Judy Sunde Hanawalt

Things I'm Thinking About

Tag: school

The Berkeley High Walkout

September 21, 2016 / / 2 Comments

On November 5, 2015, students at my son’s high school, Berkeley High, walked out in protest of a hate crime. Read the article about it in Berkeleyside, with pictures and videos.

Today, a new article came out in the Daily Cal, Racial Achievement Gap in Berkeley Public Schools Persists. I left my blog post sitting in the draft box for a year, but the problem didn’t go away.

This is my experience that day and in the following week. 

The phone rang about 8 in the morning, but I missed it. I listened to the message a few minutes later; it was the Berkeley High principal calling to inform the school community about a hate-filled, racist threat left on a computer screen in the school library.

The news was already out in the school community, circulated by students who had heard about it somehow last night. Before my son left for school, he knew about a rally that was already being planned. By mid-morning, the Berkeley High students, along with some teachers and staff, were walking out of school, and the peaceful crowd of at least 700 moved in a large, chanting group up to Cal, rallied there joined by students from Cal and Berkeley City College, and then came back to BHS.

My son was texting me with updates.

“There is a walk out.”

“I’m at it.”

“Principal Pasarow is speaking”

“We’re on the move.”

I was out around town, hearing the helicopters, maneuvering around the crowds and police cars near Cal to meet a friend for lunch. After lunch, I watched the crowd of chanting students pass on their way back to the high school. I walked with them for a few blocks, moved and proud of their unity, kids standing up for their friends.

I came to BHS a little later for my volunteer shift at the desk in the front office. It was quiet, except for a few parents calling or coming by to ask what was going on. Some of the parents were upset, challenging the principal for letting the students walk out.

Should he have stood up against the protesters, stopped the rally, squelched the students’ uprising?  I’m glad he didn’t stand anywhere except with the students–anything else would have made him an opponent. Engaging with the world around them and speaking out against injustice is a virtue. Peaceful demonstration is not something to be punished.

A few days later, I was filling a friend in on the details at a coffee shop and an African-American woman sitting nearby overheard me. “Do you work at Berkeley High?” she asked me. I told her I’m a parent and a volunteer there. I expected her to agree with me that the walk out was great.

She didn’t.

She told me that if something should be protested, it’s not a prank on a school computer. Someone should be walking out over the systemic injustices that contribute to the appalling achievement gap between white kids and kids of color. She quoted some statistics that left me feeling both defensive and helpless.

“You have to start somewhere”, I told her. “I’m at the school trying to do something”, I told her.

I left with a heavy, hopeless feeling where there had been a smug sense of rightness before. The friend I was with comforted me, “You can’t change people’s minds sometimes.”

Thinking about it later, I realized that I don’t want to change that woman’s mind. I want to listen to her, even if what she says hurts, even if it feels like too much, especially if it shakes up ideas that I have let settle into a solid, useless mass.

The next day, I searched for reported test scores in my school district, looking at graphs comparing the achievement levels of students at our school broken down by race and income.

She’s right.

How can it be that less than 30 percent of minority students in our high school can do basic algebra? Why does the math program work for 80 percent of white kids? Why aren’t we teaching math to all the students? Statistics for reading and writing are no better.

I’m mystified, I’m upset, I’m uncomfortable. I’m angry. I’m forced to look outside my self and my own interests, beyond the success of my own children. I don’t  have the answers, but I’m finally hearing the problem. Our school does not work for everyone.

It’s not just about an isolated event, it’s not just about appreciating another culture, or about being a decent human being to other human beings. It’s not about working harder, acting better and taking the opportunities that come.

It goes deeper than that, to the very core of how our society works.

Still, I’m proud of the Berkeley High kids for speaking up, for not allowing one more incident go by unnoticed. They stood with their classmates. It is doing something; it is a start.

Class Time

October 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Since my first child went off to kindergarten in a mist of tears–both hers and mine–I have volunteered in the classroom or the school every year. I wanted to be there to see and understand my children’s world, to let them know how much I value their education, and to support and encourage the teachers and staff.

That first day was in 1992. By the time my youngest graduates, I will have been a school volunteer for 25 years. That is a lot of reading groups, field trips and worksheet grading.

In the elementary years, most of the teachers were happy to have a parent in the classroom to be another pair of hands and eyes to help. I did art projects, gave make-up spelling tests, spent individual time with struggling readers, supervised recess and jumped in to help where needed.

