Virtually none of the prized access to Disney resources materialized, nor did the teachers of the year. Underresourced and under-prepared, the school was never able to implement Eddie’s personal learning plan, though to many parents who saw the video and read the brochures, it was perhaps the single most attractive feature of the efforts to promote the school. What was Disney’s involvement in the school? The company had “donated” the land and chipped in several million dollars to help fund the construction of a building that ended up costing over $24 million, in the estimate of one school board member, $17 million of which had been public monies. Even at that, Disney’s contribution was offset by a waiver of the $4.1 million the company would ordinarily have paid the county in impact fees to develop the Celebration site. Under the twenty-year contract with the school district, the company shares stewardship of the school’s Board of Trustees with Osceola County and Stetson University and is committed to helping with student mentoring. In all other respects it is a public school in the Osceola County system and is prohibited from enjoying fiscal privileges from Disney not available to the other schools in the district.
From the very first discussions about the school, board members expressed concerns about equality with other district schools, and in a county where Disney’s money and power is resented and envied, the funding situation at Celebration was guaranteed to be politically explosive. Even before it opened, it should have been clear that the company could not freely extend its largesse and resources to the school as promised or open its facilities to the teachers and students unless the rest of the county was included. So, too, there would be no way to compensate for the extensive overtime that teachers had to put in to master the innovative curriculum. Even an effort to give teachers passes to the theme parks for educational purposes blew up a ministorm of bad publicity. The same fate befell an earlier trip to the parks for Upper 3 when Disney buses were used to ferry the students.
Most controversial of all, an enhancement fund of $5 million had been set aside by Disney to assist the school in its start-up period. In a district where school funding is about $3,460 per pupil (as compared to the national average of $6,564), the idea was to show how much educational worth could be squeezed out of a moderate hike in funding. At our first meeting, Terry Wick, TCC’s liaison officer at the school, explained the gambit: “TCC then and now believes that the purpose of the enhancement fund is to show the county that by paying $300 more per pupil, the board could say to taxpayers, ‘Look what you can do with a few extra dollars.’ This is a good model for making the case to taxpayers for more money.” Those in the know, including school board members, alleged that a good portion of these funds was being used to pay Disney’s administrative employees like Wick and her staff, and so it was perceived that this money was not directly benefiting the Celebration students or anyone else in the district. Ratification of the use of the remaining enhancement funds lay in the hands of the school board, and its members exercised stringent control over the approval process. Consequently, the Celebrationites felt the school was clearly being underfunded by both the county and the company. As the only K–12 institution in the district (indeed in all of Florida, with the exception of a school plumb in the middle of the Everglades), it was allocated a budget equivalent to that of a middle school, an underestimation of the additional resources necessary for both a high school and an elementary school.
In the planning stages and in the first eighteen months of operation, the deliberations of the school board were a source of intense frustration to Celebration parents, teachers, and administrators. Here, raring to go, was the “school of the future,” breathlessly promoted in TCC’s sales literature as the model home of the best ideas to emerge from the leading centers and superstars of educational reform. Starved of resources, its growth was being retarded, in their view, by a petty school bureaucracy, rooted in the cracker mentality of cattletown Osceola. As one prominent Celebration citizen advised me early on, “our school is way above the thought bubble of Osceola County.” In the rest of the county, the Celebration educators were seen as snooty neighbors who thought they had all the advanced ideas and wouldn’t share them. One vice principal in Kissimmee told me she didn’t think “Celebration School wanted to be friendly, they never invite us to anything, they think they’re so far advanced, they couldn’t care less about the rest of us.”
Many townsfolk suspected the company might welcome any external excuse to distance itself from a school it had no control over and that had generated more than its share of embarrassing headlines in the national press during its first eighteen months. Some, like Larry Rosen, a Stetson University professor who had been involved in the planning of the school and its curriculum, were convinced that the controversies around the school had been a decisive factor in Disney’s “withdrawal” of its name from the town. Players like Rosen, who had observed the shift in management policy close up, had seen the company freeze, as it were, in midstep, survey the pitfalls ahead, and step back. “I always thought of [the school] as a chance to leverage the opportunity with Disney to do something of real consequence,” Rosen recalled. “In retrospect, though, they used us very effectively for marketing. There’s no question about it. They used me very effectively, and I was willing to be used if this could be an exemplary, nationally renowned school.”
Despite Rosen’s and Wick’s efforts, the partnership between Disney and Stetson had soured. The jewel in the crown of the partnership had been the innovative Teaching Academy, adjacent to the school, which they both had planned as a national center for forging new ideas in education. It was currently being used to train Caribbean Cruise Line employees, and would soon lose the original lettering over its facade.1 Rosen contends that Disney could have smoothed over the board’s equity concerns if only it had been willing to give some additional money to the district (for schools attended by the children of Disney employees, in effect). But the company had stood firm. Chastened by his close encounters with Disney politics, Rosen had turned down an offer to be the school’s principal when Bobbi Vogel, the first incumbent, left after one rocky year on the job. He was now assisting the district in developing curricula in other county schools while helping to plan a new progressive school for Orange County. While Rosen took a sabbatical and eventually left town, the teachers who stayed, and who called themselves “survivors,” felt they were fighting battles not of their own making or choosing. “We were thrown to the wolves,” Charmaine Gabel coolly declared, “we had all the Disney pressure, but none of the Disney support.”
