Omaha Central threw a 150th anniversary party Saturday, and the festivities at the city's oldest high school featured a concert by alumni of the A Capella Choir.
You may think handing out programs for the performance was a pretty easy job. Amid that teeming mob? That child is made of tempered steel, let me tell you.
Mein Gott, ist Götterdämmerung! And remember, keep smiling,
Offer a program, smile. Offer a program, smile. Offer, smile. Offer, smile.
Trust me, that part of the job would kill an old curmudgeon like moi.
he way things are today, you'd think it would be easy to sell people on the value of educating themselves.
If you were in Iberville Parish, La., you would be wrong. Apparently, selling adult education there -- in a poorer area of a poor and ill-educated state -- is the kind of losing proposition that drove Willy Loman to despair.
Imagine.
We don't have to, actually. It's what we do, and some do it a lot. What we need, we don't want -- have no interest in.
And what we want . . . well, oftentimes that's the last thing we need.
ENTER the Gret Stet, stage right. Acquiring skills and education never has been so popular as "being well liked." And when folks have a shot at what they need -- as opposed to what they want -- seeing things straight can be a heroic act.
Today's edition of The Advocatelifts the curtain on a little story lying somewhere between drama and farce:
Wildit Jones spends his lunch break — Monday through Wednesday — at the old North Iberville High School building finishing what he started decades ago: his education.
The school has been closed since April after Iberville Parish school system officials determined students in grades seven through 12 would be better served at Plaquemine High School, following years of low test scores and high dropout rates.
Adult education classes have been held in the old high school building since November, but Janet Tassin, the district’s adult education coordinator, said it has been a struggle to get people to attend.
A 30-year veteran of the Iberville Parish Maintenance Department, Jones, 58, of Maringouin, was prodded by an old friend to restart his education after dropping out of school in the fourth grade.
Besides the GED classes offered, the building has more than two dozen computers with Internet access available to the public for free, Tassin said.
To date, a few people have taken advantage of the computer access, and the classes have served only 25, she said.
On Monday, past the school’s deserted common areas and the empty gym, 10 adults occupied two classrooms.
(snip)
Several feet away, Jones is getting one-on-one instruction as he learns the alphabet.
He said he has been in the program for three weeks.
“I’m proud of what I’m doing,” Jones said. “I’m accomplishing something I didn’t do in my younger days. I appreciate what this is doing for my life.”
ILDIT JONES is a hero. Really and truly.
Really, discerning what's needed and putting it ahead of what's wanted is a heroic act in today's instant-gratification culture. Then there's the matter of overcoming embarrassment . . . and fear . . . and then girding oneself for a long, tough journey. In Jones' case, that journey will lead to literacy.
Truly, literacy will open the door to a world of knowledge -- a world where "working with my hands" is just one skill set out of several.
Well, duh. . . . But when "well, duh" is anything but, that's where a long and brutal cultural battle awaits a state trying to get from "oblivious" to "obvious." Both start with the letter "O.""O" is the letter that comes between "N" and "P." . . .
Courtesy of WAFB television, here's another dispatch from my hometown, delusionally referred to by its mayor as "America's next great city."
There's an old "Boudreaux" joke about how Boudreaux goes to the Westerns with his podnas and bets them John Wayne won't get his horse shot out from under him. About two hours later, as Boudreaux is paying off them ol' boys, he laments that he'd seen the movie twice before.
"Dey ain't no way I thought John Wayne would fall off dat damn horse three straight times," he says ruefully.
DEY A LOT of Boudreauxs in Baton Rouge.
And here's what happens when you think the city will quit looking a little more Third World every year -- and that people with brains will one day quit leaving Louisiana and start flocking to the Gret Stet -- if only they vote down yet another bond issue. If only they keep looking at the public school system as OK for black folks but nothing they'd want little Johnny anywhere near . . . or is even worth caring about.
After starting up in Baton Rouge 25 years ago, Innovative Emergency Management is leaving the capitol city. They're moving their headquarters 900-miles east to Durham, North Carolina, saying Louisiana can't lure the kind of workers they need.
IEM officials say for the past several years it's been hard to get educated technology professionals to move to Louisiana. One of the biggest issues their potential employees have with the state - education.
"Telling them they have to put their kid in private schools, this is an additional cost and these are just practical considerations," said IEM technology vice president Ted Lemcke.
Lemcke says struggling public schools are just one concern his company's potential workforce has with Louisiana. IEM workers advise federal agencies on how to manage threats to public safety and property.
"Young technology professionals are attracted to centers like Raleigh-Durham or Austin or other places, and they don't see Baton Rouge as one of those technology clusters," said Lemcke.
Lemcke says it's the main reason IEM is moving it's headquarters and about half of their 200 employees from Baton Rouge to North Carolina.
"These are perceptions these candidates have, and these perceptions have caused us some challenges with getting candidates to accept positions here," said Lemcke.
LONG GONE are the days when you could have a sixth-grade education, hire on at Standard Oil and make enough money to buy a bass boat, with enough left over to move far away from the "colored" folks. In fact, the very dream of a middle-class life with three cars and an oversized house in suburbia is all but gone -- even if Boudreaux happens to have a degree from LSU.
And Boudreaux has seen this movie over and over again the past three decades or so.
Big John Wayne keeps getting his horse shot out from under him, yet no one ever thinks that a different movie -- with a different screenplay -- might be in order.
Such is life in America's next great West Virginia.
And sometimes their "religious" views are, too. That's why, every so often in some burg somewhere, a news story like this will pop up. This time, it was in Sedalia, Mo.
THISAssociated Press story ran Sunday in the Columbia, Mo., Missourian, and it disappoints me to no end that I didn't stumble upon it until today:
T-shirts promoting the Smith-Cotton High School band's fall program have been recalled because of concerns about the shirt's evolution theme.
