Muck City (19 page)

Remarkably, it seemed to work. One day, Theresa got a call from one of the school administrators. “Ms. Williams, oh my god,” she said. “I have never seen a couple behave like this. They actually
act like a couple
. They
hold hands. He holds her books. He opens the car door and takes her to games.”

Theresa told Jonteria, “The most important person to protect is you. No one is gonna protect you. And if sex ever crosses your mind, please tell me. Please let me know.”

Later one weekend night, Vincent picked Jonteria up to see a movie in West Palm. But half an hour later, Theresa heard the car door slam and the engine race away. A minute later, Jonteria came inside, visibly upset.

“Are you okay? I thought yall were going to the movies.”

“Oh, Mom, I’m fine. I just remembered what you told me. Guys are something else.”

“Wanna talk?”

“No. Just know that I remembered what you told me.”

Theresa let it rest. A few days later, she asked Jonteria again.
What happened?

“Nothing, Mom. And that’s what I mean. Nothing happened.”

When Theresa saw Vincent again, she waited until they were alone and confronted him.

“Did you forget the rule?” she asked. “You just put my daughter out and didn’t even wait for her to get inside? Were you that upset that she didn’t have sex with you?”

“Ms. Williams—”

“ ’Cause if she had, I know you’d have walked her to the door.”

Jonteria never came home upset like that again. But Theresa still worried about Vincent pressuring her. She knew how easy it was to fold when a man wouldn’t give up on what he wanted. After a while you could persuade yourself to accept anything. It wasn’t until Vincent graduated and moved off to college that Theresa’s mind was put at ease.

She’d taken Jonteria for her first gynecological exam. When it was over, the doctor came out and said that Jonteria was still a virgin.

“I was smiling from ear to ear,” Theresa said. “I’m thinking,
all right
!”

As they walked to the car, Jonteria looked at her. “Mom, why are you smiling like that?”

“I’m just happy.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about.”

The memory still brought a smile to Theresa’s face. “She is dedicated. She is determined,” she said.

“Jonteria is a moral force in an immoral world.”

•   •   •

VINCENT WAS NOW
at Hampton University on a football scholarship. The two of them texted every day and tried to speak as much as possible. She’d adapted to long-distance love easier than she’d imagined.

“My friends don’t agree with our relationship,” she said. “They have trust issues that keep them from having a long-distance relationship where you can be apart and still trust the person. Vincent’s in college, but we have trust in one other.”

At the same time, she would acknowledge with a sigh, “Whatever happens, happens. Both of us are young.”

For Jonteria, there was little time to pine. Now, as a senior, her schedule was dizzying, starting each morning at six and ending near midnight. There was school, cheerleading practice, work at Winn-Dixie, her internship hours at Lakeside Medical Center, emptying catheters and giving sponge baths, in addition to finishing her final courses at college. By graduation, Jonteria would be only six credit hours from an associate’s degree and two years closer to medical school.

She was also vice-president of the Twenty Pearls sorority, secretary of the National Honor Society, treasurer of the Health Occupations Students of America, a member of the Elite Club, and the salutatorian of the senior class. Jessica Benette, the only other girl in the medical sciences academy to dual-enroll in college with Jonteria, had been given the coveted
valedictorian slot. Jonteria was graceful in her concession. After all, Jessica’s mother had passed away.

“Jessica deserves to go to whatever college offers her a scholarship,” she said. “So good luck to both of us.”

The admissions applications from the universities of her choice filled a giant folder in her room: University of Florida, Florida State, University of Miami, and Florida Atlantic University. The applications to UF, FSU, and FAU had been sent weeks before to meet each school’s early-decision deadline. But she was still laboring over the details of the application for Miami—her top choice ever since she’d dedicated herself those seven years ago.

“Miami has the number-one medical school in the state,” she said. “The smartest kids in Florida go there and it’s private, which is also a draw. I want to go somewhere private, to be accepted there. It’s always been the dream.”

