A Day of Tears and Joy

A small emotional moment can sometimes capture all the important stuff, where grey facts and figures can sometimes simply confuse.

It was the 8th of June. It was the day of our closing school's Yearbook Celebration. The day our school Yearbook was handed to the students at Ily and Havana's school.

As a blue collar worker I am rarely called Mr. Rooke. But on this day I probably heard this formality fifty times or more. Some of the younger kids thanked me for the Yearbook while speeding past on their way to play, some fourth and fifth graders stopped and waited to get my attention and then thanked me.

The journey to that day started six months earlier with the decision by the Oakland school board to close our school, along with three other schools with African American student majorities. Our school's PTA was launched after this decree with the hope that, as parents, we could collectively help our children through the emotional turbulence of the final months of our school.

I felt a yearbook would be something concrete for our school community to organize around, something through which we could express our defiance at the closure and our joy for both our school and our school community.

Maxwell Park had served as our neighborhood school since 1924. In the 60s, with Oakland's booming economy, the neighborhood and the school became racially integrated. But as the 70s set in, America's deep-riven racism unfolded and the white population completely abandoned the school. And this, in the final analysis, is why the school was eventually closed. In August the school building will reopen housing a bilingual-emersion school, transforming the African American student population of the school from 70% to 10%. Essentially our school got gentrified. As parents, we saw this coming, but in the end there was little we could do to stop this process unfolding.

So I pledged about four months of my life to producing the yearbook. A yearbook that would potentially help our students understand that their displacement was not their fault, that our school was a good school and that it was a mistake to tear up our schools' history and roots. A book they would treasure for the future.

On the day of our Yearbook celebration, the children were totally hyped up. In previous months they had walked in our Walkathon to raise money for it, they had each had their class pictures taken, five student's graphics were used for the yearbook's cover (below), three fifth graders' essays on what the school meant to them had been picked to open the yearbook,  and dozens more students contributed to the contents of the Yearbook.

In the Yearbook we'd honored our veteran teachers and staff, all African American women. One of whom was awarded elementary school Teacher of the Year in Oakland for this year. The 3rd graders who won our city's Oratorical (spoken word) contest were celebrated. Letters to Jackie Robinson shone a light on how our children view racism and second graders wrote about their Oakland, about hearing fast cars and gunshots and police sirens along with going to the movies and wanting more toys.

But one moment still resonates with me from that Yearbook celebration in June. 

Ms. Leslie, a twenty-something mom of two, and I were on the playground. I was looking for a couple of girls that would perform a hand-clapping song that was in the Yearbook and another child to read something else out of the Yearbook at the assembly. Leslie suggested a couple of fifth graders to perform and pointed out a small African American boy to read at the celebration.  

The kids were all excited to be a part of the assembly. I also noticed the older girls tease the boy that he was too young, saying to me, "he's a first grader! Really, he's a first grader!" Despite his height, it turns out he was a fourth grader and did a brilliant job at the ceremony. But the moment that moved me came later.

After the slideshow of our Yearbook, our veteran teachers took the mic to speak. One was Ms. Pitts who taught at Maxwell Park for 17 years. She was immensely popular with our students. As she spoke, her tears wove through her speech. The bubbly, excitedness of our elementary students slowly hushed until the entire hall was utterly silent and captivated. Ms. Pitts spoke of her family and how they'd joked to her that Maxwell Park School was her actual first family. Even the Kindergartners who'd been sitting on the floor for forty minutes had stopped fidgeting.

And then I watched at my side, the small boy who had read from the Yearbook had tears streaming down his cheeks as he quietly cried. 

And in the row ahead of him were the two girls that had teased him on the playground. I noticed as one of the girls turned and saw him crying. She then turned a second time, reached out her hand to his, held his hand and looked into his eyes and asked him if he was going to be okay. He thanked her and gestured that he was fine.

It was a small moment. But the most important moment for me that day. It summed up all the heartache and all the love. It reminded me that the politics of today, of money and brute force, will be rejected by the next generation. It signaled the wonderful hope for the future that is embedded in our children.

I am so glad Ilyana and Havana got the chance to go to Maxwell Park Elementary School and that I got the chance to get to know such wonderful parents, teachers and children.

Eventually we will win the future our children deserve.

The Girl Who Read Too Much - Chapter One

Chapter One: The Coffee Shop Incident

Hazel lived in two worlds.

Every morning she pushed back her bed clothes and stepped into her flat, black and white world. In this world, each chapter began and ended predictably. Each page turned painfully slowly.

