Chapter Four
Four
There were a million other things Ms. Lovie Jackson, head guidance counselor at Baldwin High School, would rather be doing at present.
Correction. There were exactly three things. A former math teacher, Ms. Jackson enjoyed being precise. The three things she would rather be doing were as follows: (1) telling anyone who would listen about her genius of a grandson who had just started his first year at Morehouse and was already making a mark for himself on campus; (2) going to yoga; and (3) rereading one of her favorite science fiction novels, either Kindred by Octavia Butler or just about anything by Isaac Asimov.
Yet here she was, on a late October afternoon, watching a woman almost four decades her junior take over the Baldwin High library for a district-mandated counseling session. And all because her former colleague Bob Lehrer’s ashes had flown into the face of the PTO president.
“I’ll just finish putting these out,” said Ms. Harper, the slight, peppy redhead from Central Office, as she charged along, putting large pads of chart paper and small plastic caddies full of markers on different tables in one corner of the library. She didn’t wait for Ms. Jackson’s encouragement or acknowledgment; she was clearly taking ownership of the meeting from the start. Ms. Jackson took a deep breath to calm herself and tried to fix her face into something at least resembling a neutral expression.
There was no one to thank for the use of the space. Due to budget cuts, Baldwin High shared one librarian with two nearby middle schools, and today was an off day for Baldwin. The large, high-ceilinged room, which in its glory days had probably been quite impressive, with its tall windows and gleaming tables and bookcases made of real oak, not particleboard, now appeared tired and worn. The poor, solitary librarian had not had the time, energy, or funds to spruce up the place, and the years had done a number here, as they had on every corner of the school.
Tacked up on the dingy white walls in the area in which they were meeting were several once-hopeful read posters, most featuring celebrities from the late 1990s that few current students could identify. Still, students and teachers liked meeting here instead of the auditorium, which was rumored to have ceiling tiles on the verge of coming loose at any moment, threatening the unlucky person who happened to be seated below.
As Ms. Harper proceeded to stick a large piece of paper on one of the walls, then used a dying green Expo marker to label it parking lot , Ms. Jackson, aware of what was coming, cringed.
“All set!” Ms. Harper announced, turning to look at Ms. Jackson and practically clapping her hands. “Folks come in right after the last bell, right?” she asked.
Folks , Ms. Jackson thought. Lord have mercy.
“Yes, they should be in shortly after the bell, but we will have to give them time to use the restroom and deal with any last-minute requests from students and emails from parents,” Ms. Jackson answered. “I’m not sure how long it’s been since you were a teacher, Ms. Harper, so you might not remember that it’s difficult to get out immediately at the end of the day.”
Given her age and her astonishing rise within the counseling department at Central Office, Ms. Jackson knew that Ms. Harper had probably taught for only two or three years before getting out of the classroom entirely. Yet she probably earned more than most of the teachers who would soon enter the room. She might even earn more than Ms. Jackson.
“Oh, it hasn’t been too long since I worked on a campus!” Ms. Harper responded, a tiny slice of defensiveness cutting through her chipper tone. “Of course, I don’t have quite the storied career I’m sure you have!”
Ms. Jackson offered a tight smile and maintained her composure. A demure, petite woman in her late sixties, she was known for wearing tailored suits in a collection of neutral tones, and her outfits were never complete without two single pearl earrings and a small silver watch she’d been given by her husband, George, on their twentieth wedding anniversary. (It was inscribed To My Girl .) She kept her hair short and natural; in recent years it had started to turn silver. One of the first Black educators to be hired at Baldwin, she had been employed in some capacity at the school since the late 1970s and was now, she realized, something of an institution.
Principal Kendricks had been the one to break the news to her that the district was sending someone to run a mandatory counseling session for all who had been in the courtyard on the day of the ashes incident, and that in her role as head counselor, she would be required to be there.
“They wouldn’t acquiesce to me running the meeting?” Ms. Jackson had asked, frowning, when Mr. Kendricks had appeared in her office doorway to deliver the decree from on high. “It might go down easier if they did. And I could make sure our time together actually had value.”
