The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  IN THE FIELD

  The fresh, blue Florida spring had dissolved into a very early summer blur by the time I went on my second field trip with the school, in late April. The mosquitoes were back in business, and the pine groves and palmetto thickets already had a seared and punished look, as if rehearsing for the onslaught of high summer. This time, we were headed for a not-so-magic kingdom in Apopka, just to the northwest of Disney World. As the bus rolled into the Lake County farmtown, we passed shabby two- and three-room shacks sitting squat on the land. Pickup trucks, washing lines, overgrown weeds, and trailer homes lined the thin country roads. A crooked sign announcing “Chikens 4 Sale” was stenciled on the side of a rickety apartment block. We pulled into the lot next to our first port of call, the Apopka branch of the Florida Farmworkers Association, and were greeted by officials and volunteers—Sister Ann Kendrick, Jeannie Economos, and Tania Rosado—who would brief us for our day in the area. Two and a half thousand farmworkers were about to lose their jobs, and we had come to find out why.

  This was a field trip I had helped to organize for the students in Upper 4, the senior neighborhood in the school. The intensively farmed lands around Lake Apopka, once Florida’s second largest lake and the country’s prime mecca for bass fishing, had become an object of great controversy. After decades of pollution from phosphorus and pesticide runoff, the lake was so hopelessly choked with algae that it showed up bright green on high-altitude photographs and the local passions provoked by its cleanup were second only to the bitter public struggle over plans to restore the Everglades. A local environmentalist group, Friends of Lake Apopka—composed of businessmen, attorneys, chamber of commerce politicians, and small landowners—had successfully lobbied the state to buy 14,000 acres of the surrounding muck farms and restore the lake to health. The farmers who had bought their land, drained from the lake, for 25 cents an acre during the wartime Victory Gardens effort were about to walk away with $91 million of state and federal money. The farmworkers, who had been the backbone of Central Florida agriculture for over fifty years, were about to lose their livelihood and their Farmers Home Administration housing. As a result of new immigration laws, most would not qualify for public assistance. From a distance, it looked like a case of environment vs. jobs, the kind of simplified conflict favored by our news media.

  But things were much more complex on the ground. Through the research students had done for this trip, they had learned there was no ultimate guarantee that the cleanup—which involved a large-scale plan to filter the water and restore marshland on the lake bottom—was going to work. All told, the regional economic impact of the loss of agriculture would amount to a staggering $120 million a year, and it looked like the cleanup would benefit those (well represented among the environmentalist group) with their eye on the lake as a site of tourist development and luxury subdivisions.1 As a result of the NAFTA agreements, the site of this agricultural production would now simply move to Mexico, where the lack of environmental regulation allows farmers to treat fields with human sewage.

  Lake Apopka had also become infamous after a 1980 pesticide spill caused freakish mutations in its alligator population. Young alligators had shrunken penises and deformed ovaries, and the egg hatching rate plummeted, as it has done more recently in many other Florida lakes. High on the food chain, these prehistoric creatures do not stop reproducing easily, and a sudden decline in their health makes them a sentinel species for all of the state’s wildlife.2 Louis Guillette, a University of Florida biologist, had argued that the DDE spill was the cause of the population crash. His study of Lake Apopka persuasively demonstrated the long-suspected link between pesticides and hormone behavior.3

  Clearly, there was more than enough to keep us busy at Lake Apopka. That morning, we heard about the plight of the farmworkers, who, for the most part, had been sacrificed in the farmers’ scramble to make a deal with the state. Hispanic, Haitian, and African American, many of them elderly, illiterate, and unable to speak English, they would have little chance of finding new jobs in the region without extensive retraining. So far, the state settlement had provided little more than a batch of computers to help them locate new jobs online. This was a world where a Mexican mother rises at 4 A.M. to make lunch and dinner because she will be too exhausted to cook after her long shift in the fields. Later, we visited some of the fields and a packing factory and listened to the owner grumble about the $10 million price tag on his farm. A visit to the lake provided water samples for analysis back in the school’s biology classes. At lunch we heard presentations from Jack Amon, former president of the environmentalist group, and John Conner, the director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, charged with administering the cleanup. Each offered earnest accounts, but there were some rough edges. Amon suggested that the workers had not done a great job of representing themselves. Conner reassured us that the environmentalists were “not a bunch of screaming lunatics.”