Nor did they benefit financially. Teacher salaries in Oscoela County are appallingly low. A typical hourly rate is $16 for thirty-seven and a half hours, but most teachers put in ten-hour days, and then some. The workweek often stretches to sixty hours when it includes preparations for this novel curriculum and the multi-age classrooms, not to mention hours of laborious, extracurricular “communication” to ease the anxieties of parents who have laid down a small fortune for a stake in a community where very few teachers can afford to live. Most have taken a pay cut to move here, for the chance to teach in a nontraditional school. The odds on their surviving from one year to the next at Celebration School are less than fifty-fifty. Oscoela school principals can decide not to renew teacher contracts without so much as a word of explanation, a fate suffered by several Celebration teachers in the spring and summer.
TINKERBELL HIGH
The majority of residents—thirty- and forty-something parents and their children—told me the school had been their chief reason for moving to Celebration. Given the lowly reputation of the county’s public schools, Disney had to put on quite a show to attract the kind of families that would buy into an upscale development. Early on, it was decided that a “school of tomorrow” would be the prize bait for luring prospective home buyers. It was easy to be smitten with the promotional package that was presented to parents.
A well-known supporter of nontraditional education, Eisner consulted Dis
ney board member Reveta Bowers, director of the innovative Center for Early Education. The company quickly assembled a glittering array of star support for their plans, including some of the nation’s best known educational theorists and gurus: Howard Gardner, director of Project Zero at Harvard and the theorist of multiple intelligences; Theodore Sizer, founder and director of the Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University; David and Roger Johnson, from Minnesota’s Cooperative Learning Center; and William Glasser, from the Institute for Reality Therapy, among others. Many of their ideas and methods were adopted into the learning design.2 A consortium of universities—Stetson, Johns Hopkins, Auburn University, and the University of Central Florida—agreed to provide interns and teaching assistants, and professorial faculty from these colleges were to pay regular visits or be in semi-attendance at the school. With the collaboration of the National Education Association, these faculty were slated to participate in the Teaching Academy to train Osceola teachers and test new methods and ideas for the nation’s schools. The school would thus have a sophisticated professional development institute on its doorstep, and the district would be able to showcase it to the nation as a model teaching laboratory. In addition, Celebration’s technology alliances—Apple, Rauland-Borg, Claris—pledged to deliver a state-of-the-art multimedia environment with truckloads of donated hardware and software packages. Above all, the Disney touch would ensure quality support.
Only Tinkerbell was missing, and for many parents razzle-dazzled by the advance publicity, she could just as well have been waiting in the wings to work some magic on their little ones. Expectations of a quick fix could not have been higher and could not have fallen further. Jackie Flanigan speculates that the school became a “freak magnet” for many dysfunctional families who believed that Disney would make it all right. Other teachers, like Donna Leinsing, head of curriculum, confirmed that the first crop of students included many with a ruinous record in traditional institutions and whose parents viewed Celebration School as a last resort. Flanigan herself did not seem to mind, ever eager to meet some new challenge—in this case, teaching more than her share of “exceptional” children. Some other teachers were less charitable, resenting the kids’ problems and comparing themselves to “punching bags” for parents whom they perceived as overwrought and over-privileged.
While most of the promised Disney resources turned out to be inaccessible, teachers and parents continued to view the company’s sponsorship and backing as an opportunity to be mined. I could see their point but I wondered, as any educator might, if the use of such resources wouldn’t inevitably affect the shape of the curriculum. Doesn’t the payer of the piper always end up calling the tune? Over lunch in the Starlight Cafe during our Magic Kingdom outing, I put the question to the ebullient Nelson. As an elephant muppet in a tuxedo crooned nightclub standards from the stage, he explained that he could much better teach marine biology if his classes had access to EPCOT, or environmental preservation at the Animal Kingdom, or the physics of sound and light at MGM. A visit to Cinderella’s Castle would illuminate the principles of Romanesque architecture for his students’ group project on the history of castles. (Task: Compare and contrast the ways a medieval and a modern labor force would be organized to build your castle.) I acknowledged that there are precious few good copies of medieval architecture in Central Florida, although I pointed out that there are no shortage of large castles—Medieval Times, King Henry’s Feast—on the commercial strips outside the theme parks. So, too, there are many other non-Disney amusement rides, much more affordable, where physics lessons could be demonstrated, if need be. As for environmental conservation, the Osceola School District owns a fine nature preserve fifteen minutes away in Poinciana, where I had spent many an educational day, but which no one at Celebration School appeared to know about. Aren’t these cheaper, more available alternatives? Nelson reluctantly agreed, but it was clear that he was himself drawn to the romance of the Disney spectacle. Celebration, I expect, will be a stepping-stone for him to a better paying job in the parks. The school, in general, has had the most trouble retaining science teachers, largely because of better paid opportunities elsewhere.
