Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

by Nick Fonda

  Because there were things going on with Tommy too. He never said a word. He never complained the way Janet did, but you know, after he started at the English school, every night, for I don’t know how many months, every night he woke us up with nightmares and they were always about school. Not the new school he was attending, but the old school.

  And it struck us as so strange because…

  …Merci. C’est une belle assiette. Non, c’est beau. Peut-être juste un peu d’eau. Merci…

  …Yes, isn’t it?

  …No, they’ve been open a couple of years I think. There was a great place in town here several years ago. I don’t know if you ever got a chance to eat there. It was called L’Abbé qui rit. Yes. Strange name but it was a clever play on words. A bilingual play on words. It had started as a bakery. The place had great bread and incredible desserts…

  …Yes, Janet. I’m sorry. I know I’m all over the place. Grade 2. But, before I tell you about Grade 2, I want you to understand that we really did try to stay involved in our kids’ education. We always read to the kids, Jerry as well. Especially when they were small, Jerry used to make up bedtime stories for them. And we had all sorts of children’s books and we’d read them to sleep—though it also happened that we’d read ourselves to sleep. All of a sudden, you’ve got this little three-or four-year-old tugging on your arm, upset with you because you’ve fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence. But you know, they were both reading before they started school. They just learned. They loved to hear the same stories over and over and at a certain point they just start following word for word what you’re reading and the next thing you know your child can read. It’s remarkable, really.

  So we were involved. And we tried to get involved in the school as well. I was a library volunteer, which meant that twice a month I’d go into the school to shelve books and tidy up the furniture or maybe make a poster for a special event. And when they had field trips and they needed des parents accompagnateurs, I was almost always the first to volunteer. I still do. Jerry has also gone on day trips, but it’s harder for him. And I want to tell you this too, the year Janet was in Grade 1—and by this time we knew there was something wrong, even if we hadn’t yet put our finger on it—but when she was in Grade 1, I had this idea that it might be helpful if a couple of parents—and there were a few others who were interested in doing this with me—to get a couple of parents who would organize some non-competitive games that the kids could play during the noon hour. Because they have a long stretch at noon. The kids eat in about two minutes flat and then they’re outside on the playground for over an hour. Anyway, we spoke to the noon-hour supervisors and they thought it was a great idea and they were all for it. But when I proposed it to Janet’s teacher, she said they’d have to talk about it at the Conseil d’école. For whatever reason, it had to go through one committee and then another and had to be approved here, there, and everywhere and to make a long story short, months after we’d proposed this it all came to nothing.

  It wasn’t a big thing, but I remember feeling really down about it. It was a moment of really deep, profound disillusionment. It was discovering you’re being lied to, that you’re told one thing—that your involvement as a parent is important to your child’s success—you should see the pamphlets and the literature they send home. But really, the truth is, the school does not want you because you’re a parent and like Victorian children, parents are meant to be seen—on particular occasions like parents’ night—but not heard. Nobody really wants to hear what a parent might have to say.

  And the other thing about Janet going into Grade 2 was that, more and more, she’d been complaining about school. It had started at some point in Grade 1 that she’d say, “Do I have to go to school today?” or “I don’t want to go to school today,” and along with that, she started complaining of pain in her back, between her shoulder blades and into her neck. At first we’d say did you fall, or did you bang into something, or did someone hit you? Not that there was anything to see, but she complained more and more and eventually we brought her to the doctor and of course there wasn’t anything that he could see either.

