Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  The whole evening feels sad. Truman’s accomplishments are muted, its strengths not in great demand. I’m sure the school could still produce some good blue-collar union men, but that ship sailed a long time ago, right down the Delaware River and out to sea.

  I ask Zuccarini if he ever recruits students from Truman’s acclaimed drama program, but he doesn’t know anything about it. A representative from Penn State’s Abington campus tells me about their musical theater program, which she says rivals Juilliard’s. But she doesn’t know about Truman Drama, either. How is that possible? Her campus is thirty minutes away. Volpe has been written up numerous times in The Philadelphia Inquirer—big feature stories when he piloted Les Mis and Cameron Mackintosh came to Levittown, and again when he was the first to do Rent. If you were a recruiter at a nearby college with some kind of fancy musical theater program, wouldn’t you know about that?

  It seems a confirmation of what Volpe’s kids have told me so many times: that no one pays much attention to them close to home because they assume nothing good could come out of Truman. They’re invisible to their neighbors. Zuccarini says he thinks Truman kids could benefit from Rider’s small classes and intense level of faculty engagement, and some could qualify for admission. But their credentials are not at the level that would bring them enough scholarship aid for them to afford it. “It’s unfair,” he says, “but it’s the way it is.”

  • • •

  Palmer Toto joined Truman’s English department in 1969, the same year as Volpe, coached the basketball team, and now directs the school’s guidance office. The two have been close friends for forty years.

  Toto was gone from Truman for two decades. When his father died, he left teaching to take over his dad’s Shell station, which was off an exit of I–95 in North Philadelphia in the same river-ward neighborhood where my father was raised. He bought other service stations and at one point owned six of them. He became a partner in an architectural finishing business (exterior finishes on buildings) and supervised employees on job sites. He climbed scaffolding and worked outdoors in extreme conditions. “I went to work in coveralls for twenty-one years,” he says as we sit in his office on the morning after the college and career night. “It provided for my family. My mother was widowed at forty-six. Every month, I was able to send her a good check.”

  Ten years ago, Toto was walking with his wife on a beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. He turned to her and said, “You know what? I’m a teacher. That’s who I am, and I’m going back to it.”

  He told her he planned to sell his business, return to Truman, and buy back into the retirement plan. He set it all in motion. He had not taken weekends off in years—part of the plan was to spend more time with his wife and family. He drove off to Truman one day late that summer to supervise an academic enrichment program. While he was gone, his wife choked on food and died. “As an adult, you know these things occur, horrible tragedies,” he says. “You know friends who have gone through hell. You read books. You know about it. It’s life. But you’re never prepared. She died on a Wednesday afternoon. I walked out of my house on a Wednesday and my life changed.”

  Toto was in his mid-fifties and still had children at home. He cooked the same five meals on school nights, week after week, in the same order. Weekends were pizza and sandwiches, then the rotation began again. “You know what? You keep going,” he says. “It’s all you can do. My mother-in-law said to me, ‘You were the perfect son-in-law. You were a great husband. You’re doing all the right things.’ It meant a lot for her to say that. I never did bad things. I didn’t have any guilt.”

  What Toto was left with, besides his family, was the job at Truman. He taught English for a year, then was asked to lead the guidance office. “I have a gift in life,” he says. “This job is my gift. I’m sixty-five years old. I waited twenty-one years to get back here.”

  Toto’s time away gave him a singular perspective. He had been doing something entirely different. When he started back at Truman, he felt the full force of what had changed. It was bracing, like opening a door in a warm room in the dead of winter and getting a blast of arctic air. “Everything here was disturbed,” he says. “Dad wasn’t coming home with his lunch pail anymore. That job wasn’t there. Maybe Dad wasn’t even there anymore, either. The economics disturbed family life. We have a higher divorce rate, youngsters living with Mom and Mom’s husband-to-be, and Mom is working two jobs, because they’re not good jobs. They’re low-level jobs, so just one of them doesn’t do it.”

  • • •

  About 6,200 students attend Bristol Township’s public schools, either at Truman High, the district’s lone high school, or one of its two middle schools or nine elementaries. More than three thousand of those children qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measure of poverty within a school system. When schools were first assessed under the state’s guidelines, the district scored near the bottom of state rankings. Through smaller class sizes and more intense attention given to lagging students, it managed to claw its way into the middle. In 2012, the district was awarded a place in the College Board’s honor roll for increasing access to Advanced Placement courses and having a greater percentage of students with a three or higher on the exams. (A five is the highest possible score; many colleges grant credit for threes and above.) It was a significant honor. Truman was the only school in Pennsylvania on the list with more than 30 percent of its students in the free lunch program.

  Samuel Lee is the district’s superintendent. He was making an annual salary of $137,500, not a lot to lead a school district. He is a little guy, affable, who still spends weekends coaching youth soccer. He looks nothing like the superintendents from the fancy districts, alpha educators who dress like senior partners in law firms. Lee’s suits look like they may have come from Today’s Man. I’m afraid that I may have underestimated him at first and thought him some kind of discount superintendent.

