by Liz Murray
The chairman of the board of SBM and a passionate English teacher for many years, Perry was absolutely indignant about the idea of segregation, and he challenged the committee to instead start a real alternative high school that met the needs of these struggling students. Several people supported Perry, including the chairman of the teachers’ union, Vincent Brevetti, another man who dedicated his life to empowering young people through the betterment of education. Together, Perry and Vince spent months meeting to design a school that would serve, rather than “park,” this at-risk population of kids who had failed within the structure of mainstream education. The two men became a team.
Every morning at seven a.m., Perry and Vince would arrive at school for an hour or more of planning. The school they were building would be so much more than a dropout prevention program. Rather than base the model of their alternative school on what was not working with the troubled students, they decided to seek out an educational model that did work, one that had already proven to be highly successful. They visited and observed other high schools, ones that catered to more elite and privileged populations of kids. What they found in the design of those schools deeply inspired them, and they returned to Chelsea determined.
The students of so-called Failure Academy would instead become the students of Humanities Preparatory Academy. “Prep,” as Perry and Vince began calling it, would become a mini-school that provided at-risk students the opportunities and privileges of a personalized education traditionally reserved only for those who could afford elite private schooling. The design of Prep would be radically different from typical mainstream education.
Prep would cap the number of students at 180, so that pupils could benefit from one-on-one attention from teachers. High-stakes tests would not be the measure of a student’s success at Prep, for the feeling was that it narrowed the curriculum and the students’ ability to demonstrate their real knowledge. Instead, something called Performance-Based Assessment Tasks took their place. PBATs were a rigorous and personalized means of testing students by allowing them to respond to test questions in depth, as opposed to the traditional fill-in-the-blank style of high-stakes New York State Regents exams, which in so many cases were the catalyst for students failing. Instead, PBATs would require students to produce thorough, in-depth work that demonstrated real world knowledge and application of their semester-long classes. This could be done a number of ways, via portfolios, extended writing projects, or even through classroom presentations wherein a student was given the opportunity to teach the class the lessons they learned throughout a semester. In doing this, PBATs would open the space for an alternative curriculum, and with it, a way for teachers to teach students differently.
So courses at Prep expanded beyond standard names and themes such as Global 1,2,3, and Literature 2, trading them in for dynamic classes like Facing History & Ourselves, in which students studied the implications of genocide, and Themes in Humanity, in which these formerly failing students would read Dante’s Inferno or Kafka. English 1 would become Shakespeare on Stage, and students would comprehend and perform Hamlet to earn their English credit.
Far more than mere name changes, the courses themselves were meant to cultivate an environment of authenticity and encourage depth of thought. To do this, classrooms were capped at around fifteen students per class. This way, student and teacher alike sat in a circle of chairs, looking one another in the eyes for an active, heavily participatory discussion-based lesson. There would be no place for a student to hide out at Prep, no place for them to get lost, and no place where they might be forgotten.
For Perry, Prep was a labor of love; he was dedicated to seeing his second-chance students win. His belief was that if the mainstream school system had failed, then it would require something different for these students to succeed. Prep would be that difference. In this way, the students were not looked at as dysfunctional; the system was dysfunctional. The concept of “failure” incorporated within the system’s very design was not in any stage of the planning of Humanities Prep. By design, Prep was made to facilitate for its students what was possible.
I flew through the double doors fifteen minutes late, my forehead broken into beads of sweat, the bun I’d attempted curling with flyaways. Humanities Preparatory Academy. I read and reread my journal page to ensure that I was in the right building. The place looked so small, like the back office of an actual school.
The main office, Prep’s only office, contained a set of four sectioned-off cubicles with walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Filing cabinets had been rolled into the short partitions that made up each room; one had a shipment sticker still stuck to the side of it, with the school’s address penned onto the boxes from their delivery. A fan whirred from on top of a bookcase that was filled with random, secondhand books. Above it, a faded poster read, LIFE REWARDS ACTION, in bold, purple script. The secretary, April, an African American woman with pretty eyes, instructed me to have a seat in the waiting area, which was a row of classroom chairs strung along the wall across from her desk.
“You’re late. They started without you,” she said, tilting her head, gold jewelry dangling from her neck, wrists, and ears. “Don’t worry, Perry will be out real soon and you can talk to him.”
Looking down at the last cubicle, to the far left, through a thin glass window in a door, I saw a chalkboard with a sentence written and underlined on top:
Pick one of the following topics and write an essay on its meaning.
Diversity
Community
Leadership
A middle-aged white man with a goatee and glasses led a discussion that was mostly muted behind the partition. He was dressed in dark corduroys and a maroon tie. The first thing I noticed about him was that he seemed to laugh and smile easily. He looked friendly. Five or so young people sat in a semicircle around him, listening and answering questions at length. I pulled out my pen and got to work on the essay. I didn’t know what I could write about community or leadership, so I chose diversity because my mind went to the discrimination I faced in my old schools.