  I can’t remember now how long this went on. Well, most of Grade 2 because it all came to a head in the spring, at the end of April. But it was an awful year. For one thing, the school got a new principal, a new directeur and he was a disaster—for everyone. By the end of the year there were so many complaints—from the teachers—that they moved him to Adult Ed. But he was completely wrong in every way imaginable. He had no experience with small children. He had been a high school vice principal, and any teaching experience he had was at the high school level. On top of that, he had no knowledge of this area. I don’t know what cesspit they dredged up to find him. I mean, it was as if he’d never seen a single immigrant, or heard a word of English before coming here. And, yes, it’s a French school, and yes, French is the official language, but there’s still a sizable English community here and there are lots of English families that choose to send their kids to French school because they think that’s the best way to make their kids perfectly bilingual…

  …Exactly, just like us. Anyway there was this new directeur, and he was all wrong. He was an awful man. He was big, shoulders out to here, shaved head. He looked like one of those big, stupid football players or something. He knew his size was intimidating and he played it up, the way he walked, swaggering with his shoulders ready to knock down anything in his way. His teachers hated him. What we heard was that he was moved because practically every teacher in the school had filed an official grievance of some sort against him. At least they moved him to Adult Ed and not another elementary school. Probably do less harm there, although it makes you wonder what someone like that is doing in a school in the first place. He just didn’t belong in an elementary school. But that seems to be the way it is now, they just move them around every couple of years…

  …It’s like bank managers. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, bank managers get moved around every few years. The bank wants the manager’s undivided loyalty. Someone who stays in the same place too long just might develop some kind of allegiance to the community and maybe act in some way which is primarily beneficial to a client rather than the bank. School principals get shuffled around the same way, and for the same reason. I’ve heard the same thing is starting to happen with teachers. The young ones in particular, it seems, do a year or two in one school and then get shipped off somewhere else…

  …Yes, I’m sorry, I’m always going off on tangents. What I was telling you was that there was this new directeur, and from the very first time I talked to him it was confrontational. I think with him it was all about power or ego or something. It had nothing to do with the kids…

  …No, it was about Tommy. And it was innocent enough. I mean, I wasn’t trying to be a pushy parent or anything. But Tommy had started kindergarten and, like his sister, he was eligible for this intensive language program. And, in his case, there were four little boys who were supposed to be getting the extra French…

  …Yes, exactly. A week rolled by, a month rolled by and Tommy still hadn’t started the extra French. In Janet’s case, she had started I think the first or second day of school and I couldn’t understand why it was taking so long for Tommy to start. I contacted Mme Sylvie, Tommy’s teacher, and she didn’t know, but she suggested I talk to the directeur….

  …No! No, it’s just the way they do it on the French side, all the teachers, everyone, is called by his or her first name. It’s got to be a cultural thing. And, it’s funny, at the English school it’s Mr. Jones and Ms Smith, but the French teacher is Mme Christine, or Mme Suzanne or whatever the first name is…

  …Yes, so I call. I call to ask when these little boys would be starting their two hundred hours of French and he says to me, “Je ne sais pas de quoi vous parlez, Madame,” and it wasn’t the words—although those are bad enough—but the tone in his voice. Utterly dismissive. I started to explain th
e program and that Janet had followed it and, just like that, he cut me off, “Je vais me renseigner,” and he hung up on me. No “goodbye,” no “I’ll call you back,” nothing. He just threw down the receiver.

  But nothing happened. Every day I’d ask Tommy. We waited one week, two weeks. I called the other parents and everybody was a little concerned but nobody wanted to phone him. At this point, at least three weeks had gone by, so I call the school again. And again on the phone, I can almost feel this antagonism. “Oui, Madame. Les arrangements nécessaires ont été pris.” Click! That’s it. But when we asked Tommy if he had started doing his extra French at noon, he said no. We call Mme Sylvie and she doesn’t know any more than we do. I call the other parents, the other three English parents, and this time Linda agrees to come with me to meet the directeur.

  We phone the school to ask for a meeting and I wait five minutes, but finally the secretary comes back to the phone and tells me that he will see us at two in the afternoon. Linda’s as concerned as I am and we’re there at five to two. We wait and we wait and finally I tell the secretary that we had a meeting with the directeur at two o’clock. She comes back two minutes later and tells us that he’s busy for at least another half hour or more but that we could wait.