Assistant superintendent Brad Pollitt said parents complained to him after the band marched in the Missouri State Fair parade. Though the shirts don't violate the school's dress code, Pollitt noted that the district is required by law to remain neutral on religion.
"If the shirts had said 'Brass Resurrections' and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing," Pollitt said.
Designed with the help of band director Jordan Summers and assistant director Brian Kloppenburg, the light gray shirts feature an image of a monkey progressing through various stages of evolution until eventually becoming a human. Each figure holds a brass instrument that also evolves, illustrating the theme "Brass Evolutions."
"I was disappointed with the image on the shirt," said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. "I don't think evolution should be associated with our school."
THE MAJOR FREAKOUT by parents at this woebegone school represents Reason No. 24,789 that I'm Catholic. Here's what the church believes: God is God, and He was free to create mankind any way He wanted to. If evolution was how we came to be, so what?
So maybe the Genesis story of Adam and Eve isn't literally true as a journalistic account. So what? That doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't an Adam and Eve at some point, and it doesn't mean that the most profound truths come only through a literal retelling of events.
Genesis is true. That doesn't mean God literally pulled a rib out of Adam's side and made Eve out of it. I guess allegory isn't a vocabulary word at Smith-Cotton High School.
Just like the idea that science can illuminate the truth of scripture resides nowhere in the closed minds of some "Bible-believing" folk.
The beauty of the Great State of Nebraska is that it can survive -- indeed, prosper -- under the dullest of governors.
Take Ben Nelson, who was an OK governor, I guess, but who moved up to the U.S. Senate only to offer up blather like this on MSNBC.
Unsurprisingly, Nelson then gets utterly owned by Rachel Maddow as he argues that federal construction of schools is an unwarranted intrusion into local affairs. Just like the unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind. YOU CAN'T make this stuff up.
So, when can we expect the senator's office to compile a list of every Nebraska school building or college hall or arena constructed as a WPA project during the last depression?
And when that list is completed, can we then expect Ben Nelson to demand every such structure be razed so that Nebraska education might be rid of the malign federal interference it has suffered, lo, these many decades?
And I started crying. By the time theRev. Joseph Lowery-- the old lion of the civil-rights movement -- got out of his wheelchair and up to the rostrum to deliver the benediction, the tears were streaming down my face.
GOD BLESS HIM, at this moment, President Obama's politics are irrelevant. And my quite eclectic politics are irrelevant, and the evil (grin) Republicans' politics are irrelevant.
What's relevant is that I lived to see something -- something positive, at least -- that was unthinkable even 30 years ago.
What's relevant is that Barack Obama has overcome . . . that I have overcome . . . that, God willing, wehave overcome.
I found myself wishing that Janice Grigsby would knock on my door so that I could give her a big, fat kiss on the lips, pick her up and spin her around and around.
(OK, this post will have some rough language. And it will use the N-word. A lot. But to tell this story -- and to be true to the times I'm recalling -- it has to be done. Reader discretion is advised.)
* * *
I wrote this post more than a decade ago, and a version of it first appeared on this blog Dec. 16, 2006. It seems to me to be appropriate to run it again after the historic night we just experienced, a night when we learned Barack Obama, a black man, will be president and America's original sin seemed less onerous and more redeemable than it did a day ago.
Last night was for Janice Grigsby. This post is, too. God bless her, wherever she might be.
* * *
Joe's Barber Shop smelled of witch hazel, hot shaving cream and talcum powder. Of old magazines, the newsprint of strewn-about State-Times and Morning Advocates, and of sweat and cigarette smoke.
WHEN YOU OPENED the front door onto Scenic Highway, Mr. Joe's place might smell of complex hydrocarbons, too. The front gate of the Humble Oil and Refining Co.'s Baton Rouge complex sat slap-dab across the street.
One summer day in 1970, though, Mr. Joe's just smelled.
"My boy ain't goin' to school with no goddamn niggers," this fellow said from up in one of Mr. Joe's three barber chairs -- under the placard that proclaimed the establishment a proud "Union Shop" -- to expressions of sympathy from Mr. Joe, my old man and the rest. Fearing his son's life might be in mortal danger, the man was popping off about having his kid pack heat.
Blame it on the Feds. A federal judge had just ruled against East Baton Rouge Parish's grade-at-a-time "freedom of choice" school desegregation plan, which had taken effect in 1963, started with the 12th grade and worked its way down to the sixth grade. Starting in the fall, a "neighborhood school" plan would take over, coupled with voluntary majority-to-minority transfers. For the first time, all students in a school's attendance area -- black and white -- would go to the same school.
Not a popular concept in the all-white, working-class world of Joe's Barber Shop.
I was 9 years old.
Summer gave way to fall in 1970 -- to the surprise of many white folks (including, I imagine, the guy planning to arm his son), the world did not end -- and school opened, "integrated" under the neighborhood schools scheme.
"Integrated" Capitol High School was supposed to have 230 white students and 1,363 blacks. Five whites showed up for classes. And "integrated" McKinley High was supposed to have 81 whites and 1,051 black students. No whites showed up.
THAT FALL, I returned to suburban Red Oaks Elementary School, a sprawling, brick-and-concrete 1950s monument to homogeneity and bad taste that assaulted the eyes with its covered walkways and copious amounts of puke-green paint. My parents saw no need to place a snub-nose .38 in my book sack; there was little chance I'd face assault by some snarling black menace from "Bucktown."
Chances were much better that I'd be assaulted by gangs of snarling white menaces from North Red Oaks.
In the fall of 1970, I was starting fourth grade, and for the past three years I had hated all-white, de jure-segregated Red Oaks Elementary. The only thing worse than Red Oaks, I imagined, must be having to go to "the nigger school," which, I was assured, just might happen if I messed up bad enough.