For three pages, I detailed the way people assumed things about me based on appearance, my race, or my being unkempt. They’d called me blanquita, little white girl, for so many years on University Avenue. “You must be rich, white girl, snotty, too,” they’d hiss as I went through the halls of Junior High School 141. I also went on about the way I was often stared at for my Goth clothing in my previous high school interviews. In detail I described the anger I felt when I knew a teacher had rejected me before really listening. Written with sloppy blue penmanship, my paragraphs were fat and long. Reading them over, I felt they made a coherent point about diversity and discrimination. It was the first writing assignment I’d completed in years. I chewed on my pen. The meeting I should have been in suddenly let out.
I had to stop the teacher. He was on his way out, dashing past me.
“S-sir,” I said. “Sir.” He turned and smiled warmly.
“Hello,” he said, his open hand extended. “Perry.” He finished his sentence laughing, looking directly into my eyes. I looked away. He was one of “those people” on the other side of the wall. The intensity of his eye contact caught me off guard and made my heart pound; I flinched when he put out his hand, stared at it too long, and grabbed hold to shake it only at the last possible moment.
“Hi, I had an appointment to be in there, too.”
“Elizabeth—” he held up a notepad—“. . . Murray. What happened?” he asked, raising his eyes from reading, looking at me through his glasses. His totally focused attention made me uneasy, but it also made him interesting. He seemed different. If there were a photograph of the day I met Perry, it would be a perfect study in opposites: Goth mess meets jovial man who, based on his glasses and desk of Shakespeare books, appeared to live in the library.
“Well, Liz, actually. Call me Liz. Please, I just need a chance to sit and talk to you. I’m really sorry about being late.
”
I was so nervous my palms were sweating. I was not good at this sort of thing; I’d never felt the permission to just talk to authority figures, ever. The other teachers interviewing me must have noticed it. I worried what this guy would do when he noticed it. I mean, what must I look like to him? A ratty street person. Lice girl, dirty, truant, thief, late, irresponsible.
“Look, Liz,” he said, without taking his eyes off me, “I would love to take you inside to talk, but I’ve got a class in ten and there’s an essay component to the interview. It’s going to take too long. I’m afraid you’ll have to reschedule.”
I held up my completed essay for Perry to see. “Done,” I told him. “I did it already.” He looked surprised, squinting at the papers, taking them from my hand to skim over, quickly. “Now can I have those ten minutes?” I pushed.
He laughed that lighthearted laugh again, took a few steps back into the office, and swung open his door. They’re just people, I reminded myself as I took a seat.
“Look,” I started, “my record is bad, I know that . . .”
I wanted to control that conversation, direct it, defend myself before he could judge me. Only, as I spoke, I quickly saw by his facial expressions—empathetic and interested—that he didn’t seem to judge me at all. Perry just listened. He watched me and took in everything I said. He was genuinely connected; I could see it on his face. A feeling of trust opened in me as we spoke, and spontaneously, because of it, I told him everything. Everything except that I was homeless. I did not want to go back into the system, and I knew it would be Perry’s job to report me if he knew I had nowhere to live. So I withheld that one detail, and shared with him everything else.
“And I have this friend Sam who I cut school with a lot, so I could, I don’t know, cut loose. Well, I always meant to graduate. I really did. But then years passed and it got out of hand.”
It was all flooding out of me, and I became more emotional in front of him than any of the teachers who had interviewed and rejected me in the last few weeks, more emotional than I wanted to be. I couldn’t help it. It was just an alien feeling, having a teacher really connect the way he did, and not at all with pity. Instead he listened actively, asking clarifying questions, offering insight, even relating to me, sighing audibly at the details of my mother’s funeral, but never once indicating pity, only understanding and interest. But listening to the sound of my own voice as I opened up to him, I began to judge myself. When I heard myself explaining my life to someone else, particularly to a professional type like him, I sounded so dysfunctional—and he looked so normal. My eyes traveled around the room, from the computer in back to Perry’s clean brown leather shoes, then to my own rotten, ten-dollar boots.
“Liz,” he stepped in, a grim expression on his face. He was suddenly very serious. “That’s . . . horrendous. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot, and I do want to help. But I also want to make sure I’m helping in the right way, do you understand?” I don’t know why I thought he meant calling social services. My eyes found the quickest exits. I could outrun this guy; the train back to Bedford was just five blocks away. “What I mean, Liz, is that I see from your appointment slip that you’ll soon be seventeen, with no high school history whatsoever. Is that right?”
“I have one credit,” I said. Coming out of his mouth, seventeen sounded so old. Of all the kids who interviewed before me, none of them could have been older than fifteen.
“Well, I admire your effort to come here today. I just want to say, if this is the right place for you, then that’s one thing. But that depends on what you’re looking for. Four years of high school might be a lot for a seventeen-year-old. I would be remiss if I did not inform you that there is an excellent, six-month GED program offered at night on the other side of this building. . . . Before we talk more, I just want to make you aware of your options.”
Options. He’d struck a nerve. All those times I’d watched Ma humble herself to Brick, accepting his demands, his rough shoves, his shouting, opening her legs to him out of need—all because she lacked options. Daddy with his sharp mind and his rich life experiences, his education, living in a shelter, without options.
