NOTE: Editorial staff removed two key elements from this piece the name of my school (Ryan Academy, Norfolk, Va.) and the HHCF! Instead of banging my head against the wall (which I only do because it feel so good when I stop) the piece is posting here to complete the broken circuit. We all know who we are anyway at this point and soon Mr. Obama will too.
I NEVER DREAMED the economy would get this bad; then, I never dreamed I would be happy after the economy forced me to give up being a children’s author and journalist to become a private high school teacher making less than $16,000 a year before taxes.
Teaching turned out to be the dream I didn’t know I had. However, with this dream comes much responsibility for those I teach and the dreams the economy is yanking out from beneath them.
Most people perceive private schools as fully-loaded finishing schools — big budgets, flashy classrooms. Too often, particularly here in the South, where many schools boomed in the days after Massive Resistance and went low at the heel when our public schools came back to life, the truth is many small, private schools exist to serve and protect those who could not thrive in pub lic school.
Teaching in the sometimes rigid and rushed, underpaid and understaffed, overworked and overcrowded environment of public schools can break students as quickly as make them.
This is not a slam on public schools, teachers or students. It’s a fact. Education has been first to cut and last/ least to fund for too long. We are in hothouses teaching snowflakes, each unique and needy in a special way. We try and race onward to fulfill standards and excel on tests, all the while trying desperately to leave no snowflake behind to melt away through the cracks in the system.
Some students, no matter how bright, melt down in public schools for a variety of reasons, and blue-collar parents take multiple jobs to give them the chance to get a privateschool education. The economy has taken a flamethrower to our scholastic icehouses; while public schools might get relief, private schools are scorched earth.
Each day I scan the tiny classroom and pray for them all to be in attendance, because I know parents have fallen behind in payments, and schools — having bent over backward — have absolutely no other choice, after months of not being able to meet meager payrolls and burgeoning bills, but to put kids out of the classroom until the tuition is paid. When the student is months from graduation, it is devastating. Two of my students have been accepted to college but have been unable to obtain scholarships or loans.
My students, who have learned to play chess and held onto the game of kings as a life raft in the perfect storm, have asked me to help them figure out how to keep afloat spiritually. Banding together, they have opted for strategy over surrender.
Two weeks ago, we all wrote the White House to challenge the president and his staff to a round of chess. We even sent one of our sets. Students have made a sponsorship form, like for a walk-a-thon, and will ask folks to pledge “change for change” — a quarter or 50 cents for every move they make against a White House opponent. Who knows? We might start a Chess Scholars Fund. Last week, the U.S. Chess Federation and U.S. Chess Trust announced their support for our Sustain the Change White House Challenge on their Web sites.
The overall strategy is to find a mate at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., so that even if some of my students fail in this economic battle, they can always have that one miraculous victory of belonging — not because they are grandmasters, famous, wealthy or PhDs, but because they refused to forfeit their hope or stalemate their dreams.
Lisa Suhay, of Norfolk, is an author and high school teacher. Contact
her at lsuhays2@cox.net.
Published in The Virginian-Pilot - Sunday, March 22, 2009
