Year of Writing 25

1/25/12

So six years ago now, I created a school. It was a lot of work: the 2 other founding teachers, the principal and I would meet twice a week for an entire year until 8 or 10 PM while we were still teaching, completely unpaid, in order to realize our dream of a project-based learning school that was solidly rooted in the Fruitvale community of Oakland. After the year of planning, and an intense summer session, we opened our doors: United for Success Academy was born. That first year was completely insane. I remember meeting every day after school for procedural things, then every Sunday I would meet with the other Humanities teachers to plan our units. Every Sunday. All day. We were wildly successful in some areas - we had 100% of our families attend student-led conferences, when the school before us had less than 15% attendance, we were featured twice in the Oakland Tribune, once on the front page for our Student Expo, where 7th graders attempted to apply lessons from World History to solve the problem of violence today on the streets. It was also really difficult in some areas, we had the same population with the same problems as before. But, we were moving in a positive direction, and it felt good.

Then, after that first year, everything started to unravel. We were given notice late in the summer that we would be enfolding the students from a failing school at our site, giving us a little more than 2 weeks to find teachers for 100 extra kids. Teachers that may or may not have bought into the grueling system we had created, and would need to run for the next two years to create a cohesive 6th-8th grade curriculum that was sustainable in the long term. Then, we decided to un-core the classes, to separate the Humanities. Next, we had a teacher negate our scores for testing, making it possible for our school to be taken over. Our principal quit, we received an inexperienced new principal, and so on and so forth.

I have been spending this last year working half time as a creative writing / art teacher. I love it, it's exactly what I want to do, but I also realize that I am slowly saying goodbye to this school. I am taking steps back, quietly, from the hallways I've walked for the last ten years. I am carefully untangling my emotions, my care, my soul from this Fruitvale neighborhood, from these kids who I have laughed with, yelled at, teared up while listening to their poetry, comforted their parents at funerals, and loved with all my heart. It is a delicate process, and it's imperfect, there are strands of me here that can't be unwrapped from their embraces, and that's OK with me too.