Breaking Night (35 page)

Pizza or interview?

I was so tired—tired of interviews, tired of getting rejected, tired of hearing no. And if I was going to be told no anyway, what was the point? At least if I left now, I could still afford some pizza. If I was being realistic, there was a high probability I was wasting my time.

But sitting there, I started thinking, Well, what if? Yes, it was likely that this school would be like all the others, but what if the answer just this one time wasn’t no? The thought had struck me out of nowhere, and I found it as compelling as it was simple. “What if? What if, despite all the evidence I had that said it wouldn’t work out, what if this very next time, just this once, it turned out to be the school that let me in?”

The thought made my heart swell with a rush of emotion that suddenly made me miss Ma. I became lonely on that sidewalk by myself, surrounded by all those people. My mind was racing. One minute I had a home, a family, a roof over my head, and loved ones to orient me in the world. And now I was on Sixty-fifth Street and Ma was dead, Daddy was gone, Lisa and I were separated. Everything was different.

Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you. The rapid changes I had experienced were hitting me hard as I sat there, and yet sadness wasn’t what came up in my gut. Out of nowhere, for whatever reason, a different feeling snuck up in its place, and hope. If life could change for the worst, I thought, then maybe life could change for the better.

It was
possible
that I could get into the next school, and it was even
possible
I could get straight A’s. Yes, based on all the things that happened before, it wasn’t necessarily realistic, but it was possible that I could change everything.

I ditched the idea of pizza and went for the interview.

In the mid-1990s, the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities was in trouble. They faced a problem of severe overcrowding, with 2,400 students enrolled in a school meant to hold no more than 1,500. In the overpacked classrooms there were lots of kids who were failing. Morale among the teaching staff was low and cynicism high. A handful of teachers who sat on a governing committee called School Based Management (SBM) within the school proposed a desperate solution: segregate the failing kids from everyone else, give them only basic classes and their teachers the benefit of fewer classes to teach, and get them out of the building by noon. Behind the scenes, a small group of teachers nicknamed the project Failure Academy.

Failure Academy would be a small thing, a separate school lodged in the back bottom corner of the building within the much larger High School for the Humanities on Eighteenth Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues in Chelsea. The plan was for it to be populated by the hundred-plus students who were screwing up their education so badly that they were seen as a detraction within the mainstream school. The thinking was, with the help of this program, the larger school could focus on educating those kids who were actually performing, while the students of Failure Academy could be segregated, parked in the annex for those from whom no one expected too much. And this is exactly what the school would have been, if not for Perry Weiner.

The chairman of the board of SBM and a passionate English teacher for many years, Perry was absolutely indignant about the idea of segregation, and he challenged the committee to instead start a real alternative high school that met the needs of these struggling students. Several people supported Perry, including the chairman of the teachers’ union, Vincent Brevetti, another man who dedicated his life to empowering young people through the betterment of education. Together, Perry and Vince spent months meeting to design a school that would serve, rather than “park,” this at-risk population of kids who had failed within the structure of mainstream education. The two men became a team.

Every morning at seven a.m., Perry and Vince would arrive at school for an hour or more of planning. The school they were building would be so much more than a dropout prevention program. Rather than base the model of their alternative school on what was
not
working with the troubled students, they decided to seek out an educational model that
did
work, one that had already proven to be highly successful. They visited and observed other high schools, ones that catered to more elite and privileged populations of kids. What they found in the design of those schools deeply inspired them, and they returned to Chelsea determined.

The students of so-called Failure Academy would instead become the students of Humanities Preparatory Academy. “Prep,” as Perry and Vince began calling it, would become a mini-school that provided at-risk students the opportunities and privileges of a personalized education traditionally reserved only for those who could afford elite private schooling. The design of Prep would be radically different from typical mainstream education.

Prep would cap the number of students at 180, so that pupils could benefit from one-on-one attention from teachers. High-stakes tests would not be the measure of a student’s success at Prep, for the feeling was that it narrowed the curriculum and the students’ ability to demonstrate their real knowledge. Instead, something called Performance-Based Assessment Tasks took their place. PBATs were a rigorous and personalized means of testing students by allowing them to respond to test questions in depth, as opposed to the traditional fill-in-the-blank style of high-stakes New York State Regents exams, which in so many cases were the catalyst for students failing. Instead, PBATs would require students to produce thorough, in-depth work that demonstrated real world knowledge and application of their semester-long classes. This could be done a number of ways, via portfolios, extended writing projects, or even through classroom presentations wherein a student was given the opportunity to teach the class the lessons they learned throughout a semester. In doing this, PBATs would open the space for an alternative curriculum, and with it, a way for teachers to teach students differently.

So courses at Prep expanded beyond standard names and themes such as Global 1,2,3, and Literature 2, trading them in for dynamic classes like Facing History & Ourselves, in which students studied the implications of genocide, and Themes in Humanity, in which these formerly failing students would read Dante’s
Inferno
or Kafka. English 1 would become Shakespeare on Stage, and students would comprehend and perform
Hamlet
to earn their English credit.

Far more than mere name changes, the courses themselves were meant to cultivate an environment of authenticity and encourage depth of thought. To do this, classrooms were capped at around fifteen students per class. This way, student and teacher alike sat in a circle of chairs, looking one another in the eyes for an active, heavily participatory discussion-based lesson. There would be no place for a student to hide out at Prep, no place for them to get lost, and no place where they might be forgotten.

For Perry, Prep was a labor of love; he was dedicated to seeing his second-chance students win. His belief was that if the mainstream school system had failed, then it would require something different for these students to succeed. Prep would be that difference. In this way, the students were not looked at as dysfunctional; the system was dysfunctional. The concept of “failure” incorporated within the system’s very design was not in any stage of the planning of Humanities Prep. By design, Prep was made to facilitate for its students what was possible.