Florida Atlantic was Jonteria’s second choice, mainly because of price. It was located in nearby Boca Raton, offered a decent medical school, and cost only $18,000 per year—the price of just one semester at Miami.

Since 2004, Theresa had been working as a dispatcher at the hospital. But her salary paid only $25,000 a year. Even with Jonteria’s contribution from Winn-Dixie, there was nothing left over at the end of each month. The family had no savings. Having grown up so poor, Jonteria felt that taking out student loans would be like digging herself into a deeper hole. She would try to pay for college on her own, and to do that, she would need a full scholarship. So, at the end of each night, her mind numb from exhaustion, Jonteria would sit at her computer and distill the subtle tragedies of her life in hopes of getting free money.

“My father was sentenced to ten years of incarceration in Georgia,” she wrote to the Ron Brown Scholar Program, for ten grand.

“The first thing that comes to mind when a person says Belle Glade is football,” she wrote to the Albert Lee Wright Jr. Memorial Migrant Scholarship, for $3,000. “Glade Central Community High School does in
fact have one of the best football teams in the nation, but I’m living proof that we are much more than that.”

She wrote letters and essays to Coca-Cola, KFC, Walmart, McDonalds, and Bill Gates—each one tailored to meet the award’s specific requirement. The Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation Award, for instance, worth $20,000, usually went to a student who could prove significant hours devoted to community service. This made her worry. She would need more of those.

“You can’t just be a good student,” Jonteria said. “You have to prove you’re an all-around good person.”

•   •   •

“COMMITTED TO WINNING
in Academics and Athletics.”

That was the motto that appeared everywhere at Glades Central, in the cafeteria, on the walls of the gymnasium, even as a reminder along the bottom of the Raiders’ season schedule. While a commitment to winning football games thrived independently of the school administration, Glades Central’s academic record had long been an embarrassment.

Perhaps Glades Central’s greatest curse was its geography, and wrapped within that curse was its defining irony. Stranded in the western outback of one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, engulfed in the sea of cane and vegetables that drove the region’s economy, Glades Central remained the poorest high school in the state of Florida. Every student qualified for free or reduced-cost lunches. Its minority rate was 99 percent, with first- and second-generation Haitians and Hispanics making up over a third of the student population. When these students did arrive, all had varying levels of education and knowledge of English.

The school’s remoteness made Glades Central a singular challenge to the district, said Dr. Camille Coleman, a former principal. The town’s isolation and poverty narrowed students’ frame of reference and knowledge
of the larger world. Coleman remembered helping students prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) one year when they became stumped by a sample passage describing a cottage.

“Even reading the sentence, they could not figure out what they meant by a
cottage
,” Coleman said. “Finally I told them, ‘Remember
Little House on the Prairie
?’ and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, I know!’ When you’re not as traveled and your bubble is small, your language and vocabulary is going to be limited.”

Since 1998, Florida had used the FCAT to measure student learning from grades three through ten. The state required kids to pass the FCAT to advance and to graduate. And for schools, the state passed down grades according to their FCAT scores and how they improved the lowest 25 percent year to year. Schools with high grades received more state and federal funding, while low performers were subject to state intervention.

The high-stakes nature of the test was incredibly controversial, with critics complaining that it unfairly awarded schools in wealthy neighborhoods while suffocating poor schools that needed the extra funding to improve. In the dozen years of FCAT, Glades Central had never received anything above a D grade. Four of those years had brought Fs, including two in a row starting in 2007, prompting the state to issue vouchers to students who wished to transfer to private schools. Auditors appeared randomly in classrooms, checking for state-mandated curriculum. The state had also threatened Glades Central with takeover or closure.

The scarlet letter associated with the FCAT and twelve years on the state’s list had also caused a revolving door of principals at Glades Central. Since 2000, four had been hired and dismissed. The chaos and inconsistency at the high school angered many parents and older residents, who fondly remembered an easier, less stressful time. For a quarter of a century, Glades Central had known only one principal, Dr. Effie C. Grear, a woman considered the grand matriarch of Belle Glade and an inspiring and iconic figure to the region’s African Americans.