But Hazel had long ago fallen upon an opening in that wall of boredom. A door which led everywhere and anywhere she wanted.
She remembered, the days before she could even read that books had put a hook in her. At three, she thought nothing could surpass an illustrated book. And then she deciphered the age-old grown-up code of the written word and the letters and sentences became seeds in the soil of her green imagination. Color came. Depth came. And the sun came out.

But today this was all to end.

Today was the day her parents put an end to this all.

Hazel had become used to the background nagging noise of her parents yelling at her to put her book down. To listen. To pay attention. To eat dinner.

She never understood why her parents constantly complained about repeating themselves. If they were saying something important, then surely repeating it was just as important as saying it once. (Although she knew that the vast majority of what her parents said to her was not that important. It was mostly about telling her to do things she was going to do anyway, but just not at grown-up speed.)

The day when things crashed was a Tuesday. Hazel was standing in line with her mother at the local coffee shop. This was the moment when everything came to a head when her two worlds collided. One of her worlds was about to be extinguished forever.

Now it is true, Hazel enjoyed a good book. That is not a crime. Not a crime that any adult would admit to. In fact other adults were constantly lavishing her mom and dad with praise. “Oh, Hazel is such a good reader. Oh, look at her, you are so lucky. She’s so good.” Many parents would die for such admiration. Hazel was especially praised by parents who had 8-year old boys. Boys seemed to have trouble sitting still long enough to get into a good book.

Sure, there were times when reading was not appropriate. While it is possible to read and walk, even on a sidewalk teeming with pedestrians, using your finger to keep a line, reading while crossing a road was understandably forbidden. Although if Hazel were allowed to debate this most un-debatable contest, she would argue that crossing the road did not necessarily need to interrupt a good storyline. You can keep your ears open to that bleeping thingy that make a noise when it’s time to cross and there’s really little danger. However, even Hazel understood, that this was not the strongest card to pull on her parents, and so she kept this argument for moments when she and her friends would gather to complain about their parents.

Sure, when you’re supposed to be eating, you shouldn’t read a book. We all need to eat. But reading never stopped anyone digesting. Really.

Hazel would read anything and everything. There were those rare moments in her life when no book was at hand. Then she would read non-book stuff. Her eyes would scan for letters in unusual spots. Like public restrooms. She knew all of Oakland’s different laws of sanitation by 6. By 8, she knew the sanitation laws of just about every city her parents had dragged her to. But usually when visiting a public restroom she would have a book under her coat or sweater. Why waste a moment peeing when you could be educating yourself? And yes, she’d wash her hands before and after turning a page. She’s wasn’t crazy.

And then Tuesday came. The coffee shop incident that sent everything into the current crisis she now found herself in.
Her parents described it as the straw that broke the camel’s back. An analogy which makes no sense whatsoever and another reason to be wary of the wisdom of adults. Anyway, you could say that it was that one coffee house worker who ruined everything. The hippy girl with the jingly-jangly bracelets and the braids that make her look like she’s in 3rd grade.

Hazel’s mom was ordering her usual triple shot, no foam, no caffeine, no something or other and she turned to Hazel and apparently asked her (in her indoor voice) several times what pastry she wanted, before giving up and yelling,
“Stop reading NOW!” It must’ve been loud because everything else went quiet, like during school lunch when someone drops a plate. Hazel looked up from her book and thought, wow, this doesn’t looked good for mum.
1. She yelled in public. 2. Hazel simply looked sweet and innocent, reading her book. And 3. Apparently other folks misheard her mom.
So the hippy dippy lady, who is very nice, sternly scolded Hazel’s mom, “you can’t tell her to stop breathing, she’s a child!”

That didn’t make much sense either, but at least a grown up was taking Hazel’s side, for the first time in 8 years.

Hazel's wide grin probably made things worse as she looked up and read the loudly silent rage that made her mom's eyes almost pop out. Hazel knew the second she crossed the coffee shop threshold that she was gonna be knee-deep in very big trouble. Resisting the tug of her mom's hand wasn't gonna save her, but it was all she could think to do.

Today was about to be the worst day of Hazel's life.

The Brick and the Girl's Grandparent's 50th Anniversary

This is a speech Ily and Havana's grandparents asked me to write and give at their recent 50th Wedding Anniversary.

....for posterity

My name is Rob, I am married to Mary and Richard’s fourth creation, Karen.

I guess I’ve been in an in-law/outlaw in the family for about 13 years.