In the fall of 1970, Janice Grigsby was starting fourth grade at Red Oaks, too. She hadn't had the opportunity to work up a good hate for the place; this was the first year she and her little brother could attend.
Janice was black, and though her family had lived just a few blocks from the school since before there was a school there -- before there was a neighborhood, even -- she had been barred from Red Oaks by force of law, relegated to "the nigger school."
I remember that Janice had skin the color of a Hershey bar, a pair of pigtails and a big smile. She was the first black person my own age I'd ever known. And despite almost a decade of racial indoctrination -- with warnings about "nigger music," "nigger rigs" and "nigger lovers," deliveries from "the drugstore nigger" and subtropical heat that left you "sweatin' like a nigger preacher" -- despite growing up with Jim Crow as the crazy uncle in the attic, I liked Janice. She was in Mrs. Anderson's class with me, and I found that I didn't care whether she was black, white, purple or green.
She was a friend.
I REMEMBER that Janice and I used to play together at recess. I'd pull her pigtails, she'd chase me, and we'd both have a grand time.
My folks had no real problem with this. Poor Southern kids during the Great Depression, they grew up around black folks. And the only difference between them and "the niggers" was a society and a legal system that placed blacks at the bottom of the pecking order and "white trash" a little bit above.
So, for some white folks, there was nothing overly unusual about playing with black kids. Or about being friendly -- not friends -- with blacks as an adult, so long as everyone remembered that God Almighty ordained that whites were the superior race.
On the other hand, you had problems if black folks got "uppity." Uppity included such concepts as sitting in the front of buses, voting and using the same restrooms as whites. Or going to school with whites.
I guess that, by 1970 standards, my parents were something less than white-supremacy hardliners. I know they weren't hot on the idea of racial integration, not by a long shot. But I suppose they figured that if the Feds were letting the "coloreds" (what polite white folks called blacks in 1970) into "white" schools, there was no use being mean to them, or in keeping your kid from playing with Janice Grigsby.
The powers-that-be at Red Oaks Elementary, however, didn't see things the same way.
MORE THAN three decades later, I remember one day when Janice and I were playing at recess, following the standard rituals of 9-year-old boys and girls. Soon enough, Mrs. Anderson got my attention, took me aside by a red-brick wing of classrooms and gave me a good talking to.
Maybe I ought not be playing with Janice, she gravely advised me. It didn't look right, she was worried about it, the Red Oaks administration was worried about it, and white boys hanging around with colored girls wasn't wise. In 1970, it seems, certain white adults were worried about miscegenation, even among the playground crowd.
Janice Grigsby, one of two lonely black children among hundreds of white faces at Red Oaks Elementary, was to be isolated. Blackness was akin to the mumps, and the authorities were worried about infection.
At day's end, I walked across the playground, then over the foot bridge of heavy timbers and the pungent smell of creosote, then across Darryl Drive and down the sidewalk to home. My mother was waiting, and I told her I couldn't play with Janice anymore.
She was outraged. To this day, I'm not sure where that outrage came from -- perhaps it was that defiant suspicion of authority bred into a class of white folk raised dirt poor and accustomed to being beaten down by the powers-that-be. Maybe it was a subconscious compulsion to do the right thing despite her own prejudices and enculturation. Maybe it was the invisible hand of God determined to see that such blatant injustice, such cruelty directed toward a 9-year-old girl, not pass unnoticed.
Whatever it was, it caused my mother to go straight to the phone book, look up the number of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pick up the telephone and give whomever answered at the NAACP an earful about the shenanigans going on at Red Oaks Elementary School.
IN AN OLD MOVIE, the outrage of the righteous would have come down foursquare upon the heads of Mrs. Anderson and her partners in crime, and Janice Grigsby would have lived happily ever after. But old movies are just that, and morality plays were long out of fashion by the dawn of the '70s.
Life did not get easier for Janice. Her black face stood out like a bulls eye in Red Oaks' lily-white world, and she took her shots from Mrs. Anderson, a surly, tanklike woman who had about as much business in the classroom as Pol Pot would have had on Amnesty International's board of directors.
No, for Janice, ridicule at Mrs. Anderson's beefy hands became a daily ritual.
For instance, every Monday was lunch-money day, and the proper procedure for paying for the week's meals involved paying separately for your lunch and for your milk -- or something like that. One Monday, Janice did something horrible. She brought a single check from home to pay for everything.
You would have thought Janice had just set fire to the classroom.
"What am I supposed to do with this!" Mrs. Anderson thundered. "Cut it in half?!?"
The classroom erupted with the laughter of small minds. The cruelty of a middle-aged teacher toward a little girl is really funny when you're 9, I guess.
But Janice just sat there. She just took it.
I am not sure why this is the incident that sticks in my mind after all these years and all these miles away from Baton Rouge. There were others, many others. But as the years have passed, those incidents have subsided into the fog of memory. All that remains is the surety of Mrs. Anderson's withering remarks, the hoots of my classmates and Janice just sitting there.
Taking it.
And I remember that I hated Mrs. Anderson. I really did, and I don't know that I'm sorry I hated her.
I left Red Oaks Elementary after the fall semester of 1970. Like Janice, I was the butt of many jokes and much abuse -- at the hands of Mrs. Anderson and little rednecks with littler minds. I didn't fit in, probably was too smart by half when being smart was a one-way ticket to Adolescent Hell, and I rebelled mightily.
I ended up at the next school over, Villa del Rey Elementary. It was a much better school, though I still had my problems.
My new fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Hawkins. She was black, talented and a sweet soul amid a sea of, on average, slightly more affluent little rednecks. I spent a while catching up on my studies, thanks to the curricular deficiencies Mrs. Anderson brought to the classroom along with her sunny disposition.