In one first-grade class, I came every Friday, filed the week’s papers and prepared the take-home folders for all the students. In other classes, I brought cookies for parties and class lunches, decorated bulletin boards, cut out craft pieces, and put together and sorted take-home reading books.

A few times, I worked with individual kids on writing projects. As I read their stories, I was sometimes confused, unable to figure out what they were trying to express. “What are you trying to say here? Tell me the story,” I would ask.  As we talked and they told me about their families, their dreams, and their ideas, this small task grew into a relationship.

There were a few dull moments, and some tasks I did not enjoy–sorting crayons, sharpening pencils, doing dishes in the classroom sink and drying them with brown paper towels–but generally, the time went quickly, talking, working  and laughing with the kids and other parents.

For the most part, I think my kids were happy to have me there, though I’m sure it was embarrassing sometimes–when I grabbed them and hugged them, or called them by an endearment instead of their name.

Once they got to middle school, they were less likely to want me in class, but didn’t mind me coming along on field trips–as long as I didn’t try to eat lunch with them.

In high school, I found new ways to be at school: proctoring for tests, checking textbooks in or out, or working at the front desk. That’s my volunteer job now–greeting visitors, directing them to right building and answering phone calls. I love being  a part of the school community and getting the inside scoop.

Volunteering at school gave me a way to see my kids’ lives away from home, at a place they spend so much time. I wanted to know their friends and  how they interact with their peers. I think my kids were watching me too. I hope they were picking up how much I valued the work being done at school, and the fact that I liked to be there.

I was helping at registration this fall when some boys from one of my kid’s sports teams came by, including a boy my son has known since second grade.  Another child came through the line that I recognized from a reading group in elementary school. “HI Nick!” I said. “Do you remember me from fourth grade reading?” He’s a junior in high school now, but he did remember. I hope that being known and cared about by a mom at school makes their school experience a little more positive.

There is a little over a year left in my school-volunteering career. I have loved my time investing in the education of my kids and my community. I think there will be tears on the last day, too.

Culture Shock

October 9, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Moving here felt like moving to a different country. I think it took a year to feel comfortable–to know where to find parking, where to shop, how to get around–to master the details of daily life.

Such narrow streets. So many pedestrians. Crazy, horn-blowing, illegal U-turning drivers. Where were all the usual chain stores and restaurants I knew and loved? Even Safeway felt foreign, with a security guard watching me as I roamed it’s small, crowed aisles. Every day, it felt like an accomplishment to come home and park–two wheels up on the curb so emergency vehicles can get by–safely in front of my house after a foray downtown.

The community, though, is  warmer and friendlier than I thought it would be. I was prepared for cool detachment, people too busy with city life to have relationships. I was wrong. People have deep roots, and many have grown up here, some in the same house for generations.   The small shops and unique restaurants, the streets lined with shady trees and old, quaint homes felt solid, anchored. I did not expect that. I thought I would find isolated people, superficial relationships, a cold and hard place.

The city feels like a small town. It’s the rootedness, the focus on local businesses.  It feels connected also because the school district actively  integrates the schools, by busing students and by having only one large high school. Your neighborhood includes much more of the city when your school is all the way across town. Without these sometimes-controversial policies (the district has been sued for reverse discrimination), there would quickly become “good” schools in the more expensive neighborhoods and “bad” schools in the less pricey areas. The Hills and The Flats.

These policies became real  for us when our kids were not assigned to the the lovely elementary school two blocks away from our house; they were bused to a school downtown, while others from down the hill come up to our neighborhood.

My first thoughts were not joy at this tangible example of justice and equality. They were more along the lines of feeling wronged, judged by my race and zip-code. It’s not fair that I should have to suffer, that my kids should ride the bus for an hour each way to attend a school with lower academic performance. I started thinking about how to protest, force the issue, get what I wanted for my children.

Another thought came tumbling in, though: an awareness of my privilege, my power, and a sense of how flexing those muscles runs counter to the ideals I said I wanted my children to discover and own. I agree with the purpose of the bussing. I love that Berkeley cares about every child receiving a good education. Can I then say I don’t want my kids to participate?

Here’s the reality: My kids have everything they need. They have supportive, involved parents. They are never cold, hungry, or alone. They will go to college if they want to. They lack nothing, really. I don’t have to go scraping and scratching to snatch up the best of everything.

Now, all have moved through elementary and middle school, and looking back, I’m satisfied with their experience at their school in The Flats. It was an involved, caring community. They made good friends, and met back up with some of them in high school after going to different middle schools. It was a broadening experience for all of us. Not what I would have chosen. Better than that.

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