“I’d like nothing more than to put you in charge,” the principal had answered. “But Central Office is obsessed with appearances, as you well know, and their desire to monitor, weigh, measure, and document has once again gotten the better of them.” Mr. Kendricks had rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly, and the two had exchanged a knowing look.
And so Ms. Jackson found herself on this afternoon simultaneously greeting Baldwin faculty and staff members and explaining the presence of Ms. Harper, who stood next to the tables where the meeting was to take place, a wide smile carefully affixed to her face.
“Oh God, not markers and chart paper,” grumbled Mr. Fitzsimmons as he sat down at one of the tables. “Please God, anything but that.”
Ms. Harper’s face fell for a moment before she recovered.
Ms. Jackson suppressed a laugh as she took her seat next to Nurse Honeycutt; he was Ms. Harper’s problem today, not hers. And the truth was, he wasn’t wrong. Teacher trainings and district-led meetings were often run this way, with an approach that treated the adults in the room as if they were children, not professionals. Ms. Jackson had sometimes wondered if hedge fund managers and attorneys sat around in meetings being asked to draw a colorful picture that represented the group’s consensus or to post clarifying follow-up questions on a piece of chart paper labeled parking lot so that these things could be considered later. It was demeaning, and Ms. Jackson prided herself on never treating her colleagues in such a manner.
As the room filled, Ms. Jackson gazed about, taking in the faces of those required to be there. Baldwin High was, as white people liked to say, “diverse” in its population. The biggest school in the city, it drew its students from a vast area, but among the staff, the so-called diversity was not as robust as it could have been. Principal Kendricks was a white man, and out of eight assistant principals there were only two who were not white: Ms. Garcia and a young, animated Black man and Teach for America alum by the name of Mr. Turner, who was clearly on the ambitious track; he had a popular Twitter account that had more than ten thousand followers and regularly featured pictures of him smiling and fist-bumping students as he enthusiastically participated in classroom activities. Ms. Jackson often wondered when—or if—he slept.
To be clear, the faculty and staff were much more representative of the city than they had been back in 1977, when Ms. Jackson had started at Baldwin as a young calculus teacher. Back then, Mr. Bob Lehrer, the source of this godforsaken meeting, had been a relatively young man in his late thirties. At this thought—as was often the case these days—Ms. Jackson was briefly taken aback by the long stretch of her career, and by how much she had experienced and seen.
Aware that her thoughts were drifting, she tried to focus on Ms. Harper, who had started the meeting by asking everyone in the room to “share out” their names, positions, and a fun fact about themselves. Ms. Jackson thought she saw the English teachers grimace at the grammatically incorrect phrase.
“Um, I’m Ms. Sanderson,” began the youngest teacher in the room, “and this is my first year in the classroom teaching geography, and my fun fact is—” She stammered and started to blush, apparently unable to think of a “fun fact.”
“Your fun fact is you’re a very nervous driver,” offered her colleague Mr. Rayfield, smiling in her direction.
“Right, exactly,” Ms. Sanderson finished, grinning back at him.
Ms. Jackson immediately understood that there was something going on between the two of them, and hoped that they would either get married or break up in the summer, not during the school year. At least they were in separate departments.
After a few more voices offered brief, strained introductions (Ms. Jimenez: “My fun fact is I absolutely despise fun facts”), Mr. Fitzsimmons inserted himself into the conversation without bothering to introduce himself by name to Ms. Harper.
“My fun fact is I have roughly forty students per class because the damn state of Texas refuses to fund public education properly, how about that?” he said, smiling broadly. Several of the teachers in the room fought not to laugh audibly.
Ms. Harper’s eyes grew wide, and she glanced around uncertainly.
“Okay, Mr. Fitzsimmons,” said Principal Kendricks from the back of the room, sighing deeply, “thank you for that.”
“Yes, thank you for that, Mr. Fitzsimmons,” murmured Ms. Harper, regaining her composure. “I think that just about takes care of introductions. Well, except for me.” She pushed her smile into full force again before saying, “I know you’re all thinking this woman from Central Office is showing up to tell us how to do things and she’s so out of touch, but I’ll have you know I worked as a second-grade teacher for three years, so I get what it’s like to be in the trenches!”