In many ways, it was Mrs. Hawkins who caught hell at the hands of her students. More than once, students might be heard to mutter "nigger" under their breath after being disciplined. I know she had to have heard, but I don't remember her ever saying anything.
And I am ashamed to admit to being among those who muttered the N-word. Like they say, racism isn't congenital; it's learned. And oftentimes we learned all the wrong lessons.
I DIDN'T SEE Janice Grigsby again until seventh grade at Broadmoor Junior High, where there was just a small handful of black kids. We didn't hang out together anymore, but I did notice one thing about her -- it seemed that her smile wasn't so big anymore. At least not often.
The dresses she once wore, I recall, had given way to a denim jacket and pants. It was fitting; she seemed to me at the time as this James Deanlike loner amid the junior-high hustlin' mob. I don't think we spoke much, if at all, during those years. But then again, the black kids had their world, and we whites had ours. The teen-age rednecks and thugs ruled supreme -- and perhaps the Mrs. Andersons of the world had won our hearts and minds.
Too, somewhere along the way at Broadmoor, Janice had to repeat a grade. I wonder whether maybe she, at some point along the line, had bought into the subtext of Mrs. Anderson's daily barrage: Niggers are stupid. Niggers don't belong. You're stupid, Janice. You don't belong.
From time to time, I wonder whatever became of Janice. Did she graduate? Is she happy? Did she ever come to terms with how that old battle axe treated her?
Is she married now? Does she have kids of her own? Grandkids?
Is Janice alive?
Of one thing I am sure: Janice Grigsby was a real little girl who suffered in very real ways due to the aftershocks of America's Original Sins -- slavery and bigotry. One's dead and buried; the other's still alive, burrowed deep into the American psyche like a mutant gene unleashing deadly cancers.
Yes, I'd like to think things weren't as bleak as my 9-year-old eyes viewed them; at least I would like to think my memories of Red Oaks, and Janice, have been darkened, have been fogged over, by the jadedness of adulthood.
But I don't think so.
And I don't think things are as changed as lots of people -- lots of people white like me -- would have us all believe. Better, yes.
Good? Probably not.
It was four decades ago, now, that Martin Luther King Jr., died. He was a great man.
And somebody shot him dead. Shot him dead for his greatness.
What happens when bigoted morons run schools? Well, for one thing, they ban constitutionally protected speech -- like wearing rosary beads as a symbol of Christian devotion -- calling it "gang related."
ON DAYS LIKE THIS, I really, really wish I had gone to law school. Because I would take Tabitha Ruiz's case pro bono, andthe Dallas Independent School District would pay, and pay dearly.
A Dallas County high school student said she was forced to remove her rosary before going to classes because the school considers it is a gang symbol.
Tabitha Ruiz, 16, said she was stopped at Seagoville High School after she went through a metal detector and told to take off her rosary.
"I was going through the metal detectors, and they looked at me and they saw the rosary and told me to take it off because it's gang-related," she said.
The Dallas Independent School District said in a statement that items that represent a gang are prohibited.
"Students are not allowed to wear logos or symbols that represent a gang," DISD said.
"Dallas police identified a rosary as a gang symbol."
But Dallas police said a rosary is not considered a gang symbol.
"Rosaries are not considered gang symbols unless the person is (a) known gang member or he/she is wearing a red or blue rosary in conjunction with other red things like shoe laces, belt or bandana," police said in a statement.
Ruiz's mother, Taire Ferguson, said she was stunned to hear a rosary was considered a gang symbol.
"My first reaction was, 'Gang people don't have Jesus. Maybe they need Jesus,'" she said.
Ferguson said it was "unacceptable" for the school to ask her daughter to take off the rosary. She said item is just a symbol of her daughter's Christianity.
"She's never been in trouble. She's a good kid," Ferguson said.
She said she is ready to take the case to court.
IT'S AMAZING -- isn't it? -- what fools, tyrants and mediocrities we oftentimes manage to put in charge of our children's education. Young minds deserve better.
And the powers that be at Seagoville High School and the DISD deserve to be made into a powerful example of the terrible things that can befall bureaucrats' when their minds get "stuck on stupid."
THEN ALL THE MEDIA and I -- we veterans of different debacles at different journalism schools at different points in history -- will go to a fine drinking establishment, knock back a few and laugh and laugh and laugh:
Back in class, Quigley tells us we have to remember to bring in the hard copy of the New York Times every week. I take a deep sigh. Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper. I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees.
At least I had hoped that this class would be more advanced. I hoped that perhaps my teacher would be open to the idea of investigating other sources of news from the Internet and discussing how they are reliable or not. I hoped that she wouldn’t refer to podcasts as “being a pain to download” and that being aware of and involved in the digital era wasn’t just a “generational” thing. I am convinced that I am taking the only old-but-new-but-still-old media class in the country. At this point I may not learn too much I don’t already know about my generation and where it’s taking journalism. But one thing’s for sure — I’m certainly going to gain some insight into what exactly they mean by generation gap.
AND YOU MAY ask yourself, well . . . how did we get here?
Same as it ever was . . . same as it ever was . . . same as it ever was. . . .
Back in my day at the LSU School of Journalism (now the Manship School of Mass Communication), all we wanted was . . . well, what we wanted was a 1981 version of what Alana Taylor wants. That and electric typewriters in every classroom.
Why don't I share a bit from a hard-hitting story in the LSU student newspaper, The Daily Reveille. Someone I know rather well wrote it . . . 27 years ago.
From the Reveille of Oct. 16, 1981:
Equipment and facilities of the University's School of Journalism were criticized as being "antiquated" by Chancellor James Wharton in Thursday's edition of The Daily Reveille.
However, a recent sampling of journalism students say the school's facilities are only part of the problem there.