  Apopka farmworkers before the last harvest. (Photo: Sister Ann Kendrick, The Last Harvest project, Crealdé School of Art)

  I wondered what the lunatics would have done. From what we had learned, the Lake Apopka settlement was a missed chance to do the right thing for the environment and the workers alike. It could have been a golden opportunity to create a model of sustainable agriculture. A marsh flowway created by Conner to filter the lake water and retain the phosphorus had begun to show results, and further cooperation from the farmers might have led to some creative solutions in the fields themselves. Instead what we got was a corrupted but increasingly common form of environmental politics, where the polluter does not pay and the cleanup boosts the land value of property owners and primes the pump of luxury development.

  The students on the trip had responses as varied as their diverse backgrounds allowed. For most, it was their first encounter with migrant workers, while others had parents who had once worked the fields in Puerto Rico. Some instinctively identified with the businesspeople, many more empathized directly with the workers, others were simply glad to have a day out of the classroom. Several told me they felt uncomfortable at being voyeurs of the workers. The next day in government class, students were asked to do some role-playing, representing the opinions of the different groups we had met in the course of our visit. In the course of the debate, the farm owners got short shrift, the workers got high respect, the government agency was coolly received, and the lobbyists generated a good deal of cynicism. With the exception of a few grandstanding males, with a knee-jerk reaction to bleeding hearts who stood in the way of growth and development, students were mostly agreed that justice should be done both to the environment and to the workers. But they clearly doubted that anything quite so fair would ever happen.

  The government class was led by Melissa Rodriguez, aided by Debbie Delevan, a popular intern from the Johns Hopkins University. Rodriguez had been recruited as a social studies teacher from the upper Midwest in January, and had hit the ground running. She was the first Celebration teacher whose style I instinctively relished. Socratic and provocative, she pushed buttons, raised hackles, and rabble-roused from the get-go. In return, the students erected a solid wall of complacency. It was a familiar game, and a delight to watch it unravel, even in her first class a few months earlier:

  “I grew up in a two-room log cabin without running water in Wisconsin. Part of your complacency is about how easy it is to access everything you want. I need you to come up with something you’re going to get riled up about.”

  “I can feel the passion in this room,” one student quips dryly.

  “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, marched for NOW, went on a hunger strike, and boycotted our junior prom because the district wouldn’t provide services for non–English speakers.”

  A deep pool of silence swallows up this last remark.

  “Don’t you want to make a difference here?” she asks.

  Finally, the dawn of dialogue.

  “At the beginning of the year we w
ere vocal, but the administration paid no attention to us.”

  Rodriguez takes a more direct approach:

  “Give me an example of someone who acted against the law, because of their beliefs.”

  “George Washington, he acted against slavery.”

  “Harriet Tubman, she helped free slaves.”

  “Rosa Parks, she stood up for her rights.”

  “Only three names, in all of American history?” Rodriguez asks.

  “Nixon, he broke the law, and lost our trust.”

  “Where is that bright shining face that wants to be president?”

  “Talk to the elementary kids, we know too much about the government’s lies.”