Upon hearing this—perhaps trying to mentally transport herself elsewhere—veteran English teacher Ms. Fletcher closed her eyes and tipped her face toward the library ceiling.
“After working with the kiddos,” continued Ms. Harper, “I decided to get my master’s in counseling and increase my impact by taking a job at Central Office, where I’m deputy director of the district’s counseling department. And my fun fact is that I love avocados!”
Nobody said anything, and after a few uncomfortable beats Ms. Harper proceeded with the debriefing session, slowly defining words like grief and trauma and process in her affected tone of voice. It all felt highly scripted because it almost certainly was. Ms. Jackson found nothing particularly insightful or helpful in what this young woman was parroting; instead, her mind drifted to the unanswered emails in her inbox and to the lasagna her (happily retired) husband, George, had promised to prepare for dinner.
The session moved on, with Ms. Harper instructing the group to make K-W-L charts on the provided chart paper, complete with three columns, each marked with a K , a W , or an L. “In these columns we will place what we know about our grief over Mr. Lehrer’s passing and the event in the courtyard, what we want to know about that grief, and what we will learn about that grief,” Ms. Harper explained cheerily.
As Ms. Jackson worked with Nurse Honeycutt on their chart, she could overhear the English teachers at the next table.
“I know I want to die right now,” said Ms. Brennan to Mr. Williams. “Write that down.”
“And I want to know how to die,” Mr. Williams responded quietly, “right here in this library, so we don’t have to sit through any more of this shit.”
“After you do it, I will learn how to do it, too,” finished Ms. Fletcher dryly, completing the joke.
Being longtime veterans, the three were easily able to fill their chart with appropriate, vacuous nonsense that would appease Ms. Harper, even as they joked about darker, unwritten content. It was how they managed to survive such moments.
The session droned on as Ms. Harper blathered. While Ms. Jackson worked, she noticed Principal Kendricks and Ms. Garcia, the newest assistant principal, putting their heads together. The other assistant principal present, Ms. Baker, worked quietly with the two younger teachers. Even the grumbly Mr. Fitzsimmons and the snarky Ms. Jimenez played along. She felt a swell of affection for everyone in the room as they dutifully complied with Ms. Harper’s idiotic directions. In the end, they knew, it would only help them shed this undue burden the district was forcing them to carry.
With about fifteen minutes left in the session, Ms. Harper moved toward a blank piece of chart paper hanging next to the still-empty parking lot poster. In careful print, she wrote, “How Does Managing Trauma Create a Value-Added Education for Students?” She punctuated the sentence with a large smiley face, then turned to face the group.
“We know that healthy teachers are better teachers, right?” said Ms. Harper. “So to sum up our learning today, let’s guide our thinking through an outcomes-based lens and brainstorm and share out all the ways that our work here answers one of the district’s essential questions for this school year: How can we measure our impact on student growth in relation to the socioemotional learning we’ve done here today?”
Ms. Jackson sighed. Was Ms. Harper honestly trying to tie the events surrounding Bob Lehrer’s death to the school’s T-SOAR scores? But of course she was, even if she didn’t come out and explicitly state it. Standardized test scores were everything, and that fact wasn’t even Ms. Harper’s fault.
The Texas Standards of Academic Readiness tests (T-SOAR, sometimes casually referred to by teachers as bedsore ) were the bane of their existence—high-stakes, poorly written tests that caused unreal amounts of stress for students and faculty alike and transformed normally enthusiastic, creative classrooms into drill-and-kill multiple-choice factories where students ceased to be human beings and instead became data points. Championed in equal measure by the state’s conservatives (who longed for concrete reasons to defund public schools and sell them to charters) and bourgeois neoliberals (who saw college degrees and white-collar jobs as the only measures of “success”), these tests had so damaged public education that Ms. Jackson worried their deleterious effects would be felt for generations to come. It took an exceptional amount of strength and commitment not to become worn down by the constant focus on the T-SOAR and instead remember that the children they served were real, actual people with unique gifts and needs.