Mary and Richard asked me to retell the story tonight of the moment when their relationship began. I am kind of familiar with public speaking through my union activities. I’m used to adlibbing a speech, but I wrote this down as Mary and Richard wanted to be able to run this by their lawyer first.

So here goes.

Firstly, the brick. I have never brought a brick to a party before. What’s more unusual is that I’ve never been given a brick by my father-in-law to bring to a party before. But here it is. We’ll get to the brick in a minute.

Toward the end of the decade of the 1950’s, Mary and Richard were both members of the Catholic Social Club. What was the Catholic Social Club? Under the auspices of religion and with the social lubricant of wine and beer single people, Irish, Portugese, Italians over 21 found partners. It was a wholesome version of what would today be called partying.

Mary had noticed Richard. Richard had noticed Mary. But it was to be at least two years before their first date.

Richard asked Mary several times to go on a date and each time she sheepishly shrugged “No.” She felt Richard, in her words, “was a bit of a player.”

And even though he’s now 75, you can see Richard probably was once a good looking lad, but he denies he was ever a player. Just because he drove a Thunderbird, a hot blue, two-seater, that didn’t make him a player. Just because he asked a lot of girls out, we shouldn’t narrowly define him as a player. However if you were to ask him why he kept a cushion on his passenger seat, the issue becomes more cloudy. To quote Richard, “the girls would ask what the cushion was for. I’d say, look: I have bucket seats and a stick shift, the cushion is there so we can get closer.”

That’s a player, even by modern standards.

So for a couple of years they’d cross paths.

They went to the same dances. And this is how it worked in the late 1950s. Someone organized a dance, they sent a letter in the mail to the President of the Catholic Social Club, then when their next meeting came around, the President in turn announced it and then through word and mouth people would come along. It somewhat slower than organizing a Facebook event page. But it worked, albeit at a slower pace. It was a different time, a different world.

Anyway that’s just for background.

Mary’d turned him down Richard’s casual offers to go out with him until June 1961.

At that time one of Mary’s best friends was about to leave the Social Club. The only way to leave the club was death or marriage. Her friend was getting married. As a bridesmaid, Mary was at the Wedding Rehearsal dinner and had got in her car to drive home to West Mckinley. She was a couple of blocks into the drive and realized she needed to pee. Going back to the rehearsal dinner site seemed a bit embarrassing so she decided to stop at the local bowling alley.

It was the Mid State Bowl at Clinton and Webber.

As she walked in, she noticed that playboy with his friends and went over for a chat. Then she headed off to the bathroom and left.

This was an important moment for Richard in particular.

One of his bowling friends, who was not a great guy, turned to Richard and said, “wow, that Mary is a good looker, I’m gonna ask her out!”

Richard was invited to the wedding the next day and spent much of the night thinking about this scenario. In the morning he resolved to get to Mary first and so at the Wedding Reception, he walked up to Mary, stuck up a conversation and by the end of the evening he’d asked her out and she’d said, yes.

So maybe it was Mary needing a pee that brought them together or Richard trying to save Mary from a bad guy, but whatever the trigger was, their relationship has worked.

On December 8^th 1961 Richard showed up at the old farmhouse on West McKinley with a ring. He knocked on the kitchen door. Mary opened the old screen door and there he was with his arm outstretched and an open ring box in it.

About 10 years ago Mary and Richard were in their sixties. They were driving back to the old Vasconcellos farm on West McKinley, their home together, at that time, for some 40 years. The home where they’d reared six children, all of whom were now grown and had left home. They were now grandparents. As they drove home that night, they passed Clinton and Webber, the spot where their relationship as a couple had begun.

It was being torn down to make way for something, someone somewhere, thought was something better. They stopped and took in the moment. They both got out and asked one of the workers for a couple of bricks.

So this is one of those bricks.

It’s a brick from another time, another world. It’s a brick from a place which led to a million different events, including me meeting my wife, Karen and everyone being here tonight.

A Bully-free World

Ilyana has been a bit grumpy lately. Unwinding at bedtime, she mentioned that she has been pushed by a girl in 1^st grade, with whom the Kindergartners share some recess time. For younger children, it can be a fine line between an invasive, pushy child wanting to be your friend and someone deliberately tormenting another child.

Bullying can become more blatant as kids get older and then, bullying can become more subtle in adult world as individuals use their power over others to their advantage.

In Ilyana’s case, the un-named first grader's behaviour appears to be a little reckless and a little pushy and she seems a bit insecure: ingredients in bullying, but maybe not yet meeting its full definition.