By the end of our day in the park, the rides had murdered my neck (would I sue the school or Disney?) and I made a beeline for Muhammed, the deep-tissue masseur at Celebration’s Fitness Center. A kung fu expert at the Wah Lum Temple in Orlando, Muhammed gave me my last lesson of the day in potential and kinetic energy. I reflected on the questions I had asked other teachers and parent volunteers about the educational virtues of our trip. Not one had doubted the “quality” of our Disney experience. Indeed, several observed that this was the “most authentic” environment of its kind in the area. If schoolkids could learn something from such visits, it would be better to learn it here, because Disney World was “the real thing.” In other circumstances, these might have been bizarre comments and likely to chill the hearts of educators across the land. Disney, after all, is a catchphrase in our culture for the commercial falsification of real history, real experience, real knowledge. When Disney is the most authentic game in town, surely we are in serious trouble. But six months in Celebration had taught me to temper such judgments with the benefit of some local understanding.
No doubt, part of the response was due to the simple jubilation of parents and teachers at having gotten access, otherwise denied, to the educational component of the parks. But it was also clear that Disney offered some of the better job possibilities in the region’s dominant industry. Its lowest paying positions, while pitiful in compensation, exceed other service worker wages in the local tourist industry, thanks to union contracts that increase hourly rates faster than at rival attractions like Universal and Sea World.3 Management squeezes the unions at every opportunity, but the very existence of the Service Trades Council, which negotiates the largest union contract, covering 22,000 employees, is unusual in a right-to-work state like Florida. Courtesy of “Donald’s Deals,” cast members also enjoy a wide range of discounts from area retailers. Upper-level employment is well represented by Celebration’s own coterie of Disney executives. Somewhat more glamorous to kids are the Imagineers, who combine technical proficiency and artistic flair. So from the point of view of the school (and the state’s school-to-work initiatives), Disney World is not there to be consumed, nor is it perceived as a process (Disneyfication) of sanitizing culture or history. It is a career opportunity for students looking realistically at job possibilities in the region.
Celebration School is not a “Disney school” in any real sense. Neither its staff nor its mission have any relationship to the company’s own educational programs. But it does serve a community with many Disney employees—where Disney culture is omnipresent—and the quality of things Disney, at least compared to other companies in the region, is respected. More to the point, perhaps, the school’s performance-based methods lean toward the modes of exhibition and self-display that have become prevalent in a society where everyone has to advertise him or herself to win attention. We are viewed more and more as people with something to sell—our own brands—and our capacity to dramatize and showcase that product is a primary survival skill. If we cannot show how and why we count, then we will be cast as extras or as backdrop, at best, and passed over, at worst. Disney has played its role in the growth of that kind of society and those expectations, although they did not originate with the storyboarders who drew Mickey and Minnie Mouse. At Celebration School, it is easy to imagine, if you really want to be conspiratorial, that the classroom modes of performance are part of a systematic training in how to be good Disney cast members. In truth, such rituals of character acting and self-advertisement are much more widespread, and have become habitual in many zones of our daily behavior. As one parent noted to me: “There’s not much structure in life anyway these days. It’s all role-playing out there. So why do we need structure in the school?”
All the same, Disney ways were not entirely absent from the school. In
several neighborhoods, I found that storyboarding was a favored technique of learning, as was reworking fairy tales. On a February visit to Lower 3, at that time the most tightly organized of the six neighborhoods, students were beginning a new group project that would amalgamate and update tales like Goldilocks, the Three Little Pigs, and the Three Wishes. Tom Vitale, the remarkably industrious team leader, told me that some parents had recently objected to the teaching of The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen’s book about a Nazi concentration camp in Poland: “The subject matter is too grim for 8, 9, and 10 year olds,” one parent had written. “There are so many nice books out there, why not choose some fairy tales?” Given that the original pre-Disney versions of so many of these fairy tales were the splatter movies of the Middle Ages, it was an ironic complaint. Whether or not today’s project was undertaken in response to the complaints, Vitale’s students were busy weaving familiar characters into new plots: Cinderella has her precious coat stolen at the school, allegedly by three pigs. She chases them home, and blows their house down. Three billy goats arrest the pigs and bring them to trial. The Wolf is the presiding judge.
This project is a springboard for a social studies exercise that examines the countries of origin of fairy tales. Some months later, the project became a full-fledged play, combining Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, set in Celebration itself, with the town’s landmark buildings as backdrops. Cinderella leaves one of her roller blades behind at the stroke of the clock on Skate Night, and she is wooed by a prince rapping hip-hop rhymes. Elvis is the fairy godmother, and pizza is the feast of choice. The new version did its fair share of reworking some gender stereotypes. A month later, Upper 3 students were producing “politically correct” fairy tales.
EDUCATION WARS
The Celebration Chronicles Page 16