The students said they faced problems in dealing with typewriters and other equipment in bad repair, but said a far larger problem they faced was a curriculum short on practical experience in their fields.
Most of the sampling also said they felt the absence of video display terminals and other state-of-the-art equipment in the school hampered the students in preparing for future work experiences.
"I feel that (the lack of new equipment) is hurting the students' education. We have manual typewriters in our journalism typing room -- out in the field, not only are people not using manual typewriters, they're not even using electric typewriters. They're using VDTs," said junior news-editorial major Eleanor Ransburg.
"It's not keeping you up to date with what's going on now. We're learning the old ways. We should learn the old ways and the new ways.
"One of our guest speakers in class said he hadn't been in the building since he graduated and the chairs looked like the same ones that were here when he was here in the 1950s," she said.
(snip)
[Junior advertising major Cindy] Blanchard also said the advertising curriculum of the journalism school was deficient. "I think a lot of the teachers are good but I think a lot of the structuring is at fault.
"I think the structuring of the class is really kind of deficient. I think we learn more theory and not enough practical application. We don't get to put into practice what we learn in the book. What I've had so far is not too much of what I can use (in the field)," she said.
SAME AS IT EVER WAS. And yes, Alana, we Young Turks who somewhere along the way turned into journalism fossils feel your pain.
Does this ring a bell, by chance?
An associate managing editor for the student paper also criticized the school for not having enough equipment for its students, as well as School of Journalism Director John C. Merrill.
Lisa Schelp said Merrill is trying to "isolate" the school and train its students to be "academicians" instead of reporters and editors.
"Only having one video display terminal for 25 people in the reporting class is ridiculous, almost every newspaper has terminals," she said. "We don't even have newspapers in the journalism reading room. It doesn't make sense. What we need is exposure to many kinds of newspapers.
"I don't know what his (Merrill's) point is in trying to isolate the journalism school and make us all academicians. We're trying to communicate. We have to communicate with everybody, not just academicians," Schelp said.
LORD. Somebody at that journalism school ought to have said something to that intrepid Reveille reporter (again, with whom I'm well acquainted) about unloading every last jot out of his Stationers' Reporter's Note Book and dumping it into his story. Talk about making a point, rehashing it and then rehashing the rehash. . . .
Then again, back in the day, Reveille reporters got paid by the column inch. Whatever it takes, you know?
But down that path a tangent lies. Let me return to my point here.
Students are always pretty sure they're getting screwed over by somebody. Sometimes, it's even true. For instance, the LSU J-school, overall, was pretty appalling in 1981. Fortunately, our professors still taught us pretty well, despite everything.
Another truism is that journalism school -- or any kind of professional school, it seems to me -- always perfectly trains students for the world that just was. Never the world that will be.
The reason for that is staggeringly simple: We're really good at knowing what just was. And we're not so good at predicting the future. While we might have some general idea of what will be, the future likes to throw knuckleballs -- when it isn't throwing you curveballs.
The state of newspapers and broadcasting today is the curveball with which the future put my generation of J-school grads deep in a hole. When we were in college, there was no Internet for us to master, and "social networking" was Friday night at the Cotton Club. Or maybe the Bengal.
We never knew what hit us. But we're learning.
I suspect Alana Taylor, today's frustrated NYU student, will be doing the same in a couple of decades -- dealing with the unknowable curveball the future throws you while you're deeply engrossed in the World That Just Was.
Every now and again, I am reminded that my Omaha-bred wife and I hail from the same country but different worlds.
THE ABOVE PHOTO and story is from Page 17 of the Evening World-Herald on Wednesday, Nov. 27, 1963. There was nothing remarkable at all that day in Omaha, Neb., about this bit of newspaper boilerplate.
Typical Omaha elementary school. Staged picture accompanying routine, feel-good story about a natural-gas company providing ice cream and cookies for the kids next door. Cute . . . but ho-hum.
If this story and picture -- reflecting an equivalent reality in my hometown, Baton Rouge, La. -- had run that same evening in the State-Times. . . .
Forget it.
There is no way in hell that story and picture ever would have run in the State-Times. The circumstances behind it would not -- could not -- have happened. Not without military occupation . . . and, come to think of it, not even then.
What was unremarkable in Omaha in 1963 didn't even start to happen in Baton Rouge until 1970. Technically.
I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. I have lived in Omaha for 20 years now.
With that kind of background, you start to draw some conclusions about where you are -- and about where you're from. You look at the lingering racism back home. You look at lousy public schools, crooked politicians always on the make -- and on the take -- and every bit of the public infrastructure falling apart.
You look, and you think "This is not good."
AND IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH, you read stories like this-- and, really, you wish you hadn't just read a story like that -- and then, a week later, you read thisfrom WAFB television in Baton Rouge:
A worker at a Baton Rouge photo lab is used to developing photographs of birthday parties, beautiful sunsets, and vacations. A picture of a girl cutting up a dead puppy, however, was a first.
The worker, from a Baton Rouge Walgreen's drug store, immediately called sheriff's deputies, who launched an investigation. Deputies were led to a student from Woodlawn High School who told them her mother had gotten the dead puppy for her from the East Baton Rouge Parish Animal Control, according to a police report.
The puppy that was given to the student's mother for the school assignment had previously been euthanized, investigators were told. Upon further investigation, deputies learned that the dissection of the dead puppy was part of an assignment from the girl's biology teacher, Dennis Dyer. The assignment read, in part, "Skeletal preparation can be an interesting and rewarding project for those who recognize that beauty and have the stomach for the grosser side of Biology." A report from the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office says the teacher told his students if they could not find a dead wild animal, they could get one from animal control.
