Things are no longer so lovey at the lovey dovey hippie charter school. We absorbed the 7th and 8th graders from Diggs Middle last year when we took over their building, and worked our asses off to integrate them into our system with some success. A couple of those chuckleheads are headed to City and Poly because of us! But others struggled and are now lashing out. We have only a few weeks left until the last of those students are gone. They want to graduate 8th grade as Diggs students, and they're acting out against the SBCS system. One put a boulder through the Science teacher's windshield and got suspended for two weeks. A few of the more charismatically thuggish boys have gone to some $5 tattoo dude and had their names inked crookedly up their forearms in a neo-Gutenberg Bible script. This of course sends electric charges down the spines of the 7th grade girls, who are drawn to bad boys. Once the 7th grade boys see the 7th grade girls drooling over thugs, they have to step up their street game, and suddenly the sweet sheltered lovey-dovey charter school kids are running gang initiation fights behind the skatepark next to our building after school.
So now I'm running around jazzed and edgy pulling kids apart and getting between kids about to throw down again. I've had a couple years off from that shit and it is not making me happy to be thrust back into it. Especially when I see my former students at the March attending another candlelight vigil.
No comments:
Post a Comment