  I was there one night when Lee had to tell a meeting of about three hundred teachers and parents which programs and innovations had to be cut—including precisely some of the “extras” that had helped the district make its gains. What impressed me about Lee was the total absence of bullshit in his remarks. He made no attempt to suggest that if everyone just pitched in and worked harder, the kids would still get the same great education. Worthy programs were going to be dismantled, good young teachers put on the street. “Everything that is going to be presented tonight is not good for our kids,” he said. “We are heartbroken.”

  Lee is a traditionalist, like many in Levittown, and no fan of charter schools or anything else that scrapes money away from school systems. In an open letter to township residents and policy makers, he criticized “idiosyncratic alternatives” to public districts, many of them “owned and operated by large national corporations whose number one mission is to enrich shareholders.” You can agree or disagree. I admire Lee for knowing exactly where he stands and stating it clearly, without jargon.

  The whole district tends to be that way. Meat and potatoes. Light on lyricism and lofty credentials. The website for the Bristol Township schools features a group picture of the members of the school board. One of the men is wearing a black T-shirt, another a short-sleeve yellow shirt with a brown tie. The caption under the picture says: Elected by the people, unpaid for their services, and open to public criticism, board members must make the tough decisions. The qualifications for their positions are leadership, vision, and mental toughness.

  The discussions over the school budget sounded much like a couple talking around their kitchen table with a stack of bills, no hope of paying them and nothing but bad options. Lee called the situation “catastrophic.” Some people in the township had been out of work entirely, including Earl Bruck, the school board president. The unemployment caused home foreclosures, leading to shortfalls in property tax receipts, and therefore holes in the school budget.

  Additionally,
the state’s new Republican governor had drastically cut education funds going to local districts—as well as money for state colleges. One remedy proposed by the governor seemed like it could have been satire from The Onion, but it was reported by the Associated Press. It said that Governor Thomas Corbett had proposed that the state’s institutions of higher learning should consider closing their budget shortfalls by drilling for natural gas on their campuses.

  The deficit in the Bristol Township schools came to a whopping $603 per student. Taxes could not be raised, so the quality of education would be cut. A ninth-grade academy in a separate building, which had been successful in acclimating students to high school, was to be shut down. Pre-kindergarten was in danger. Fifty-nine teachers would be laid off. The district once offered instruction in five foreign languages. Then four. Now it was going to be just two—Italian and Spanish. The foreign languages would be taught almost exclusively at the high school level, not in middle school, when many students in wealthier districts begin to learn a language, if they have not already started at the elementary level.

  The arts curriculum had long been in decline. There was no instruction for string instruments at Truman anymore, and therefore no orchestra. For musicals, Volpe had to hire professional musicians. This latest shortfall would involve more cuts in the arts. In the high school, electives of all kinds were eliminated, and some seniors who were on course to meet graduation requirements were encouraged to just leave school at midday after taking their core courses.

  Jim Moore, the school’s principal, said it was not “lack of effort” that caused Truman to be poorly ranked in previous years, but a matter of resources. “There’s been an investment in education here, above and beyond bare bones, and it paid off,” he said. “Now it’s going to be scaled back. There will be fewer opportunities for kids to do things that are not math, science, or English.”

  At the meeting when the cuts were announced, a mother of a Truman student asked if the cuts wouldn’t just dig the community into a deeper hole. Who would want to buy the empty houses in a district that did not offer a full-bodied curriculum? “By cutting education,” she asked, “aren’t we subjecting our kids to the same fate that we’re all living right now?”

  School board president Earl Bruck was just as blunt as Sam Lee.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “We are.”

  But the drama courses that Volpe and Krause teach—Theater 1, 2, and 3 and musical theater—were spared. Truman is holding on to that. Moore said the determining factor was not Volpe’s status but, in a sense, his popularity. “You can’t have a high school without any electives,” he said. “You try to keep the ones that are highly popular, and Lou’s classes are what kids in this school want to take.”

  THE CAST OF GOOD BOYS AND TRUE. FROM LEFT: COURTNEY MEYER, BOBBY RYAN, MARIELA CASTILLO, ZACH PHILIPPI, BRITNEY HARRON, AND WAYNE MILETTO.

  I WOULD KILL FOR YOU

  In mid-June 2011, the cast members of Good Boys and True receive their high school diplomas at the traditional commencement on the football field. A week later, they board a morning flight at Philadelphia International Airport, change planes in Chicago, and land that afternoon in Nebraska. This is the post-graduation beach week they yearned for—on the Great Plains, about as far from an ocean as you can possibly get in America.

  Zach keeps talking about experiencing what could be called the “Truman Drama effect”: the sense of acclaim they feel only when they leave home. “They say we’re known in the nation, which is insane, to think you’re a part of that,” he says. “Because in Bucks County, we’re not known for anything good, just negative things.”

  Truman Drama will not perform for another three days. The kids attend workshops and scholarship auditions, watch the performances of other high schools, and go to dances at night. They are living on campus with a couple thousand other high school–aged kids, most of them eager to get to know one another. The festival is what is sometimes indelicately called a meat market.