  Rodriguez moves briskly through the classroom, picks up several backpacks, and starts to look through them. Voices are raised in protest. She explains she has the right to do this, and that no student has the right to stop teachers searching their bags, lockers, and cars. “When you enroll in school, you check your rights at the door.” Are students full citizens? Maybe not. “I can violate your individual rights to protect others from you.” Of all the rights, however, the most important, she declares, is “the right of the governed to start a revolution.” One student considers this suggestion to be “mutinous.” Another says it “makes for weak government.” They are given four weeks to come up with their own “quiet revolution” as part of a service-learning project. The results are mixed. One group opts to find out whether Town Hall has installed surveillance cameras to watch over teen behavior around town. Nothing tangible can be found; all evidence turns out to be anecdotal. Another chooses to petition the school administration to allow students to plan the graduation ceremony. The student council has no effective presence in the school, and this ad hoc group has little chance of holding sway. But they do finally prevail and graduation is organized, this time around, with full student input. A third group is organized to initiate an AIDS Awareness Day in Osceola schools. A much more ambitious undertaking, it slowly dissolves.

  Just before the Apopka trip, Upper 4 had successfully completed a project on simulating a local government system. Nominations were made, campaigns were run, and a mayor and city council were elected to preside over mock meetings. The mayoral choice, Marcel Zahner, was already a legend around town. An exchange student from an elite school in Switzerland, Marcel was the walking definition of precocious. As part of an earlier class project on Wall Street, this wunderkind had invested $10,000 of play money in the stock markets and within a month had apparently racked up over a million dollars in returns. Word got around about this feat, and area investors asked him to repeat his performance, which he did with ease. A stock market player since the age of five, his senior project was a business analysis. While Marcel and I were quite friendly, he was cagey about letting me read the research paper, “in case it got into the wrong hands.” Some of Marcel’s classmates referred to him, rather enviously, as “The Capitalist.” At times he adopted the finely tuned politics of a European-style Social Democrat, and at other times inveighed, from the right, against American-style liberalism. He quickly became a model of character building for other parents to judge their Celebration children against. As one put it to me, “Marcel sees a challenge and makes a beeline for it. My son senses pain and moves away. That’s the problem with this school.”

  In time, the government project yielded to one focusing on utopian communities—the last topic of the year. Students convened into self-selecting groups to draw up the founding principles of their ideal societies. The political spectrum was well represented. On the right, Marcel’s all-male group came up with following: security/crime prevention, rights of ownership, small government, limited welfare, no drugs, individual rights, free education, and no laws that violate the founding principles. On the left, a coed group, led by culture rebels like Aimee Ramos and Ryan Frith, had a wish list of neo-anarchist principles: freedom of choice (anytime, anywhere), no censorship, equal opportunity (regardless of sex, age, sexual orientation, and social class), full media publication of all government transactions, free education, free health care, freedom of religion, firearms are prohibited. The other groups were centrist, the exception being a New Age–oriented female cohort, led by the formidable duo of Sarah Fields and Rachel Binns, who listed evident and relevant love, words with meaning, giving (money-free), and equality in numbers. How did Celebration match up? “Diversity is not happening here,” claimed the anarchists. The law-and-order group wanted more “structure.” The New Age group argued that the school, in particular, could not be an “ethical” institution because its administrators were too authoritarian and hierarchical in their mode of government.

  At year’s end, Melissa Rodriguez had weathered the storms well. She stole a march on everyone by persuading Patricia Schroeder, Celebration’s own resident celebrity politician, to deliver a cheery graduation day speech. A Hispanic-Jewish mother of two, with a keen scholarly interest in the Holocaust, Rodriguez had taught previously in Kenya, in barefoot village schools where paint was applied to the wall to illustrate lessons. Unlike other, greener recruits on the staff, she took everything with a grain of salt. Besides, by the time she came on board in January, Upper 4 was functioning, as she put it, more like a “normal high school in a different building.” Given the pressure on seniors to collect graduating credits, classes even then were reverting more and more to single discipline teaching and to traditional whole-group instruction. Teachers had less and less need to draw on those break-the-mold skills for which their recruitment interview had involved questions like “Have you ever broken a law?” (The correct answer, of course, was yes.)

