Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  “Back then, they felt they couldn’t see anything beyond Belle Glade,” said Grear, who passed away in May 2012 at the age of eighty-four. “And for having never been out of Belle Glade, they were dispirited in trying to see anything to help them out, unless they were an athlete. If you’ve never been to the outside to know there’s something brighter, you never have any hope of leaving.”

  By the time Grear retired in 2000, two years after the advent of FCAT, Glades Central had a firm reputation as a chronic academic underperformer. She’d managed to raise the school grade to a D, along with students’ writing scores, but still only 44 percent of seniors were graduating. The school offered only one Advanced Placement course, and reading scores were still the worst in Palm Beach County.

  The years of stigma had also weathered the staff. Teachers complained about colleagues who’d given up on teaching, instead showing movies and allowing students to run wild through the halls. There were also numerous reports of faculty having sex with students, a practice many said had persisted unchecked for years.

  It was certainly one of the lowest points in the school’s academic record. When it came to athletics, however, Glades Central had reached an apex. The year Grear retired, the Raiders had just won three back-to-back state football championships and were on their way to a record forty-seven straight wins. The team was ranked top ten in the nation. Football fever was at its peak, with thousands of fans packing the bleachers on Friday night and players headed to college by the dozen.

  And that was exactly the problem, thought Mary Evans, who took over Glades Central in 2002 and practically flipped the world upside down. Born and raised in Belle Glade, Evans had performed a miraculous turnaround while principal of nearby Gove Elementary, the only school in the Glades ever to earn an A grade.

  A month before taking over at Glades Central, she’d vowed to then governor Jeb Bush at a hearing in Tallahassee that within the year the school would be more famous for its Brain Bowl victories than for football. The governor had been so fired up by her moxie that he’d slapped his dais and volunteered to help in any way, even visit the school and paint his hair purple.

  “Well, get ready,” she told him.

  Evans’s first act of business was to “zero-base” the entire teaching staff, making every teacher reapply for his or her job, regardless of tenure. Days after the interviews concluded, a quarter of the faculty received letters that said, “I’m sorry to inform you, but …”

  Included was Willie Bueno, the head football coach who’d taught physical education for nearly a decade. Also on the list was the wildly popular wrestling coach, Frank Lasagna, who’d been at Glades Central for nineteen years and produced a string of district titles and twenty-five state place winners.

  Going even further, Evans transferred Jay Seider, the athletic director and girls’ track coach who’d been hired in 1971 by Al Werneke. Not only had Seider brought home ten state track titles, but the murder of his son Jyron two years earlier had become something ingrained in Raider football history. The 2000 championship trophy that Jyron’s teammates had won was removed from the main office, replaced with academic awards (the trophies were relocated to other parts of the campus). And for good measure, Evans then disbanded the Raider booster club.

  “Glades Central was a failing school and that bothered me,” she told the Sun Sentinel at the time. “I want the school to be recognized for its athletes and scholars. Academics and athletics. I say that in alphabetical order.”

  The dismantling of the athletic program sparked an uproar. Parents and fans argued that for most of these kids, sports was the only avenue into college, and that athletics had educated hundreds in the Glades over the decades. One columnist pointed out that if sports was such a distraction for young minds, how did Evans explain Tim Sims, the Raider track star and football player who’d been given a scholarship to Stanford?

  But in the end, the sky did not collapse. The Raiders, under the new leadership of coach Larry Coffey, still barreled through the season undefeated and lost in the playoffs. In the classroom, Evans backed up her promise. Students received more-rigorous tutoring, and football players were required to sit through study hall before practice. Reading and math scores improved, some dramatically. Evans sent a dozen teachers to get AP certification and made it harder for kids to drop classes they deemed too difficult. Governor Bush even paid a visit and accepted a football signed with players’ SAT and ACT scores. (Bush had apparently forgotten about his promise to dye his hair purple, though he still drew laughs after sitting down on a wad of bubble gum.)

  In addition to academic reforms, Evans began working to change students’ expectations of themselves. She arranged for the band to play its first-ever concert on the coast and secured sponsorship money for Glades Central girls to enter the town’s annual Harvest Queen pageant, which for decades had never featured a black contestant.

  “That really lifts your spirits as a young girl,” said Evans, who now worked as the city spokesperson. “There were lots of things to be done here, but adults had to get off their lazy behinds and do them. We’ve always been recognized for football, but what about the other 96 percent? What are you going to do for them?”

  But for all the incremental improvements and changes, even down to the way the staff answered the phones (“Glades Central. Expect more.”), Evans’s reign at Glades Central was short. In 2004, citing health issues, she transferred to another elementary school and was gone.

  • • •

  IN THE YEARS following Evans’s gutting of Glades Central, the school weathered two more F grades, another zero-basing of staff, three more principals, and a near takeover by the state. The Raider athletic program, meanwhile, clinched state championships in both football and track.

