The Academy (29 page)

Bobbi ushered Robert Harris, one of the PE teachers, into the chair on her right. “I love being treated like a child,” he told Bobbi. “Thank you.”

Linda laughed.

Teachers were still entering the room, but the clock on the wall said it was one, and since Jody had said the meeting would start precisely at that time, she stepped behind the podium and tapped on the microphone to make sure it was working.

The podium.

Linda frowned. Was it the same one as before or had the principal bought yet another one? Because it looked different. It was just as elaborate, still ornately embossed with gold and silver, but there were carvings on its base she did not remember: the Tyler tiger, although far more frightening and ferocious than she had ever seen it before; a pile of books with a grinning skull atop the stack; and what appeared to be a one-room schoolhouse, with grotesque faces peering out of the two windows to either side of the door.

Whether the podium was new or had been altered, it was still disturbing, and Jody met her eyes and smiled as if knowing exactly what was going through her mind. Linda looked away, cursing herself the second she did so. The principal would take that as a sign of weakness, and in an effort to reclaim some traction, Linda casually glanced about the room, then once again returned her gaze to Jody’s face, hoping the woman would think she’d merely been scouting around for friends and had met her eyes the first time by accident. No such luck. The principal wasn’t even looking in her direction anymore.

The last few teachers were hurriedly seated as Jody began to speak. “Welcome,” she said. “I want to thank you all for making our great experiment such a huge success. Particular credit goes to our esteemed charter-committee members, who have taken on the role of advisers, consultants and school board as well as teachers. . . .”

The speech went on like this for some time, the bland self-congratulatory rhetoric that was mandatory at all meetings. Then things changed. Jody scanned the room and without preamble said, “In your mailboxes this week, each of you will receive amended contracts, which you are all required to sign. The new contracts state that previously ratified collective bargaining agreements are null and void, and that position-correlated pay scales are no longer valid. Sal-aries will now be calculated on an individual basis. Disciplinary action will be less codified, giving the administration more leeway in dealing with personnel problems. There are also no more open-ended or multiyear contracts. All employees must sign new contracts annually.”

“The terms of this charter keep changing,” Robert muttered next to her.

“Then you shouldn’t have voted for it,” Linda snapped. “I didn’t.”

The PE teacher looked at her in surprise. She expected hostility, a nasty comeback, since that’s all she seemed to get from the charter supporters these days, but instead Robert looked downcast and discouraged, and said nothing. Linda felt a welcome and unexpected sense of hope. All was not lost. If people were starting to become disillusioned with the direction in which the school was headed, maybe it was only a matter of time before they would have enough votes to override the charter or even resubmit to district control. She wasn’t sure exactly how that worked, but she made a mental note to herself to look it up.

Jody’s smile had grown wider. She actually looked happy. “I also regret to inform you that although we had promised raises for all, specifically a five percent increase on your next paycheck, that will have to be postponed for the time being. Due to unexpected expenditures, we simply do not have the money in our budget to honor that promise.”

“It
was
a promise!” a man yelled from the back of the room. His voice sounded muffled, and even when she turned around, Linda couldn’t see who it was. “The only reason most of us voted to become a charter school is because we were promised raises greater than what the district was offering! Now teachers in the other schools are getting three point five and we’re getting nothing!”

“Yeah!” Linda said at the same time as someone else. There were murmurs of assent, but not nearly as many as there should have been.

“
And,
” the man continued, “we were supposed to vote on everything and make these decisions together! What are these
unexpected
expenditures? I never heard a thing about this!”

“They are primarily security measures,” Jody said patiently. “I’m sure you would not want to sacrifice the security of our campus for the sake of a few pennies, now, would you?” She smiled condescendingly. “As to the specifics, we have the wall, of course. It’s slightly off schedule and therefore slightly over budget. We are also purchasing a new highly efficient, highly advanced monitoring system. The price tag is admittedly hefty, which is why we cannot afford raises at this time, but we’ll be getting a lot of bang for our buck. There will be surveillance cameras in every room of the school as well as others mounted outside under the eaves of the buildings, and we will have a centralized command station located next to the custodians’ office.

“We will be able to monitor everything. Every corner of the school and every person in it. At any given time, we will be able to pinpoint the actions and location of our most incorrigible troublemakers, which should lead to a significant drop in both personal and property crimes.”

“Who’s going to be doing the monitoring?” Diane asked from somewhere off to the left. “And what about faculty and staff? Are we going to be spied on every minute of the day? I don’t want some pervert watching me go to the bathroom on his little video screen.”

Jody chuckled. “Safeguards are in place. And, no, we won’t be keeping track of employees.”

Yet,
Linda thought.

“When all is said and done, we will have not only the safest and most secure school in the district, but with our state-of-the-art technology in place, Tyler will be a model and example for all of the high schools in California.”

There were questions, a lot of questions, and the principal answered them all, even Linda’s pointed query about treating all students as though they were guilty of some crime and invading their privacy. But the more she heard, the worse Linda thought it sounded. Between the prison wall and the cameras, not to mention all those scouts marching about, they would soon be living in an Orwellian police state. She decided to add
Nineteen Eighty-four
to her syllabus and have each of her classes read the novel. Maybe they would get the hint. Maybe they would tell their parents.