  No, I said, that was fine. We’d go for a walk and come back in half an hour. I wasn’t going to sit outside the principal’s office like some truant ten year-old. And we knew he was just playing games with us. He didn’t want to see us and this was his way of getting rid of us. We didn’t go more than twenty steps from the front door and the secretary was calling us back.

  He was seeing us only because he knew we weren’t going to go away but he wasn’t any more pleasant with the two of us than he had been with me on the phone. “Quelqu’un a été engagé,” he said but when we asked why our kids hadn’t yet started the program, he went off on a long tangent about classrooms and schedules and all sorts of things that were coming out of left field. Finally, I asked him when the kids would be starting their intensive French. “Bientôt,” he said, “maintenant, je suis très occupé.” He jumped up behind his desk and that was the end of the meeting. It was ridiculous.

  But the next day, Tommy finally started doing the noon-hour French…

  You can’t imagine sometimes how inadequate I feel that I don’t have a university degree…

  …Yes, I know…

  …That’s true…

  …No, I am. But still, sometimes…

  …Yes, Janet! While all this was going on with Tommy, things with Janet weren’t going any better. What we didn’t realize—and we should have—was that the same small group of kids who had been in Janet’s garderie were just following her up through the successive grades. The same kids who had made the garderie such a negative experience were still there in the same class. And Janet was coming home and complaining of these pains, and not wanting to go to school and…

  …Oh, no! No, girls don’t hit. It’s not physical with girls. No, it’s all psychological, emotional. It’s “I’m not going to be your friend.” It’s ostracism. At one point, a little girl said to Janet, “I’d like to be your friend, but I can’t because if I’m friends with you they said I can’t be friends with them.” And she turned her back and walked away.

  You know, when Tommy started at the English school, one of his friends—well, Andy, you know, Mary’s oldest—he pulled him aside on the first day of school and pointed out all the kids on the playground. Watch out for him because he punches, and be careful with her because she steals. And you know—the teachers would be surprised because they all think that she’s a little princess—but the worst bully in the school was a girl in Grade 6. Andy told Tommy, stay away from her and don’t let her come near you. She’s big trouble.

  But we didn’t know. The irony is that now the big thing in schools is socializing the child—learning math or language is almost like a little side dish, the real aim is socialization—but all Janet was feeling was complete isolation. Her teacher was this woman, Mme Jacqueline, who’s the exact opposite of anything we would ever have wanted in a teacher. Maybe I’m being unfair, but she was like a Barbie. Hair out to here. Dressed like she was stepping off a fashion runway. I didn’t see this woman every single day but I did see her a lot and I don’t think I ever saw her wearing the same outfit twice. Nails painted to match her eye makeup, loaded down with costume jewelry…

  …You laugh, but I’m not kidding. If you met her somewhere the last thing you would imagine this lady does to earn a living is teach a Grade 2 class. If I never see her again, it’ll be too soon.

  And she was a screamer…

  …A screamer is what they call a teacher who screams when she gets upset with a child…

  …Ha! Yes, you’re right. But you can see that the last thing Janet needed was a screamer. It wouldn’t matter that Mme Jacqueline was screaming at the kid beside her, or even at some kid at the other end of the classroom, Janet would be the one traumatized by it. She’s a sensitive kid, maybe a little too sensitive… So it was all wrong for her and we didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it maybe.

  And I’m to blame too because I was there. That’s the most amazing thing. I was there. Every second Tuesday morning, I was doing my turn in the library. I would walk down those corridors, and I would see those people: the kids and the teachers and the janitor and the secretary. I think I was trying really hard to project all my good intentions onto the place. I think that’s why I didn’t see it. It was what we wanted for her. To be fluent in both languages. And it did just the opposite.

  But it must have been awful for her in that school. The last two or three times I was in that building, it almost literally made my skin crawl. And it must have been like that for her every single day.

