Eek! It's a Mouse!

It is an uncomfortably warm, humid morning in June.  My students are in the middle of their performance – a medieval musical play about the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters.  As I stand in the miniscule orchestra pit, I can see the actors in front of me singing and dancing on stage.  I look to my right and see the instrumentalists kneeling on the floor of the auditorium as they accompany the singers on xylophones, metallophones, hand drums, and recorders.  Sara stands behind them waiting to play her violin solo in the next piece.  I am pleased to see total concentration and focus on each young face.  Though the house lights are off, I can tell the audience is enthralled by the performance due to the complete silence behind me.  I can feel the energy and excitement in the air.  My alto recorder sits resting on the music stand in front of me – I have to play a counter melody at the end of the song.  As I reach for the instrument, my eyes fixate on a small mouse teetering on the top of the music stand.  In a matter of seconds, numerous thoughts race through my head:  I’m sharing a small, semi-enclosed space with a rodent less than a foot away.  How long has he been with me?  Did he touch my recorder in his attempt to climb onto the top of the music stand?  I don’t want to put that instrument to my mouth now.  What should I do?  If I draw attention to the creature, it will distract the musicians, actors, and audience members which would be disastrous for the students.  On the other hand, do I have nerves of steel necessary to ignore the mouse until the end of the performance?...

As I debate my options, the physical education teacher – who has been watching the performance from the back of the auditorium – suddenly runs down the centre aisle with a waste paper basket held high over his head.  In one swoop, he leans over the pit from behind me, knocks the unsuspecting animal to the floor of the pit, and covers it with the upside down container.   Of course, his actions draw the attention of the audience members, musicians, and actors who, until then, had been oblivious to the unfolding drama in the pit.  Not wanting to alarm the students, I wave them on to continue with the play, despite my shock and apprehension.  We all have a good laugh afterwards and the incident becomes part of school legend through the ensuing years.

Though humorous on the surface, the incident is emblematic of many urban schools.  Over the nineteen years I had taught at the school, the building had gradually been allowed to deteriorate and become grungy.  The grounds surrounding the school were not kept up – trash littered walkways and collected under bushes and throughout the play area in back.  At one point, we were told graffiti removal was too costly, so the markings of gangs remained for years on the brick façade where the children played.  Inside the building grime collected on every wall and floor and in every crevice, whilst mold grew behind walls and oozed through ceilings.  Candy and gum wrappers took up permanent residence in stairwells.   All the bathrooms (students’ and faculty’s) reeked of urine, contained broken toilets, and were utterly disgusting.  Toilet paper and paper towels were scarce commodities, and soap was simply nonexistent.  Mouse droppings in classrooms became a common occurrence, noticed upon first entering in the morning.  [I guess the bathrooms were even too deplorable for the mice to use.]  Rather than investing in repairs, the district continually applied “band aids” to problems.   Miss Carol had once been a secretary at the school.  She often reminisced about her first day at the school when a flood in the office greeted her.  Two repairmen removed the heating grille revealing a thick layer of accumulated filth inside.  After they hastily patched the leaking pipe, they began to return the grille.  Miss Carol told them they forgot to clean the dirt inside.  Both men laughed and informed her that they were hired to patch a leaking pipe, not clean the heating system.  She shook her head in disbelief as the two men walked away still chuckling.

Jonathan Kozol is known for documenting conditions of urban schools and children throughout the country.  He began teaching in a poor, segregated, overcrowded school in Boston in 1964, and was fired for teaching poetry by Langston Hughes (which the school board at the time regarded as “inflammatory”) before the school year was completed.  In his writings and lectures since then, he describes schools in more deplorable conditions than Flynn.  “Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I’d seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working” (1).  Why indeed?  And yet, Kozol points out that the problem transcends issues of bureaucracy and inefficient school administrations.  He notes, for example, that New York City manages and troubleshoots every conceivable problem and provides a well-oiled system in Manhattan to ensure that “Wall Street brokers get their orders placed, confirmed, and delivered at the moment they demand.  But leaking roofs cannot be fixed and books cannot be gotten into Morris High in time to meet the fall enrollment.  Efficiency in educational provision for low-income children, as in health care and most other elementals of existence, is secreted and doled out by our municipalities as if it were a scarce resource” (2).  Maybe it is idealistic and naïve thinking, but I wonder how inner-city schools would be if everyone were to treat all children the way they would want their own sons and daughters treated.  If the official mantra were “if it’s not good enough for my own children, it’s not good enough for any children,” would Jonathan Kozol still be writing and lecturing about urban schools?  Would Flynn Elementary have been allowed to deteriorate as it did?

Deplorable conditions in schools convey the message that our students are not worth the effort and cost of having a clean and safe environment.  And the children know this without ever expressing it explicitly – they notice and take it all in silently, seemingly accepting the implication of their unworthiness.  And, after being in that kind of environment for a long period of time, even the adults begin to acquiesce, to accept it as somehow normal, the way things are.  Despite numerous grievances over the years, conditions never really improved and we eventually lost ourselves in the daily struggle to raise test scores in the frantic hopes of making AYP with increasingly less resources and support. 

After being isolated at Flynn for so long, I grew accustomed to such dismal conditions.  It wasn’t until the school was closed that I realized how truly abnormal the conditions there had been; that an urban school did not have to be a place of filth and disrepair.  I was fortunate to be hired at another Providence public school (Veazie Street Elementary) which is clean, bright, and well maintained inside and outside the building.  It is an environment where the students are shown daily that they are worth the effort and cost of having a clean and safe environment.  It is a building led by a principal who acts on the premise that “if it’s not good enough for my own children, it’s not good enough for any children.” 

In the years to come, I am hopeful that I shall never have to share my music stand with another rodent – at least not at Veazie.

(1)  Kozol, J. (1991).  Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers (p. 5).

(2)  Ibid. (p. 114).

For further information on Jonathan Kozol including a bibliography:

http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2002/sites/kozol/Seevak02/ineedtogoHOMEPAGE/homepage.htm