as a dangerous kid, a five-year-old, possibly
violent, gang-banger. At lunchtime the day I went, he was the other
kid besides Celeste crying for his mom, who is often in the classroom
to pick him up early. Quite a contrast with what I had, unconsciously,
begun to imagine Celeste confronting at school! |