(snip)
The teacher says the student approached him and stated that she went to animal control and workers there "offered to provide her with a euthanized animal if it was for a school project," Trahan said. "Once they've been euthanized, they are disposed of," said Hilton Cole, director of the EBR Animal Control Center. "And that's the end of their little lives and it's rather unpleasant. So, if somehow, some way, one of these animals can somehow help a student or help an educational program or enhance a life maybe in the future and stimulate some young mind to become a scientist or an investigator of some sort, I feel like that's a worthy cause," Cole said.
THE TANGIPAHOA PARISH animal-control center putting down 170 animals in a day. The East Baton Rouge Parish animal-control center giving away euthanized puppies to be dissected by a kid at home.
Now, the expatriate wonders something else. No, "wonders" is not the correct word. The expatriate knows something else. He knows the Thing Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.
He knows that "It" is true -- that which has, in the past, been thrown in his face by people who looked at him like he was from a particularly rough patch of Albania.
Yes, Louisiana is a pretty backward place.
Yes, something's just wrong with people down there.
AMERICANSNEED to remember that the next time some Louisiana politician or another arrives in Washington, hat in hand, whining about:
* How the state was "wronged" by the federal government over Hurricane Katrina.
* How the state can't possibly pay its 10-percent share of rebuilding New Orleans-area levees.
* How Uncle Sam is "holding back" the rebuilding of New Orleans because Washington has been so unbearably niggardly with federal aid.
* How there's a perfectly good excuse for the latest Bayou State nonsense and -- by the way -- how Louisiana needs to make just one more claim on your federal tax dollar because "We're a poor state."
Right.
And remember that, in such a "poor state," this is a "broken-down car":
ANYTHING ELSE you need to know before opening up that checkbook, America? Now somebody go inform members of the Louisiana Legislature that ideas -- and the words used to express them -- have consequences. Especially when one's hat spends so much time in one's hand.
When the president of a local school board decides that, no, public education isn't necessarily a public obligation, I'm not sure how much further a community has to go before it hits rock bottom.
THAT'S WHERE the court of winners and wretches finds my hometown -- in a nosedive and still pushing the yoke and throttle hard. If it's indeed true that a strong community is one of proverbial "brother's keepers," Baton Rouge surely bears the mark of Cain.
Not that I'm completely surprised or anything.
Why would the president of a public school board -- such as East Baton Rouge Parish's Jerry Arbour -- say, in effect, "We give up. We can't educate your kids properly. Take the state's money and run"?
Communities outsource things like collecting garbage, not educating their children. Public funds need to go to entities accountable to taxpayers as a whole, not to entities accountable to God-knows-whom (or what) or, perhaps, accountable to no one at all.
Why would communities not insist upon adhering to such a basic principle?
Well, for one thing, because it's hard. And because, first, some sort of commonweal must exist. Individuals must find it within themselves to bond themselves irrevocably to others on some level beyond that of the clan . . . or Klan, as the case may be.
John Deaux must, somewhere within himself, find the strength to be his brother's keeper. Even if that brother is a minority, or poor, or just not all that edifying to be around.
You'd think folks in the Bible Belt would be more serious about biblical principles. But we are talking about Louisiana.
AND WE ARE TALKING about the Deep South here. We are, after all, talking about a region where -- historically -- the electorate hasn't cared much for education, and what care it had was for "white" schools. "Nigger schools" got what was left over from those slim pickings.
In state after state, community after community across the South -- and, to be fair, in many urban areas outside the South -- we have seen a familiar progression from the earliest days of school desegregation.
First, a federal court steps in to order the integration of public schools long under the unequal and unjust yoke of de jure segregation. Then, after much fulminating by local pols and sometimes violent outrage on the part of the public, a token effort is made at "integration." Usually, this involves the admittance of a token number of minority students into "white" schools under the banner of various "freedom of choice" schemes.
Of course, after some time, a federal district judge would deem such tokenism as wholly unacceptable. Baton Rouge's stab as such foot-dragging proceeded at a grade-per-year snail's pace, and had not yet reached the elementary grades by the time the federal judge had enough in 1970.
Then -- at least in Baton Rouge's case -- "integration" was to be achieved through voluntary majority-minority transfers and through a "neighborhood schools" plan. That's right, going to your own neighborhood school constituted race-mixing progress.
Except that white folks either a) fled what previously were mixed areas of town, b) fled the public schools or c) both. And the "integrated" schools largely weren't.
Finally, fed up with segregated "integrated" public schools, federal courts then turned to the B-word -- busing. That, of course, led to an explosion in the numbers of private schools, particularly in Baton Rouge. And to a population explosion in "whiter" outlying areas.
As the public schools, under "forced busing," went from majority white to majority black -- and from majority middle-income to majority lower income -- the white exodus picked up steam, with previous holdouts fleeing what they now saw as "failing schools." I'm not sure, but I think the difference between acceptably mediocre and "failing" is somehow proportionate to the percentage of African-American (and underclass) students.
Now -- almost three decades after "forced busing" began and several years after it was deemed pointless and abandoned along with the 47-year deseg case -- my hometown school district has gone from 65 percent white to 83 percent minority. Whites, once a strong majority in Baton Rouge, now make up less than half the population.
Until Katrina flooded Baton Rouge with those fleeing New Orleans and southeast Louisiana, the city's population hadn't grown in two decades.
THAT'S THE HISTORY of these things, and I would imagine Baton Rouge's troubled transformation mirrors that of more than a few Southern cities. And some Northern cities, too.
No, I am not digressing. My point is to suggest that America's original sin -- slavery and racism -- destroyed basic bonds of human affection. Racism was so prevalent for so long that the notion of commonweal has become unthinkable.
When a people has become so accustomed -- so enculturated over centuries -- to thinking that some humans are chattel, that some humans are less than oneself, it becomes impossible to think of anyone as one's brother. And impossible to believe that you are The Other's keeper . . . and he yours.
