Monthly archives: June, 2008

…well…at least one of them…is likely to be shut down this year for rock bottom poor academic achievement.

For me, W. W. Samuell represented a very large amount of angst. Most people never realized what was happening to me directly when I transferred there as a Junior. I started off the summer before effectively on the run…I walked into that school with only a few distant acquaintances from junior high that remembered me as a poster-boy for what kids look like before becoming criminally insane. I came from schools that were bent on using me to make them look better in testing…zero friends.

The school was a warzone to me. I was jumped twice, both times by people with zero legitimate excuse for doing so. One group said they thought I was Cody (schmuck that looked like me that dropped out). The second incident was someone deliberately stick me with a rumor that would get me in a very dangerous situation with a very rough group…ending with blood all over the place…it would have been worse if Todd wasn’t there…only a few stitches were necessary..I’d live.

I watched a teacher get shot on accident, by a dude most of the people living in the area had known personally for ages. Bad-ass soccer player, great in tae kwon do…was even kicking for the football team…over a gang dispute, he missed when firing a gun in the foyer of the school and the bullet winged one of the most loved teachers in school. Suffice to say…this was the beginning of DISD following in the footsteps of the more notorious scholastic institutions in southern Cali.

There were days that we couldn’t actually go to school, because some idiots had fired a gun, and our parents were wise enough to keep us out.

The truly hard part about my time at Samuell was my habit of comparing it to other schools I had been to…Eustace, Skyline, Lake Highlands…none of these schools were exactly the picture of perfection, but none could be attributed with the harsh prejudices, racism, and violence that children were actually being taught to exemplify in that school. I was lucky upon reflection…I came from a family that didn’t feel the need to impress hate upon their children. I went to enough schools outside the warzone to understand that not everyone deserves nor asks for that kind of treatment, and most importantly that it’s a very unhappy way of life. A lot of people at Samuell came up with some pretty crazy ideas about me because I distanced myself from most of them so much.

It turned out for the best I think. So many of those I went to school with are dangerously close to the same destructive environments we were all in during high school. But the high school itself is now purportedly a haven for juvenile criminals now. If thats the case then two factors need to be acted upon:

1. Get the students that wish to get a decent education into a school where their safety is not a greater risk than the desire to see them educated.
2. Remove/Relocate the undesirable elements to a remedial school or workforce school.

Sounds pretty crappy of me to say…but I have only my experiences to base this idea on. In my experience, the only way to avoid violence in schools was to not be present for it. And I tried more than a few tactics in avoiding it. Bottom line…when teens with sub-standard education see other kids realizing dreams and ambitions, their justification always varies, but they reciprocate with malice. In this, we are not educating kids/teens with values allowing them to find better methods of venting those raging hormones. End result? Prize students have to disguise themselves as normal, normal students have to ride the wire to keep from falling into the dropout statistic, and the students that are more concerned about shooting each other get to rampage all over everyone else. Sounds like a crappy movie idea to me…the crappy part is it’s entirely true.

So should Samuell (and Spruce) get shut down?

Objectively, we honestly need to stop basing our own education system on our own US standards and start basing it on more successful education systems, such as those in Japan and the UK, where their average 8th grader is more educated than the average college sophomore here. Want to argue? By all means…but the reform that needs to happen now is harsh and not so warm and fuzzy. We should be analyzing the most successful educational systems in the world rather than the most popularly promoted one promoted by the Dept of Education in the states…in the meantime…shutting the school down and relocating the students is best. Building a new high school later with a far more strict policy on discipline and educations standards is better…raise the bar, and let none fall below it.

You can find the full article without my own ranting HERE.

Ciao,

Tony