  The job of principal in the Glades had never been easy, and if anything, after Evans, it only became more difficult. In 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a set of national standards designed to narrow the achievement gap between low-performing minority schools and high-performing wealthier ones, which tended to be predominantly white. The law dictated what states taught, how they tested, and how teachers were trained. It also established rules and consequences for schools failing to make yearly progress, such as allowing each student an opportunity to transfer. The law also tied federal funding to scores.

  In Florida the measuring stick for NCLB was, of course, the FCAT. And it seemed that every day since Anthony Anderson had taken over as Glades Central’s latest principal, he and his staff had had one goal in their sights: getting off the list, gaining freedom.

  After the state intervened in a low-performing school, it controlled many parts of a teacher’s day and what was seen in classrooms. There were whiteboard configurations with lesson plans categorized under the headings: I Can, I Do, We Do, You Do It Together, and You Do It Alone; a lesson plan on the door outside for the state-mandated monitors; teachers using “differentiated instruction” with individual students to identify strengths and weaknesses; classrooms plastered with students’ current work; and “data walls” displaying students’ progress on each test.

  And because of NCLB (pronounced by faculty as “Nicolby,” in a tone that evoked an overlord listening from above), the school had lost dozens of high-performing students to transfers. But under Anderson’s leadership, the school managed to raise its graduation rate to 82 percent.* It brought up reading and math scores, just before the federal standard jumped again out of reach. The same had happened to principals before him, and when those administrators had failed to improve after two years, they were transferred.

  “That target is always going up,” said Dr. Janis Andrews, the county’s chief academic officer who once presided over the Glades. “It’s like the principals are in a circus and they’re all spinning plates. You have to keep them all going, because if one of them goes, they all come crashing down. It gets to be exhausting.”

  She felt that her former boss, sup
erintendent Arthur Johnson—who resigned in February 2011 in the midst of a scandal involving his chief academic officer accused of moonlighting—had given principals too little time to make improvements. “Research shows that it takes longer to turn around something as big as a high school,” she said.

  Especially one where its children live within entire city blocks lacking adequate plumbing and where ninth-graders become guardians of young siblings after parents die, leave town to work, or simply vanish altogether. These were the spinning plates a principal and his staff were forced to balance on every finger and toe, and only one of them had anything to do with the school’s failing grade.

  Although Anderson was seen as an outsider when he arrived in 2009, he’d overcome some of the same obstacles facing his students in the Glades. He’d grown up poor in a tough section of Boca Raton. His mother died in childbirth when he was five and his father was incarcerated for drugs not long afterward, leaving a grandmother to care for him and his siblings. In September 2006, his twenty-two-year-old son, Christopher, who’d been in and out of trouble for several years, was shot and killed at a house party in Delray Beach.

  “Adversity and poverty are not monopolized here,” he told a gathering of faculty, parents, and students shortly after arriving. “I wasn’t just dropped on this earth with this shirt and tie on. I understand pain. I’ve had struggles, too.”

  For Anderson and his staff, the daily problem-solving was from another era, one dark and cruel and hell on children. How to help the young lady who for weeks couldn’t use the communal shower in her apartment for fear of the red-eyed men who lurked like wolves at the door; where to put Zeke, the shy and gifted artist they’d discovered living in a boarded-up house with a mentally ill brother, surviving on sardines and cold cereal; how to persuade the father of a senior honor-roll student to allow his daughter to leave the cornfields and finish school because she’d just been accepted to Florida International University?

  What to do when dedicated students couldn’t afford their caps and gowns, school uniforms, or tickets to the Senior Grad Bash? In those cases, teachers pooled their own meager pay and bought the things themselves. And what to do when, after prepping all year for the FCAT, many of your lowest twenty-five-percenters (whose scores enormously affected your school grade) didn’t show up for school? Assistant principals have jumped into the yellow cheese wagon and driven through the narrow streets, yanking kids out of bed, out of the fields, anything to get them into a testing room. One AP, Angela Moore, even ironed kids’ clothes while she waited.

  “We eat, sleep, and dream this stuff,” said Moore, who’d been at Glades Central for seventeen years. “Here you give two hundred percent.”

  The double shifts expected of teachers in the Glades, plus the isolation and lingering stigma as a district rubber room, made it extremely difficult to recruit quality staff. This despite one year when the county offered a $10,000 bonus for leaving a better-reputation school. Most teachers lived along the coast, so the commute was long and the travel stipend offered by the district hardly covered the rising price of gas. And what if you had to work past dark? Visiting teachers have described the mortal fear that gripped them while caught in the Glades after sunset, the curtain of blackness on either side of the highway and the canals wild with chatter. What was the incentive when there were ten other schools within twenty minutes of your house? Especially if they were wealthier magnet schools like Suncoast, where test scores and achievement were always high and teachers received bonuses every year? Schools like Glades Central only got endlessly scrutinized.

  “It’s a backward performance system because you’re benefiting schools that are already prepared and taking away from communities that are hurting and dealing against the odds,” said Dr. Andrews, referring to the current structure. “The rich get richer.”

