She began her teaching career as a substitute in Richmond, CA. Schools that ran the gamut from the hills of Berkeley to the low lands of poverty below San Pablo Avenue. The higher the hill, the more economic and educational advantages. Some of the schools were filled with the children of university professors and students. Some of the schools were over-filled with a mostly poverty stricken black and Hispanic population of the working class and under employed.
She believed poverty is a state of mind rather than a state of finances, but some of the low land schools were filled with the children of those incarcerated in San Quentin. Their parents were paying for crimes of drug dealing, addiction, prostitution, theft, violence. So, many of these kids were being cared for by their grandparents. They were doing what they could, but there was nothing uplifting about their possible futures.
Those schools were trial by fire for her as a teacher. There was no hope. She actually had a first grader come back from lunch drunk. There were heavy chains on the soda machine in the teachers’ break room. The teachers themselves were desperate to get out of there. Substitutes reluctantly took these jobs.
The cupboards were empty of the school supplies that you should expect to find in a well-stocked class room. There weren’t even any pencils in the teachers’ desks. There were bars on the windows and the play ground had no equipment, no balls. The playground pavement was badly cracked with weeds growing through.
It felt so sad being at those schools. No parent volunteers. No books. No hope. No future. Poverty of the soul and mind. She began carrying some supplies with her everyday not knowing where she’d end up. She talked about art, taught them how to tell time, worked through some simple math problems.
She taught them camp songs, read them stories and they drew pictures with the crayons and paper she brought. Some of her supplies ended up getting stolen. It didn’t matter. The future for those kids was written on the walls of prisons following in their parents’ footsteps. Sad. Very sad.
The hill schools had plenty of parent volunteers and supplies. The biggest problem in the hill schools was that all the Title I money was designated for the low land schools, but low landers could transfer their kids to the hill schools in an effort to integrate the district more fairly.
Some of the transfer kids as well as some of the hill school kids needed remediation and there wasn’t the money to pay for the extra help needed. Parent volunteers tried to fill the need of the Title I aides in the classrooms, but some of the kids were so frustrated that they became prone to violence which led to serious problems for the teachers and their fellow students. She learned first hand that education is not fair or equal.