“I’m an ex-con, who would hire me?” he often said. “My options are limited.” Being in the motels, eating from the trash Carlos left behind, no options. I’d heard GEDs turned out great for many people. But after all that Ma and Daddy had gone through, something in my gut told me graduating high school meant I’d have more options.
“I see where you’re coming from, Perry, and I really appreciate your help . . . but I want to graduate high school. It’s just something I have to do.”
Hearing myself say it out loud made it real. Speaking what I wanted was totally different from just thinking it. Speaking it made me connect; I could feel it. I was shaking. Perry’s eyes were still on me. I tried to guess what he was thinking about what I said, what he thought of me: Failure. Dirty. Train wreck. Or he was trying to decide how to tell me no in the most polite way possible. With that tie and those glasses, those shiny shoes, he looked like the polite type. He probably grew up in Westchester, I thought. He probably told people like me “no” all the time, just like the rest of them did.
Perry leaned back heavily in his chair and let out a small sigh. But he didn’t look stressed; he looked emotional. I waited.
“Liz,” he started, sitting up again, sending my heart racing. Here it comes, I thought. His voice was much lower, his face completely serious. “Can you get here on time?”
A smile pushed itself across my face and my eyes welled up. “Absolutely,” I answered. “Yes.”
The only catch was that I had to bring in a guardian to officially register me in school, as soon as possible.
Daddy and I met on Nineteenth Street and Seventh Avenue later that week. By then, I’d started to sketch out a plan. I would register for school, spend the summer working, save money, and attend Prep while living off my savings. It seemed solid. But the whole thing hinged on Daddy’s help—I needed him to get me past these registration papers. From there, everything else I could handle on my own.
When I showed up for our meeting that muggy Thursday morning, I found Daddy leaning on a lamppost, engrossed in a book. I paced myself as I approached him, taking time to ready myself and take deep, relaxing breaths. The last thing I wanted was for Daddy to see me emotional; I don’t think either of us knew how to deal with each other’s emotions. That’s probably why we had a silent agreement to pretend we didn’t have any. But seeing him there, I was emotional. For months, I’d grown so accustomed to seeing strange faces and moving endlessly to new locations that the familiarity of Daddy’s face, standing out from a sea of faces, hit me hard. No matter how much time or hurt had passed between us, I simply missed my father. Now here he was again, resurfaced, a thinner, unshaved version of himself, tattered-looking, made offbeat by the busy Manhattan life that surrounded him. He looked as fragile as Ma had that day on Mosholu Parkway when we blew our wishes into the sky on dandelion puffs. Rarely had I experienced my parents outside of our home, or away from University Avenue, but every time I did, the world around us kept reminding me of their limitations, how society made them look vagrant.
The night before, I’d called his shelter and was patched through to him by a woman who called out his name sharply, which made me feel sorry for him, protective. The way he’d spoken, so faintly into the phone, I might have woken him from a nap, I thought.
“Daddy. I’m going back to school. I need you to register me. Uh, I was hoping you could register me.” I got right to the point because time on the shelter phone is limited. He’d asked twice for clarification. “No, not a program, Daddy, a real high school, yes. I kind of need you there.” Everything in my body resisted using the word need with him. “Do you think you can make it?” If his answer had been “no” for any reason, I’m not sure what I would have done. But it wasn’t. He agreed to meet me, without the hesitation I’d expected. Though I had
n’t explained to him about the lying part. That I would save for later.
For the school’s administration, I designed an airtight story that in no way indicated I was homeless. I would use a friend’s address and a fake phone number as my cover. Because I knew the school would never be able to reach Daddy, I’d tell them he was a long-haul truck driver who was on the road for weeks at a time. I decided the story was believable enough to work, so long as I could get Daddy to go along with it.
He smiled as I walked up to greet him, a huge smile at me from under his newsboy cap. I smiled back, and my hesitation gave way to the simple joy I felt from seeing him again. We hugged, and after he rubbed a single page from his thick book carefully between his fingers, and took a moment to dog-ear it, tucking it into his shoulder bag, we began walking. I was nervous about talking to him about anything too serious—our current lives, Lisa, Ma—so I got right into the details about Prep, as though we saw each other every day and could afford to be casual. I coached him on all the little, important parts.
“Two hundred sixty-four East 202nd Street.” I recited a phone number. “Zip code 10458. Can you remember all that, Daddy?”
His face was all twisted up, and I could tell he was wondering what he’d gotten himself into. “You want me to say what?” he yelled. “Lizzy, they think I’m a truck driver?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not going to quiz you about the industry, ya know?” He seemed more panicked than he was angry; I noticed his hands shaking a little.
Maybe my own uneasiness about entering meetings like these was inherited.
“And I live where?” he asked.
Vince, the co-director of Prep, Perry’s partner in running the school, met us. Also a middle-aged man with glasses, Vince seemed a little more serious than Perry, with a harder edge to him. Still, he smiled just as much and he turned out to be equally as warm and kind. When we walked into his office, he presented Daddy with a set of papers, spreading them out on the table between the two of them. The parts where Daddy needed to sign were already X’d.