Is that, ultimately, why Jerry Arbour, the school board president, finds it easy to figuratively throw up his hands and abandon his responsibility to educate the public's children? Is that, ultimately, why Baton Rouge -- why Louisiana -- pretty much always has thrown up its hands and abdicated its responsibility too?
And why, when someone at the capitol gets the notion that the state budget is too big, it's always education, health care and social services that take the big hit?
IF PRESSED by someone up here in Yankeeland to explain my hometown and home state, maybe I'll tell them that to understand Baton Rouge (and Louisiana) you need to understand a city (and a state) that throws its hands up.
Huh?
See, when you're faced with a really big problem -- as most people are sooner or later -- you basically have two choices: You bear down and fix it, or you throw your hands up.
For centuries, when faced with corrupt oligarchs and politicians, what have Louisianians done . . . what do Louisianians do still? They throw their hands up, and the crooked pols are still in charge.
When faced with endemic poverty and social dysfunction? Throw your hands up.
Sputtering economic infrastructure . . . ignorant workforce? Put on a pot of gumbo, grab a six pack of Abita . . . and throw your hands up.
Failing schools? Throw your hands up.
In other words, "It ain't me, it ain't my kin, throw the bastards a voucher and let the private schools clean up the mess."
IFI AM NOT my brother's keeper (if I have no brother, just The Other) there is no such thing as commonweal and -- unless I'm getting directly screwed here -- civic culture and governance ain't my problem. My problem is how to move heaven and earth to get a prime tailgaiting spot at Tiger Stadium.
To be born a Louisianian is to learn not to ask for whom the bell tolls.
After all, it has been the better part of a week since the Messiah took office. Robert KennonBuddy Roemer Bobby Jindal, by his mere presence and tough talk on ethics, was to instantaneously transform a state that's been mired in varying degrees of dysfunction since the dawn of the 18th century.
SO, WE FIND that, thus far, the status quo is hanging tough in the Gret Stet. The business community and LSU are fighting over the resignation of Chancellor Sean O'Keefe, forced out amid political machinations by the school's new president and its board of supervisors.
Also in Baton Rouge, existing downtown casinos, through front organizations, are airing anti-casino TV ads to keep a competitor from opening and sucking gamblers to a new "resort" in the southern part of town, where -- on a different matter -- some residents are fighting tooth-and-nail to stop the kind of mixed-use, commercial/residential development that most American cities lust after.
Meanwhile, murder rates are soaring in both New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and the mayor of the Crescent City is still a preening doofus.
And my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, is still a dump. Despite having one of its own in the governor's mansion.
Any moment now, I expect that disillusioned Louisianians will begin denouncing Jindal, asking what use have they for a messiah who can't turn water into wine, much less a Third World entity into something resembling a functioning civic society. And do it instantly. Remember, you read here first that -- even under the most miraculous permutations of great good fortune -- the best Bobby Jindal can do is futz around the edges of Louisiana's pathology, perhaps fixing a doodad here and a thingamabob there. Maybe a couple of thingamabobs, which probably would earn him a vice-presidential slot on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket.
That's about it, though . . . fixing some doomaflatchies and whatsits. Because Jindal can't legally do anything about the real problem with Louisiana -- the people who live there.
It takes people to make a culture, and it takes people to generally care so that government might generally work. Your score in the Louisiana Bowl, after 300 years of play, is Violent Dumbasses 76, Prosperous Functioning Society 14.
The coach, alas, is only as good as his players.
LET'S LOOK, in a metaphorical vein, at the governor's old school and mine -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.
Over the past generation or so, it has been allowed to fall into an extreme state of disrepair. Quite literally, it has been falling apart around students, teachers and administrators . . . which is not exactly the way a state tells its best and brightest young people "I love you. Please stay."
Football programs quickly learn they can't recruit good players when Whatsamatta U's athletic facilities are falling apart. Louisianians never learn, however, and demographic data has shown for some time that the state pays the price.
When I was a child, Baton Rouge's public schools were pretty dumpy, and the school system pretty much sucked. Except for one school -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.
Now, as reported by the Baton Rouge Business Report (and everyone else), the school system still pretty much sucks and the facilities have nosedived well into "Good God ALMIGHTY!" territory:
About a year ago, workers employed by the East Baton Rouge Parish School System were looking to perform some fairly routine repairs to Baton Rouge Magnet High School. But the more they looked, the more problems they found. For starters, the brick and mortar of the venerable main building were no longer even connected to the exterior walls.
The findings were no surprise to Dot Dickinson, who watched a tile fall from the ceiling before a performance of the school’s orchestra, which included her son, in the mid-1990s. Luckily, the wayward tile landed on empty seats.
“Seems someone would have noticed the need for maintenance at that time,” she says.
Most likely someone did. But at the time, every public school in the parish needed work, and there was virtually no money to pay for it, school officials say. The system isn’t in the crisis mode it was in 10 years ago, but there are still a number of school buildings that are drafty, leaky, moldy or otherwise disheveled.
The School Board was scheduled to discuss—and most likely finalize and vote on—the system’s facility plan on Jan. 10. The futures of Baton Rouge Magnet High, which is in line for a $62 million renovation, and Lee High School, which the system had considered closing before Superintendent Charlotte Placide proposed building a new Lee High on the same site, have elicited the strongest emotions.
(snip)
Revenues over the next 10 years, including a $20 million surplus, are expected to be more than $489 million, assuming the renewal of a one cent sales tax. That covers what the system believes are the most pressing needs.
But making all the needed repairs could cost about $800 million if everything is fixed by 2011, system spokesman Chris Trahan says. Meanwhile, the parish’s older schools will continue to deteriorate. Placide says the system needs more money to catch up, but will parish voters pony up, especially since so many abandoned the public school system years ago?