On hearing of Ily’s suffering, my first inclination was to get Ily to learn to physically defend herself, and secondly to get her older sister to step in to give the bully a warning. Both ideas would not necessarily have played any positive role in outcomes, but were motivated by my sense of the importance of our children being bully-free and not victims of someone else’s aggression.

Bullying has been in the news lately. Most of the coverage seems to be on the need to identify children that are being bullied and giving them support. There seems to be less coverage on the roots of bullying, on what makes a child angry and hungry to overpower others.

Our own children’s experiences routinely return us, as parents, to our own childhoods. Last night’s conversation took me back to Dean Nettle. A kid who was the receptacle of my own violence when I was at elementary school.

I was just 9 years old. I had just started at a new school. One particular day I was full of anger. I could not focus on class and remember looking around the group table where myself and a group of six boys were sitting. I sized up everyone and decided to target another boy. I was probably the tallest in the class, Dean Nettle was the next tallest.

I systematically began kicking him under the table whenever the teacher was not looking. It didn’t feel right to me, but I wanted to do it. I didn’t really know this other child and had had no particular conflicts with him.

Later that day on the playground, I continued to taunt him, and finally began to hit him. I can remember the crowd of kids gathering around us as I beat on him and beat on him. It was horrible, but I could not stop myself.

Eventually I beat Dean Nettle unconscious. This was about the time that the recess teacher showed up. Dean got up, dazed, and we were both sent to the school nurse and then the Principal’s office. The Principal was reasonably soft on me, trying to reason that the playground was not for boxing matches. I specifically remember him telling me that I was not Cassius Clay, which dates the moment.

At school I got the reputation for knocking out another kid. The glory that this world drapes on the violent.

But it is only yesterday, after talking over Ilyana’s situation with Karen, that the worst part of this story occurred to me.

After beating up Dean Nettle, I never gave him another thought through elementary school. I never taunted him. I was done. It was out of my system. What occurred to me last night in processing this with my partner, was how that other 9-year old may have spent the rest of the year coming into school worried that I was going to turn on him. So while I never gave Dean another thought that year, I now know that he was probably terrified of a repeat, unprovoked episode.

So was I a bully?

I had many other fights before that fight, mostly on the public housing project I was brought up on. Those were the fights that were critical to surviving. It was fight or be bullied. But I never had another intimate fist fight again in my life.

So what could have stopped this? Could Dean have done anything different? Could the teachers have done anything to prevent this? The short answer is No. Could I have been prevented from unleashing this violence on Dean. Yes.

Part of the reason I remember this story so vividly, is, I think, because it happened during the very worst week of my entire life.

That week had begun with a social worker driving my brothers and I away from my sobbing mother, who had been our sole caregiver. It had become the week where we were moved into a state-run group home. It was a week where I saw my younger brother savagely beaten by older kids while the social workers’ backs were turned. It was a week of feeling betrayed by my mother, who bore no blame, and the entire adult world. All this for a 9-year old child to process.

I processed it, without a single thought. I processed it with my feet and my fists. And another 9-year old was the victim, who probably will never be able to rationalize the incident.

I’m not ready to forgive myself, or the child that I was. But I am ready to dole out blame. I blame the penalty-driven, old-school social services system. I blame poverty and its weight that it bears down on families. And above all I blame an economic system that rewards bullying, economic bullying. The enemy of bullying is solidarity and equality.

Solidarity seeks to listen and hear pain, and seeks to share resources and repair the damage that the promotion of inequality does to small children and the adults they become.

With help and support, Ilyana’s struggles will not weaken her but help her to survive this rocky world that we share.

NOW SHOWING! In Oakland, California

Maxwell Park wins the Martin Luther King Oratorical regionals!

Havana wore her medallion to bed on Friday night. Her class placed 1st of 11 schools in the regional round of Oakland's public school Martin Luther King Oratorical Festival. A competition to celebrate choral-speaking that has been held annually in Oakland for 33 years. The closest way to describe it may be as spoken word.

Ms Hurrell's Maxwell Park 3rd grade Elementary classes have won the District finals for five years in a row. And now Havana's class has made the finals after their regional win.

It is a very Oakland event. It's held at a Gospel church in deep East Oakland. It is no coincidence that her teacher, Ms Hurrell, is a veteran school teacher and African American. The majority of students in the class are also African American. The competition in a way, is a celebration of a culture that is under attack, even moreso than in the past. Oakland is going through big demographic changes flowing from gentrification and recent years of population flight to cities where fake mortgages attracted Oaklanders. Oakland in many ways is no longer an African American city.