I flew through the double doors fifteen minutes late, my forehead broken into beads of sweat, the bun I’d attempted curling with flyaways. Humanities Preparatory Academy. I read and reread my journal page to ensure that I was in the right building. The place looked so small, like the back office of an actual school.

The main office, Prep’s only office, contained a set of four sectioned-off cubicles with walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Filing cabinets had been rolled into the short partitions that made up each room; one had a shipment sticker still stuck to the side of it, with the school’s address penned onto the boxes from their delivery. A fan whirred from on top of a bookcase that was filled with random, secondhand books. Above it, a faded poster read,
LIFE REWARDS ACTION
, in bold, purple script. The secretary, April, an African American woman with pretty eyes, instructed me to have a seat in the waiting area, which was a row of classroom chairs strung along the wall across from her desk.

“You’re late. They started without you,” she said, tilting her head, gold jewelry dangling from her neck, wrists, and ears. “Don’t worry, Perry will be out real soon and you can talk to him.”

Looking down at the last cubicle, to the far left, through a thin glass window in a door, I saw a chalkboard with a sentence written and underlined on top:

Pick one of the following topics and write an essay on its meaning.

Diversity

Community

Leadership

A middle-aged white man with a goatee and glasses led a discussion that was mostly muted behind the partition. He was dressed in dark corduroys and a maroon tie. The first thing I noticed about him was that he seemed to laugh and smile easily. He looked friendly. Five or so young people sat in a semicircle around him, listening and answering questions at length. I pulled out my pen and got to work on the essay. I didn’t know what I could write about community or leadership, so I chose diversity because my mind went to the discrimination I faced in my old schools.

For three pages, I detailed the way people assumed things about me based on appearance, my race, or my being unkempt. They’d called me
blanquita
, little white girl, for so many years on University Avenue. “You must be rich, white girl, snotty, too,” they’d hiss as I went through the halls of Junior High School 141. I also went on about the way I was often stared at for my Goth clothing in my previous high school interviews. In detail I described the anger I felt when I knew a teacher had rejected me before really listening. Written with sloppy blue penmanship, my paragraphs were fat and long. Reading them over, I felt they made a coherent point about diversity and discrimination. It was the first writing assignment I’d completed in years. I chewed on my pen. The meeting I should have been in suddenly let out.

I had to stop the teacher. He was on his way out, dashing past me.

“S-sir,” I said. “Sir.” He turned and smiled warmly.

“Hello,” he said, his open hand extended. “Perry.” He finished his sentence laughing, looking directly into my eyes. I looked away. He was one of “those people” on the other side of the wall. The intensity of his eye contact caught me off guard and made my heart pound; I flinched when he put out his hand, stared at it too long, and grabbed hold to shake it only at the last possible moment.

“Hi, I had an appointment to be in there, too.”

“Elizabeth—” he held up a notepad—“. . . Murray. What happened?” he asked, raising his eyes from reading, looking at me through his glasses. His totally focused attention made me uneasy, but it also made him interesting. He seemed different. If there were a photograph of the day I met Perry, it would be a perfect study in opposites: Goth mess meets jovial man who, based on his glasses and desk of Shakespeare books, appeared to live in the library.

“Well, Liz, actually. Call me Liz. Please, I just need a chance to sit and talk to you. I’m really sorry about being late.”

I was so nervous my palms were sweating. I was not good at this sort of thing; I’d never felt the permission to just
talk to
authority figures, ever. The other teachers interviewing me must have noticed it. I worried what this guy would do when he noticed it. I mean, what must I look like to him? A ratty street person. Lice girl, dirty, truant, thief, late, irresponsible.

“Look, Liz,” he said, without taking his eyes off me, “I would love to take you inside to talk, but I’ve got a class in ten and there’s an essay component to the interview. It’s going to take too long. I’m afraid you’ll have to reschedule.”

I held up my completed essay for Perry to see. “Done,” I told him. “I did it already.” He looked surprised, squinting at the papers, taking them from my hand to skim over, quickly. “Now can I have those ten minutes?” I pushed.

He laughed that lighthearted laugh again, took a few steps back into the office, and swung open his door.
They’re just people
, I reminded myself as I took a seat.

“Look,” I started, “my record is bad, I know that . . .”

I wanted to control that conversation, direct it, defend myself before he could judge me. Only, as I spoke, I quickly saw by his facial expressions—empathetic and interested—that he didn’t seem to judge me at all. Perry just listened. He watched me and took in everything I said. He was genuinely connected; I could see it on his face. A feeling of trust opened in me as we spoke, and spontaneously, because of it, I told him everything. Everything except that I was homeless. I did not want to go back into the system, and I knew it would be Perry’s job to report me if he knew I had nowhere to live. So I withheld that one detail, and shared with him everything else.

“And I have this friend Sam who I cut school with a lot, so I could, I don’t know, cut loose. Well, I always meant to graduate. I really did. But then years passed and it got out of hand.”

It was all flooding out of me, and I became more emotional in front of him than any of the teachers who had interviewed and rejected me in the last few weeks, more emotional than I wanted to be. I couldn’t help it. It was just an alien feeling, having a teacher really connect the way he did, and not at all with pity. Instead he listened actively, asking clarifying questions, offering insight, even relating to me, sighing audibly at the details of my mother’s funeral, but never once indicating pity, only understanding and interest. But listening to the sound of my own voice as I opened up to him, I began to judge myself. When I heard myself explaining my life to someone else, particularly to a professional type like him, I sounded so dysfunctional—and he looked so normal. My eyes traveled around the room, from the computer in back to Perry’s clean brown leather shoes, then to my own rotten, ten-dollar boots.