For more than three decades, the system didn’t build a single new school. From 1964-98, parish voters approved enough tax renewals to keep the system operating, but not nearly enough to make any significant capital improvements, Trahan says. There were no bond issues, and no dedicated stream of revenue for infrastructure. The system didn’t even have a building maintenance fund like most districts.
Placide says there are “various reasons” why voters wouldn’t approve significant fees for capital improvement, which she didn’t attempt to list, but allowed that the problem was “related to the desegregation issues the community struggled with for some time.” The parish settled its 47-year-old desegregation case with the federal government in 2003.
IN OTHER WORDS, since 1981 -- the beginning of "forced busing" as a desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- white residents steadily and relentlessly removed their children and their financial support from the public schools. The numbers don't lie. Sheer racism may or may not have played a major role in the ethnic and financial "cleansing" of the local schools. For the first wave fleeing the East Baton Rouge public schools for brand-new private schools (and to neighboring parishes), race played a big role.Or at least I suspect it did.
For later waves of refugees, that abandonment probably was due to being sick and tired. Sick of fighting against growing urban decay and the resulting educational dysfunction, and bone tired from the fight.
Nevertheless, the result was the New Orleanization of the capital city's public schools, and civic support for public education cratered. Again, from the Business Report article:
In 1997, the system put together a comprehensive facilities plan that identified millions in needed work. Perhaps hoping to take advantage of goodwill engendered by the end of forced crosstown busing the previous year, school officials put together an ambitious proposal, asking voters to approve a 25-year, $475 million bond issue and a 35-year 1% sales tax for constructing and maintaining new school buildings. Both propositions were soundly defeated at the polls.
Thus chastened, school officials came back the next year with a proposition that had been drastically scaled back: a penny sales tax, levied over five years, about half of which was earmarked for a pay-as-you-go repair and construction fund. The tax passed and was renewed for another five years in 2003, and the system built seven new schools with that money.
(snip)
“The school system is one of the greatest detriments to economic growth that we have here,” says Fred Dent, chairman of a Baton Rouge financial consulting firm and spokesman and founding member of TaxBusters, which works for lower taxes and streamlined government. “When we keep getting headlines about the lack of performance of schools, it does not engender a lot of trust for any school board that has that problem. … It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.”
(snip)
Thirty percent of children in East Baton Rouge Parish do not attend public schools, nearly double the state average of 16%, which the Louisiana Department of Education says is the highest rate in the nation. The private schools can pick and choose whom they want to let in, while public schools take all comers. Public schools tend to have nearly all of the special education and special-needs students, while private schools grab many of the high-achievers.
For middle- and upper-class children, private schools are the rule, not the exception. Nearly 77% of the students left in East Baton Rouge public schools are poor, as measured by how many qualify for free or reduced lunch. Often, poor children come from unstable homes or dangerous neighborhoods, and they bring those problems with them to school. Parental involvement in a child’s education, a key factor in academic success, is often lacking in poorer homes.
EVERY STATISTIC in this story is staggering. And very few of them can be ameliorated by even as great and talented a political messiah as Bobby Jindal.
In Baton Rouge -- and in New Orleans . . . and all across the Gret Stet -- the problem with public education lies in the people. The people have the freedom to elect good stewards of the public trust . . . or lousy ones.
The people can commit themselves to strong public education for the good of society . . . or not. They can give public education -- and desegregation -- a chance . . . or not. They can vote for taxation sufficient to support good public schools and then hold officials accountable . . . or not.
The people of Baton Rouge, and Louisiana, can be OK with the sorry state of one of the state's best schools . . . or not.
So far, the people's job performance hasn't been exactly inspiring.
And the Business Report article makes it sound like passing the tax renewal won't exactly be a slam-dunk. Even in the face of damning evidence that Baton Rougeans have fallen down on their job -- the job of creating a functioning civic society that offers all its citizens equal access to the necessities of modern life.
Like a decent education.
IN STATES not Louisiana, public education has a history dating to 1635, with the establishment of the Boston Latin School. Universal education as a function of the state had one of its early champions in Thomas Jefferson, and the idea took off in the mid-19th century.
As it has been understood in the United States, free public education is a basic service civic society -- through local government -- provides to all its citizens without regard to status, creed, nationality or race. As it has played out in Baton Rouge, among other unfortunate examples, free public education is what you get when you are unable or unwilling to pay for private or parochial school.
And like the segregated education African-American children routinely received in the South of my childhood, public education in my hometown once again is separate and unequal. Some 83 percent of those children on the public side of Baton Rouge's resegregated educational realm -- many of whom are doomed to attend classes in substandard, crumbling facilities -- just happen to be black.
Separate. Unequal. Still.
Faced with the picture of children -- if not theirs, somebody's -- trying to learn in squalid classrooms such as those at my alma mater, Baton Rouge High, "activists" like Fred Dent balk at setting tax rates adequate to erase the shame of a city.
"It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.” That's what the man says.
Really? Couldn't it be just a little bit about, "I got mine. Screw the ghetto dwellers"?
Or does Dent really think the rational response to a crumbling, failing school system is to cut off the money and kill the sucker dead? And he and his ilk are working to replace the unacceptable entity with . . . what, exactly?
MEANWHILE, it'll probably take a brutal fight to pass enough of a tax renewal to assure repairs to Baton Rouge High, Lee High and all the other dung heaps where Baton Rougeans are content to warehouse their children. If it even passes at all -- despite all the shocking pictures, despite all the gallons of ink used to print the story of a city's shame.
"America's Next Great City," as its mayor laughably calls it.
Louisianians wait with bated breath for one of their occasional political messiahs to pull off a miracle well beyond the pale of mortal man. And soon enough, they'll crucify him because cheap grace was something that would not materialize out of his insufficient incantations.
A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work. . . . And he marvelled because of their unbelief.
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