If Havana's class does win the finals then this will be the last time Maxwell Park Elementary will do so. The school District leadership are closing 5 elementary schools, four of which are schools where the majority of students are African American. Their business plan, however it is carefully packaged, does not include the preservation of Oakland's unique culture.

Money with its heavy leaden feet crushes everything in its path, making everything grey and colorless in its wake. But in young people there is the greatest hopes of hopes.

We video-ed Havana the night before the Fest. We will video her whole class at the finals.

CLICK BELOW FOR THE YOUTUBE LINK to see it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN9U6EhPxIE&context=C357c559ADOEgsToPDskJy2tXARVip9ehhcfxsemvG

Imagination

Imaginations are limited.

Some people dream in miniscule detail. But reality in all its color and depth cannot be fully or completely imagined.

I imagined one day the girls growing up. Maybe the girls would be carpenters or electricians; in hard hats and work boots. Maybe they’d work at a beauty salon, cutting hair and enjoying the pleasure of small talk all day long.

I imagined them close as grown-up sisters, or in their language, in sistee-hood. The kind of sisters that text daily. Even as children, they’ve already chatted about getting an apartment together as a part of their post-parented life.

But more than anything I imagined for, I imagined them as people who would be thoughtful. People that would be tough enough to travel life’s big roads and sensitive enough to be open to its smallest intimacies. People who enjoyed life’s bumps: savoring the ups and surviving the downs.

I still imagine this for the girls.

But today the blurry edges of imagination are becoming more defined.

Naturally, the girls are more like other children than different to other children. They are no better than other kids and deserve no better, but they already have the uniqueness that their parents are the first to see. That uniqueness that someday their best friends will see. That uniqueness that one day they will share with the love of their lives.

In retrospect: Our big event of 2011

She pointed out of the car window every time we drove past it. Our five year-old talked Kindergarten all summer. For three years she’d walked to Maxwell Park Elementary School with her mom to drop off her older sister. Then she’d be off to pre-school. Now it was her turn to go to big school.

In August, Ilyana packed her backpack and began public school at the school that has served our neighborhood for 85 years. But she would not complete her elementary years at Maxwell Park. In September the school District announced that our school was on a list of five schools for possible closure.

District leaders came to our school and heard dozens of parents’ plea to keep our school open. Children, parents, grandparents and even one great grandparent spoke. Our school is genuinely rooted in our community. We not only have students that are siblings, we have cousins, and many students are the third and fourth generation to attend our school.

Like four of the five schools scheduled for closure, our student population majority is African American and 98% of our students are children of color. Our families are predominantly economically poor with 85% of kids eligible for free or subsidized lunch.
When District board members came to our school it felt like an exercise in political expedience. Parents were angry, tearful and focused. In contrast, the Board members appeared to be checking their watches, eager to get out of there.

In the end, for all the arguments on the table, the issue was money. And when its money verses the people, money usually wins out. Especially when its money verses the group least likely to vote: the urban poor.

Many parents joined the 6-week fight between that meeting and the final School Board decision. Other parents felt it was already a done deal and didn’t fight. They were used to being ignored and treated with disrespect by those in power.

For those that joined the fight, we marched on the School Board, packed hundreds into meetings, delivered a faux eviction notice to the steps of the District headquarters. Hundreds of children made home-made picket signs. We spoke on radio stations and on TV. We were drawn into the Occupy movement who helped us bring a thousand people to the school District under the banner of Save our Schools and another 3,000 people to rally outside Lakeview School, one of the other closing schools. We finally organized a recall petition against Board members who voted to close our five schools, collecting many hundreds of signatures.

But the Board voted. It voted on the side of the status quo. On the side of bailouts for banks and make the poor pay the tag. The five schools are to be closed at the end of the school year.

In the wake of these closures are hundreds of angry parents and disappointed children. But not simply that. Our five-school community has been drawn together. Our own school’s parent community is closer than it has ever been. Our children have been educated in their right to fight and right to organize: a lesson that will last a lifetime.

When a school like Maxwell Park Elementary is closed, a thread of history is torn off. Memories are cut across and children are emotionally scarred, some more than others. When communities are split up, anger is nourished. But all these cuts and bruises is the history of working people, and with it, our distant hope that one day we will be on top. And with today’s rising tide against inequality, that day may well come. And when working people and the poor are on top, we will treat children like people, not numbers.