  Luke Robinson, a tenth-grader at Truman, is among the handful of non–cast members along on the trip. A skinny kid with braces, a member of the debate club as well as drama, he has a passion, bordering on obsession, for recycling. He constantly pesters students and teachers to properly dispose of their plastic water bottles. He meets a girl at one of the dances. “Yo, Luke,” Zach teases him the next day, “you’re the only one of us who has gotten any action. What’s up with that?”

  Just like he does every year, Volpe worries about the seniors who are about to go off on their own and away from his day-to-day reach—all but Wayne, who invites no worry. Five of the six are headed to college. Courtney, as yet, has no plans. “All that self-confidence you see in them, it’s not as deep as they sometimes want you to think,” Volpe says as we sit one morning at a coffee shop near the University of Nebraska campus. “They’re not doormats, but they know they’re up against kids who have had more resources. I’ve seen it. They feel intimidated sometimes, even by kids from Pennsbury.” (Pennsbury is a neighboring high school whose students are drawn from the upper end of Levittown and also several wealthier communities to the north.)

  Confidence is a funny thing in high school. Almost everyone has it in the wrong measure—either too little or too much. Volpe is in a ruminative mood, thinking out loud about some of the kids. He has given them his all and hopes it’s enough. “Courtney at some point in her life is going to have to realize what a beautiful, brilliant, and perceptive young woman she is,” he says. “She has to come to terms and honor those parts of herself. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that for her. I’ve done what I can. It’s up to her now. She’s going to have to own it.”

  Zach’s challenge, in some ways, is the opposite. “I worry that high school will be the best part of his life. I don’t want that to be the case,” Volpe says.

  He sees Zach as “fawned over” at school and at home. His success in sports has filled him with self-regard, and when he comes up short, he has a tendency to be moody afterward and sometimes to shift blame—Volpe recalls Zach complaining to him after he pitched in a baseball game and got hit around that the coach should have known his arm was tired. But when he had recently given up a bunch of runs at an all-star game, he said to Volpe that sometimes “you just have to tip your cap” to the opposition—give them credit. “Zach hasn’t failed a lot at Truman,” Volpe says. “It’s been such a wonderful environment for him in that way. But I worry what will happen when he struggles and no one is there to catch him. So when he gave credit to the other team, I was so happy to hear him say that. It’s a good sign.”

  • • •

  A well-intentioned activist working on issues of poverty in America’s older, close-in (code for “falling apart”) suburbs contacted me after a story I wrote about my hometown ran in The New York Times. Janis Risch, the executive director of Good Schools Pennsylvania, was starting to organize in Levittown. She had some business in the Washington, D.C., area, and we met for coffee. I passed along Tyler Kelch’s insight—that Levittown was full of people who once felt a part of the middle class but had fallen down the ladder.

  In a follow-up e-mail, she asked me, “What do people in Levittown need?” What do they need? Maybe they need United Steelworkers Local 4889, which used to throw its muscle around at the mill, to make profit machines like Walmart pay employees better wages. But, realistically (to use Courtney Meyer’s favorite word), probably no one is going to empower America’s globalized workforce, any more than anyone can turn the clock in Levittown back to 1964.

  Truman students have a strong sense of being on the wrong side of a divide even without knowing the full dimensions of it. At my hotel in Nebraska, I finally get around to writing back to Risch. I still don’t have a great answer, but I tell her a little about the theater festival. “I’m seeing these kids do this remarkable thing, and it fills in some of what’s missing for them,” I write. “What I’m thinking ri
ght now is that everyone in life needs to have had at least one brilliant, inspiring teacher.”

  That, I know, is far from a new idea. But then again, I have never known a single person who achieved a measure of success and could not look back and credit at least one treasured teacher. What Volpe’s students gain from him is a passion and sense of self unrelated to anything having to do with money, power, or status. Nothing matters except what they do together. He never lets them feel defeated. When he tells them they could do theater with a bare stage and a lightbulb, they absolutely believe it. They believe it so deeply that if that ever really were the case—and he said here’s the stage, here’s the bare bulb—they wouldn’t question it. They’d get to work, rehearse the play, and figure they were taking it to Nebraska.

  “I’ll be chasing this for the rest of my life,” Bobby says of his experience in Good Boys. I asked if he meant success onstage or in some field of entertainment. “No, not that,” he says. “I mean I’ll be chasing how happy it makes me, how totally into it I am every single second. No matter what I’m doing in life, I want that. Now that I’ve experienced it, I’m not going to settle for less.”

  • • •

  The real cost of the Nebraska trip, including airfare and fees for the festival, is about $1,500 per Truman student. With money from the theater department budget (mainly ticket receipts from productions) and a grant from the school board’s charitable foundation, Volpe cut the cost that each of the kids had to pay to about $550, still a struggle for some of them. He and Krause contributed money of their own, as they have consistently over the years. I asked him how much of his own money he spent to get the production to Nebraska, and he would not say. Throughout the whole course of my working on this book, it is the only question I recall Volpe not wanting to answer.