  Many now felt, however, that as controversial as they were at the time, the two rounds of faculty purges had achieved their aim of a stronger, leaner, more dedicated staff. The teachers chosen to stay at Glades Central, and those who sought out the post, tended to be dogged and intrepid types with high energy and unspoiled idealism. Some were also locals who’d returned out of duty, bent on cleaning the tarnished image of their home. And after years of oversight and mandatory curriculum, said Dr. Andrews, they’d also become some of the most creative and innovative instructors in the district.

  “I will put them up against any teacher along the coast,” she said. “I will put the actual practice of teaching against some of our best teachers. They’re just better prepared.”

  • • •

  ONE OF GLADES Central’s most highly regarded teachers and champions was a woman named Sherry Canty, an eight-year veteran who chaired the school’s career academy. She’d graduated from Glades Central in 1981, the same year as Hester, then had spent nearly two decades as an emergency-room nurse before being called to teach. Canty found her passion creating the school’s medical sciences academy, guiding bright students such as Jonteria into the demanding field of medicine.

  While the academy only offered students the LPN certification, most, like Jonteria, had greater aspirations. They were certainly the most dedicated. The required 3.0 GPA, advanced math and science courses, dual enrollment in community college, and off-campus clinical work usually guaranteed that Canty’s students dominated the top scholastic positions in the school. For the other 96 percent, the counterpart to the football dream machine was here. In eight years, every one of Canty’s students had gone to college and most had been awarded full scholarships.

  Canty was quick to point out that Glades Central students were also perennial winners of academic decathlons, and that in 2009 twenty-four graduates received academic scholarships to the University of Florida. Just the previous year, two had been named Bill Gates Millennium Scholars, one of the most prestigious awards given to aspiring college students today.

  “The school grade doesn’t tell you what’s happening here at Glades Central,” she said. “And neither does the football team.”

  * The significant percentage increase since Dr. Grear’s tenure is the result of substantial changes in the way graduation rates are calculated.

  For the Glades Central Raiders, the middle chunk of the season schedule was expected to be light fare—“stat games,” as KB and others described them, much to the annoyance of the coaches. But a few easy games were certainly welcomed and exactly what Hester needed to iron out kinks and review fundamentals with his line. Much of the week was spent in the classroom, drilling plays and formations, hours steeped in the coded lexicon of football.

  “Guys, this is Sally.”

  “Coach, is Sally quick?”

  “Yeah, Sally is quick.”

  “So we can chop?”

  “Yeah, chop.”

  But as weak as the opponents appeared, the Raiders still struggled in their game against Royal Palm Beach at Effie C. Grear Field. The Wildcats’ offense had gone all season without scoring a single touchdown, a truth that caused the bleachers to groan when, minutes into the first quarter, they connected for a fifty-yard bomb into the end zone against the Raider secondary.

  “Come on, Jet!”

  “Where the defense at?”

  Penalties and turnovers plagued the Raiders throughout the game. Benjamin’s kickoff return for seventy yards—his giant legs churning slowly at the start like an engine getting loose, then pure velocity, the kind of run that fed the dreams of his recruiters—was instantly erased the next play by a Raider fumble. The Wildcats then managed no more acts of greatness, which meant that for four painful quarters, the Raiders played mostly against themselves.

  Little things, like the center’s ballooning weight, stymied them:

  “Coach,” Mario screamed toward the sideline, “the ball keeps getting stuck between Cubby’s legs.”

  “You gotta get up under there!”

  After the Raiders won 24–7, even Pastor Dez channeled his frustrations to heaven when the team gat
hered for prayer:

  “Father, it could have been prettier, but nonetheless, we thank you for the victory.”

  A sloppy victory in any other town in America was a victory nonetheless. Despite playing with a torn ligament in his shoulder, Mario passed for nearly three hundred yards and two touchdowns. It was his best game so far, but one that also included three interceptions. Once again, the insults had rained down from the stands, then later flooded the message boards:

  “everybody knows that [Rowley] can not handle the qb position but hester keep using him. that same qb gonna have you lookin for a job next year.”

  “DAM JET YOU GON LET US GET TO THE PLAYOFFS OR STATE AND LOSE BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF DEVELOPMENT AT QUARTER BACK AGAIN THIS YEAR!!”

  On Saturday the quarterback’s Facebook status read, “ME AGAINST THA WHOLE BELLE GLADE.” For all of Hester’s encouragement, for all the times he’d stood before the team saying, “I don’t care what nobody says. He’s my quarterback,” the ever-private coach withheld arguably his best line of motivation—his own personal struggles with insecurity and the battle a city had once waged against him.

  • • •

  “IT FEELS WONDERFUL,” Jessie Hester told the Los Angeles Times in May 1985, shortly after the L.A. Raiders selected him in the first round. “I’m just overwhelmed. I just can’t believe I’m part of this organization.”

  The Los Angeles squad that Hester joined in 1985 was older, more hobbled than the Super Bowl champions of the 1983 season. Injuries had riddled the entire offense, in particular the thirty-seven-year-old body of warhorse quarterback Jim Plunkett. The Raiders had finished the previous season 11–5 and suffered a crushing loss to the Seattle Seahawks in the AFC playoffs.