  And you know, I kept asking Mme Jacqueline. Every time I went in, I always tried to see her just for a minute, just to ask. And it went from Comment ça va avec Janet? to Qu’est-ce qu’il y a qui ne va pas avec Janet? Pourquoi est-ce qu’elle n’aime pas l’école? I knew there was something wrong. We knew. Every single morning she’d have these pains and she’d be crying and asking to stay home. But every time I talked to Mme Jacqueline, we might start talking about Janet, but it always went off on a tangent and she’d end up talking about her own problems: she had too many kids in the class; she didn’t have enough books; she had to accommodate a student on crutches; her photocopying budget had been slashed. And then, the second-last time I saw her, she went off on her usual tangent but this time, she started telling me what a hard year it was, how she had a half a dozen coded students—des cas de comportement graves—and I went home just as frustrated with her, but somehow with a bell ringing in my head.

  I’d just come from there, but I phoned the school and made an appointment with the directeur, for the very next day. And it was so frustrating, so humiliating almost. I went in and tried telling him there was something wrong. “Il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas,” I told him. And I told him yes, I’d spoken to Mme Jacqueline, who knows how many times, and I told him about the pain in the shoulders and neck that Janet was complaining about, and the way she cried in the morning not to go to school. And he sat there and looked at me the way he might look at an insect with two heads. I can’t describe it to you, but there was something about his face, his eyes, his posture, that told me he couldn’t care less. “Je suis très préoccupée,” I told him. He said he’d look into it and stood up to let me know the meeting was over and I didn’t know what to do. I felt like crying but I’d be damned if I was going to cry in front of him. I just sat there stewing, feeling so angry that I couldn’t talk to him, that he wouldn’t listen, that he didn’t care.

  I finally left. I don’t think I even said goodbye. I certainly didn’t say thank you, although I knew that was also a mistake. I know when I got into the car, I sat there for I don’t know how long with tears streaming down my face but I wasn’t crying. It was just tears.

  I wasn’t home five minutes when the p
hone rang and it was the school asking me if I could come and pick Janet up, that something was wrong.

  I rush back to the school, I rush up the stairs to her classroom and what do I see? Janet is laid out on the floor with a blanket over her, up to her chin. Her eyes are shut tight, not in sleep, because you can see she’s forcing them shut tight. Mme Jacqueline is kneeling beside her, playing nurse, fanning her face. Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé? I ask her and even as I’m asking Janet the same question in English, Mme Jacqueline answers, Elle s’est écroulée et elle a du mal à se relever. And then, without so much as a pause between sentences, she says, Janet et moi, on pense que Janet serait plus heureuse à l’école anglaise…

  I could have collapsed, like Janet, stretched out on the floor. Or I could just as easily have scratched her eyes out, if I had nails like hers. My daughter is stretched out on the floor unable to get up and you pick this moment to discuss choosing the right school? I have come to see you dozens of times to ask you why my daughter is so unhappy in school and you tell me absolutely nothing, on the contrary, you keep assuring me that everything’s fine and now my daughter collapses on the floor and you tell me she should change school? That’s the solution to a problem that, so far, you have told me doesn’t even exist?

  I was livid. I think I looked at her for a minute but I didn’t say a word to her.

  No, I did. I said Laisse-la. The big hair gave me a look but she backed away.

  I looked at Janet and it was so strange. It was like an out-of-body experience. It was as if I was somewhere else, a spectator watching my own body as it moved through this unreal event. I leaned over Janet for a second and spoke to her. I’ve come to bring you home, I said. Or something like that. I know I was perfectly calm and I also knew—and don’t ask me how—but I knew what had happened and what to do. I spoke to her again. We’re going home now, I told her. And I kept speaking. I spoke softly and calmly as if what had happened, what was happening, was as natural and harmless as snow falling in January. I understood that Janet’s body had somehow seized. She was frozen. What she had been experiencing in her shoulders and neck had taken hold of her entire body. All I wanted to do was get her out of there. Somehow, between talking to her and lifting her, I managed to get her upright and moving. It was as if, instead of being flesh and bones, as if she was made of metal and all her joints had rusted up. Like the Tin Man. It was very slow and for her, I know, it was painful.