Questions over, there was a low buzz of conversation among faculty and staff. But the tone seemed more resigned than outraged. Around her, she heard complaints from several teachers. They were not as upset as they should have been, though. Nor as defiant.

Jody raised a hand for silence, and like obedient children, everyone stopped talking.

“Next week,” she announced, “we will also be instituting a new dress code. Study after study has shown that children who attend schools requiring uniforms perform significantly better than schools with a more laissez-faire attitude toward student attire. So beginning the first of the month, all Tyler High School students will be required to wear uniforms. Flyers and order forms will be going home to parents in the Wednesday envelopes.”

“I’d like to see those studies,” Linda said, standing. “Because I don’t believe they exist.”

The principal frowned. “Copies will be made available to all staff members who request them. But let me assure you that there are
many
studies on this subject and that they all—”

Ray Cheng stood up. “I don’t believe that’s true. There was an article last year in
Today’s Education
that said just the opposite.”

Jody was getting annoyed. “I’m not going to argue with you about this. The decision has been made.”

“Unmake it,” Ray challenged her.

“No,” the principal said. She glared at Ray and Linda and other faculty members who must have looked like they disagreed with the new policy as well. “You’re of Chinese descent,” she said to Ray. “Why do you think all of those Asian countries are kicking the shit out of us academically?”

“You think it’s because their kids wear uniforms?”

“You’re damn right.”

“This is high school,” Linda reminded her. “These students are nearly adults. Some of the seniors
are
legally adults. They should be allowed to dress the way they want. Clothes, hair and fashion provide them with a safe, harmless way of expressing themselves.” She looked around the room for support. “I hate to bring it up again, but these are good students here, for the most part. We aren’t living in some gang-ridden neighborhood filled with crack addicts. These are normal middle-class kids. We can’t keep treating them like they’re criminals.”

Jody’s voice was stern. “We are treating them in a way that ensures they won’t
become
criminals. All of our efforts are working toward the same goal, and they are methods that have been proven time and time again in both public and private educational facilities.” She fixed Linda with a hard stare. “Now I suggest you sit down, Mrs. Webster. Unless you would like another reprimand added to your file.”

She heard the intake of breath from several men and women nearby, a sound that indicated a more-than-passing acquaintance with reprimands, and she wondered how many other teachers Jody had disciplined lately.

“You sit down, too, Mr. Cheng. This is an announcement, not a discussion. It’s not up for debate.”

Jody’s Stepford smile returned. “It’s a win-win situation,” she told the crowd. “We have entered into an agreement with a local uniform supplier. In return for giving them our business, the firm will donate to the school a percentage from each uniform sold. We will use that income to help fund some of our after-school programs. As for the specifics, the uniforms were designed by myself, with input from members of the charter committee, and are in the school colors of orange and black. Each teacher will be responsible for inspectingall students in his or her class on a daily basis to make sure that they are complying with the new regulations. A checklist detailing all of the dress code’s requirements will be provided. As I said earlier, order forms will be distributed through the Wednesday envelopes, and by the following Wednesday, everyone will have been issued his or her uniform.” She looked out at the assembly. “I don’t expect there to be any questions.”

Jody wrapped up her speech with some rah-rah platitudes, and the meeting continued with status reports by members of the charter committee, each of whom had been assigned the task of overseeing a particular area of the school. Without the principal’s grand pronouncements, the discussed topics soon disintegrated into boring minutiae. Next to her, Robert dozed off, and Linda saw Bobbi, sitting in a chair in the front of the room and off to the right, watching him and writing in a notebook. No doubt he would be punished for this transgression later. Bobbi continued to scan the crowd, periodically writing notes, and Linda knew she was scrutinizing the assemblage for those who did not appear to be entirely on board.

How much worse was it going to be after the security cameras were installed?

And still the meeting droned on. A half hour. An hour. An hour and a half.

If the point was to numb them all into submission, Linda thought Jody might succeed. Even she felt tired and overwhelmed by the marathon session, and when they were finally released, it took her a moment to rise from her chair because her left foot was asleep. Around her, teachers filed out quietly. She met up with Diane by the door, and Suzanne sidled next to the two of them as they were walking across the quad toward the English department office. “I need to talk to you,” she said. “About Yvonne Gauthier.”

“What about her?” Linda asked.

Suzanne looked around furtively. “I’m telling you because I don’t know who to trust. And I’m not sure anyone else would believe me.” She waited for Scott Swaim to pass by, then leaned in closer. “I don’t think Yvonne quit.”

“You think she was fired?”

Suzanne shook her head. “More than that. She supposedly resigned on Back-to-School Night, right? But she left without taking any of her personal belongings. Her purse and coat and iPod were still in her room. I know. I saw them. I thought maybe she’d come back for them later, although that didn’t make much sense—how could she have driven home that night without her purse, right?—but yesterday I was helping a student look for something in the Lost and Found, and there in a box was Yvonne’s stuff. She never did come back for it. So I got her address from her emergency card and drove by her house. It’s abandoned. There are newspapers piled up on the walkway, her mail’s spilled out of the mailbox and now the post-man’s putting it on the ground in rubber-banded bundles. No one’s mowed the lawn since, I would guess, Back-to-School Night. The grass is wild; the flowers are dead; there are weeds everywhere.”