Grear had been raised poor in Huntington, West Virginia. Her father, a
minister, had suffered an accident and died when Effie was in high school, leaving her mother to raise the children on a meager salary as a maid. In the mid-1950s, after putting herself through West Virginia State College and Ohio State University, where she earned a master’s in music, Grear had taken a job teaching in a migrant camp school outside of Belle Glade. She’d served as band director at Lake Shore High, then as assistant principal through the turbulent integration of schools. In 1975 she took over Glades Central, and for the next twenty-five years she oversaw the education of Belle Glade residents, most of whom she still remembered by name.

The memory of Dr. Grear’s tenure still carried a golden hue, symbolic of a simpler era, before joblessness, crime, and technology began complicating an already complicated life. To listen to anyone over forty years old, it was an era when teachers still lived in the community and kept close watch on their students, telephoning parents at the sight of children in the bars or misbehaving on the corner. It was a time when adults commanded both respect and fear, and fights on Fifth Street were settled with fists and a blade, rarely a gun.

And until the FCAT, it was also a time when poor academic performance came with little consequence to schools. For most of Grear’s tenure, students at Glades Central struggled on just about every standardized test placed before them. The alphabet soup of tests given each year caused panic in the classrooms and made a public mockery of the Glades in the morning papers. Students who failed the High School Competency Test (HSCT) could retake it in order to graduate, though Glades Central still had one of the highest dropout rates in the state. Often frustrated, Grear would hold contests for A and B students, most of whom she saw off to college. But in a poor migrant community, she explained, the isolation worked like a desert island.

“Back then, they felt they couldn’t see anything beyond Belle Glade,” said Grear, who passed away in May 2012 at the age of eighty-four. “And for having never been out of Belle Glade, they were dispirited in trying to see anything to help them out, unless they were an athlete. If you’ve never been to
the outside to know there’s something brighter, you never have any hope of leaving.”

By the time Grear retired in 2000, two years after the advent of FCAT, Glades Central had a firm reputation as a chronic academic underperformer. She’d managed to raise the school grade to a D, along with students’ writing scores, but still only 44 percent of seniors were graduating. The school offered only one Advanced Placement course, and reading scores were still the worst in Palm Beach County.

The years of stigma had also weathered the staff. Teachers complained about colleagues who’d given up on teaching, instead showing movies and allowing students to run wild through the halls. There were also numerous reports of faculty having sex with students, a practice many said had persisted unchecked for years.

It was certainly one of the lowest points in the school’s academic record. When it came to athletics, however, Glades Central had reached an apex. The year Grear retired, the Raiders had just won three back-to-back state football championships and were on their way to a record forty-seven straight wins. The team was ranked top ten in the nation. Football fever was at its peak, with thousands of fans packing the bleachers on Friday night and players headed to college by the dozen.

And that was exactly the problem, thought Mary Evans, who took over Glades Central in 2002 and practically flipped the world upside down. Born and raised in Belle Glade, Evans had performed a miraculous turnaround while principal of nearby Gove Elementary, the only school in the Glades ever to earn an A grade.

A month before taking over at Glades Central, she’d vowed to then governor Jeb Bush at a hearing in Tallahassee that within the year the school would be more famous for its Brain Bowl victories than for football. The governor had been so fired up by her moxie that he’d slapped his dais and volunteered to help in any way, even visit the school and paint his hair purple.

“Well, get ready,” she told him.

Evans’s first act of business was to “zero-base” the entire teaching staff,
making every teacher reapply for his or her job, regardless of tenure. Days after the interviews concluded, a quarter of the faculty received letters that said, “I’m sorry to inform you, but …”

Included was Willie Bueno, the head football coach who’d taught physical education for nearly a decade. Also on the list was the wildly popular wrestling coach, Frank Lasagna, who’d been at Glades Central for nineteen years and produced a string of district titles and twenty-five state place winners.