As the room began to understand the next step on Ms. Harper’s agenda, there was uncomfortable shifting in seats and open eye-rolling. Ms. Jackson wondered again just how much Ms. Harper earned, and if it was enough to make up for the hostility she almost certainly had to face on a regular basis. Maybe she was oblivious to the hostility? Or maybe she—like some in the profession—had actually swallowed the lie that the T-SOAR mattered and was a good judge of ability, both of children and of teachers. Who could know?
The question of how their meeting about Mr. Lehrer might connect to standardized testing hung in the air unanswered. Ms. Harper did not relent but instead projected her fixed smile at the room without stopping.
Ms. Sanderson, clearly an overachiever who couldn’t help herself, raised her hand.
“Great!” Ms. Harper almost shouted. “Let’s hear from you!”
“Um…,” the young teacher began as Ms. Harper poised herself by the chart paper, marker in hand, ready to take notes. “I guess we could, like, do an assessment after this meeting and compare it with one from before and then, like, see if there has been an impact on the data?”
Ms. Jackson thought Ms. Sanderson’s tiny voice sounded defeated. Sad. She noticed the first-year teacher glancing shyly about the room, seeking approval, and Ms. Jackson wondered if her young colleague had ever imagined that such a dry and soulless meeting would be a part of her work as a teacher. She also wondered how much better this meeting might have been had Ms. Harper bothered to actually address the loss of Mr. Lehrer with the group in an authentic way. Ms. Jackson had heard through the grapevine that Ms. Sanderson had been the one to discover the body and that, naturally, it had shaken her up. She made a mental note to check in with the young teacher later, one-on-one.
“An assessment is a great idea!” Ms. Harper exclaimed, enthusiastically affirming Ms. Sanderson’s tepid response. She wrote pre-test/post-test on the paper, then turned to look back at the group. “What else?”
From the back came the voice of Mr. Kendricks, and the entire room shifted in unison, the faces of the teachers and staff members in the room now focused on him. Their principal stood up and smiled congenially.
“You know, Ms. Harper, I want to thank you for your time today,” he said, and Ms. Jackson could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “I’m going to be sure to tell Anna Dowell over at Central Office what a help you’ve been for us, but I think given the sensitive nature of what happened in the courtyard, this last activity might be better completed just by those who are a part of the school community.”
He was so affable in his delivery, so unthreatening in his approach, but as he spoke he walked toward Ms. Harper in much the same way an experienced bouncer gently approaches a drunk to guide him out of the bar. As if he can get the drunk to believe it was his idea to leave all along.
“Oh!” said Ms. Harper. “Well, I think…” She was somewhat uncertain. In the hierarchy of the district, she outranked him, even though he was more than twenty years her senior. That said, Baldwin was his school. His turf. On some level Ms. Jackson knew that Ms. Harper would have to respect that, even as the head guidance counselor worried what such a bold move might mean for their principal. She noticed Ms. Baker, Principal Kendricks’s second-in-command, nervously appraising what was going on.
“We can help you gather your stuff,” Principal Kendricks said, still smiling. Understanding what was being asked, some of the teachers began gathering Ms. Harper’s chart paper and markers and packing them up.
“Again, I can’t thank you enough for this guidance,” said Mr. Kendricks. “You deserve and will receive a glowing report.”
These words seemed to relax Ms. Harper. Ms. Jackson knew she was the sort of district employee who found value not in her work but in glowing reports about her work.
After Ms. Harper was packed up, Principal Kendricks volunteered to walk her out.
“Let’s talk tomorrow,” he murmured quietly to Ms. Jackson as he passed her. “Just go home and unwind.”
Ms. Jackson shot him a look of gratitude—hers certainly not the only one he’d received over the last couple of minutes—and waited for the library to empty before she started to gather her things.
A young custodian arrived, pushing her janitorial cart through the library doors, ready to get to work. Trying to quell her worries over what had just happened, Ms. Jackson excused herself and got out of the woman’s way. She was the last one to leave the meeting.