  But the turmoil of the summer reforms and faculty departures took their toll, even on Rodriguez. When the fall semester began, she encouraged her students to open a dialogue with the administration about their concerns. She reported that she was issued with a verbal warning for “unprofessional use of student alliances.” When this was explained to her by a district official as “inciting students to riot,” she could see the writing on the wall. Rodriguez taught her last day of classes, and, with a dramatic touch, wrote her letter of resignation on the blackboard for all seniors to read, before heading back to Wisconsin. At that time I was back in New York, but students were so stunned by this turn of events that they let me know all about it. In retrospect, Rodriguez explained that she had not come all the way to Celebration to teach in “a regular high school,” but had left comforted by the knowledge that many of her students “had got it.” In her mind, they had understood the goals behind the school’s methods and had participated in their own education in ways that are rare for a teacher to witness.

  One month later, Charmaine Gabel, the union rep and Upper 3’s unflappable mathematician, also called it a day. Worn down by parent harassment and unwilling to watch Celebration become a “prep school instead of the nurturing, creative body it was intended to be,” she concluded: “This was no longer the school in which I was hired to teach.” Tired of hearing about “bright young people getting out of teaching because of parents,” she said she was considering writing a book entitled How to Eliminate the Teachers from Your Child’s School.

  SELF-STARTERS

  I first visited Upper 4—the school’s sticky spot—at the invitation of team leader Carolyn Hopp, and ended up spending more time there than in any other neighborhood. Trained in the performing arts in North Carolina and France and a veteran of several school start-ups in Washington state, Hopp was a member of the original DNA2 planning team and hailed from a family of educators. Leroy Walker, her father, had been chancellor of North Carolina Central and, later, president of the U.S. Olympics Committee. Snapshots of him with Bishop Tutu, Bill Cosby, and Al Gore lined her personal space in the teachers’ room.

  It was the afternoon of portfolio night, when students show their parents a selection of their work from the past nine weeks. In the classroom where Hopp was teaching, an American flag hung limp by the blackboard, while smaller fl
ags of other nations lined the back wall. Beside Old Glory was a faded snapshot of a pre–Civil Rights multi-age classroom of black children. Off to the right were a picture of Martin Luther King Jr., arms crossed patiently across his chest, and a defiant if goofy John Lennon flashing a peace sign in front of the Statue of Liberty. Ranged around the walls were presentation boards from student projects about anorexia, bulimia, depression, and other phobias and obsessions. By the end of the year, these would be joined by large displays on constitutional rights and amendments, healing the world, and starting a revolution. The hearth area featured a Combate el Racismo! sign and tourist posters for Spain, France, and Puerto Rico. Pictures of Geraldo Rivera and Tito Puente hung in the Spanish language classroom, and in the science area, a mockup of the HIV virus posed alongside a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum. There was little chauvinism in evidence here—I never once saw a pledge of allegiance observed in any Celebration classroom, and the school’s dress code was rarely in evidence. These images were not set up as multicultural icons to be idolized. They were matter-of-fact details of the environment that students would simply take for granted.

  Hopp and her team were expecting portfolio night to be a highly charged drama, with parental frustration at this new ritual running into the red zone. Many parents would not be satisfied until the school sent a senior to an Ivy League college (and they doubted that “portfolios” would help). An Ivy League admission may happen in time, but it was not a goal emblazoned over the entrance to the senior neighborhood. Hopp had become well aware of the consequences. She took more direct parental hits than anyone else, and her resolve to stand by her, and the school’s, principles gave her the scent of a martyr. She considers herself “an educator, not a black educator,” and modestly makes the case for “thinking outside of the box” of the bichromatic mentality governing race in America. Regardless, she often underwent a special scrutiny. Months after the fact, she was still rankled by the memory of her encounter with some visiting college educators from the Holmes Group who had tried to take her to task for being a “token” black teacher in the white-bread Celebration environment. “Does it bother you that I teach here?” she had retorted, turning the issue into their problem.