by Sean Boling
Chapter Seventeen: Dale
From the beginning, he knew some families would pull their children. Turnover was a part of any school, and the issue about which he was least idealistic when he took the job at LOCA. You gained some, you lost some, hoped you came out ahead, and all of the above would be intensified as a new charter. He even accounted for the possibility of some sort of polarizing event to inflict heavy losses for a period of time that he hoped he would be able to keep short.
So when word was clearly spreading and opinions developing about his decision, he had already braced himself for the fallout. What surprised him was that the first wave of defections were from the ranks of the affluent. He had assumed they would try to outlast the meager levels to form what would amount to a free private school, as the exodus amongst the most vulnerable would amass over time.
The top-down insurgency made some sense when he thought of the world beyond their withered valley, and the role that the wealthy play in setting trends. It made even more sense when he considered the source of the Live Oak uprising. He imagined Candice was attempting to set herself up for life after the revolution at the same time she was fomenting it. And Dale was long past being in a position to disparage anyone for trying to bake themselves into the upper crust.
The families most at risk still played a role, but only as a cudgel for those coming in to announce their intentions.
“There are a lot of kids who seem to need more attention than they’re getting,” said Jo Jo, a mother whom Dale hadn’t seen much of since her husband had fulfilled their volunteer hours with his electrical work on the building before the school opened.
“They will,” he assured her. “Once we have our new high tech classrooms set up, the teachers will have more time to work with our gifted students, such as your Maddie, as well as those who may be struggling.”
“I’m not really talking about that kind of attention,” she said.
“You mean behavior, then,” Dale confirmed.
“At our old school,” Jo Jo nodded. “At St. Bonnie’s, we had some kids like that, but they had people monitoring them. They had special classes they could go to.”
“We’ll get there,” he said. “That’s my background, after all.”
“I know.”
“And nobody wants to get that infrastructure up and running as much as I do. But we need to compile our evidence to demonstrate our need that leads to our funding, and then find qualified people to spend those funds on.”
Jo Jo continued to nod, but as filler it seemed, rather than thanks to the point he made. She stopped nodding and made her pronouncement.
“I just don’t think we can wait that long to feel like our daughter is safe.”
Which is where every conversation with the initial evacuees ended up.
They had agreed that safety would be their theme.
Most fell on the safety net as their cue to exit, but some went so far as to say that rules were being applied differently to select students. If Dale pressed them for examples, they never mentioned Artie, so as to dodge accusations that they were violating any family’s right to confidentiality, especially when that right belonged to a family so wealthy and powerful. They would instead reference a special needs student of some sort, usually Xavier, whose hulking presence and ongoing rivalry with the equally hulking Viv made him an obvious mark. The closest they would come to identifying Artie is when Dale would bring up the high tech classroom and someone like Jo Jo would tie the funding to preferential treatment of certain students. Again, their marching orders prohibited them from naming Artie outright, so they would tiptoe through the accusation by claiming the computers would simply serve as a place where LOCA could plop all of the problem children and give them something to do, without having to address the behavior.
Dale wondered how long Candice’s plan could sustain its momentum. He also realized that in terms of being able to stem its growth, Rod’s plan would be of no help.
Not that it was a total failure. The Pluma doctrine was succeeding in its own way. Artie no longer bothered anyone, and he was never sent to Rod’s table in lieu of the principal’s office. Rather, Artie sat there voluntarily during recess and lunch, getting his homework done early, biding his time as quietly with his Dad as he did in class with his fellow students. The two of them were the steady presence Rod had hoped for. But their steadiness verged on lifelessness.
If Dale didn’t have access to such information, he would have sworn Artie was being medicated. Whether it was Rod brooding solo, or the two of them indulging each other’s solemnity, Dale was reluctant to approach their table. Others seemed to feel the same. Even Rita didn’t spend much time with them while on campus. They were invisible and unavoidable, well-groomed echoes of broken people holding cardboard signs pleading for help. Dale made an effort at least a couple of times a day to talk with one or both of them, and it was like conducting a séance with ghosts that he could see but still had to lure into conversation.
During one of those contacts, Rod informed him that the dirty looks were fading, as were any looks in general.
Dale suspected as much with regard to their haunted picnic table, as he had also experienced a similar feeling of being the object of a disappearing act with a sizable portion of the parents since he had regained his bearings and started to venture out on campus more often.
They would avoid eye contact rather than express their hostility, and it usually served as a preamble for pulling their kids, amounting to a silent version of the evasive conversations he had with those who at least scheduled an office visit before leaving. One day a mother or father was pretending to spot something beyond Dale that provided an excuse to walk past him without saying hello, the next day their son or daughter was gone.
There was a sympathetic faction as well, those who had taken his side, but their overtures were almost as disconcerting. They lobbed him forced grins and thumbs-up signals, and their verbal support was far too lavish. They would tell him how courageous and brave he was, and thanked him for what he had done, which made him feel like a soldier getting off a plane to a hero’s welcome when all he had done was work behind a desk, far away from combat. Others made him feel as though he had a grave illness with low odds for survival. They would put a hand on his shoulder or pull him aside and tell him how much he had to be proud of, that he had a cause worth fighting for, and they were rooting for him.
The students remained mercifully oblivious in great numbers, particularly amongst the younger ones, and provided a serene path for Dale on his hikes. They waved at him when he entered their classrooms, excited to see him, but perhaps even more excited to steal a moment that diverted their attention from their teacher or their work. He smiled back at them and silently suggested they return to what they were doing.
He threw the football around at recess, and shot a basket or two, and when running a game of kickball or capture the flag for a P.E. class, celebrated with the victors and shared in some good-natured gnashing of teeth with the vanquished.
He heard singing outside his office door after lunch one afternoon, and followed the sound onto the catwalk with a nod to Wendy as he passed by. Shirley Ojeda’s Kindergarteners were marching around the showroom in a circle. They each had a word on a card, and would raise that card when the word was voiced in the song they were singing. The words were the type that often come up in children’s songs, ‘love’, ‘happy’, ‘mother’, ‘baby’, and they sang a collection of greatest hits to give themselves plenty of opportunities to hoist those words. Dale drifted to the far end of the catwalk to keep from distracting them, and listened to their voices make their way through “Five Little Ducks”, “Skidamarink”, “You Are My Sunshine”, and “Hush Little Baby”, with Shirley maintaining the pace and belting out the lyrics loud enough to prompt those who forgot the occasional word, line, or verse.
He watched them until the circle was broken and turned into a wiggly line that Shirley wanted to straighten out
before leading it back to the room. Dale focused on each kid for a moment as they jostled into position, imagining them as adults. They each had chosen a color to wear that day, and their choices appeared to represent all the available options, but so much about the rest of their upcoming days seemed so inescapable. One boy already carried himself like a very sweet, very lonely, very overworked man. A few spaces down the line stood a girl soberly waiting to fend off those who were drawn into idiocy by her looks, while the girl behind her was up for any attention that her friend didn’t want. The boys who were as hyper as calves seemed destined to turn inward as they got older and become as sullen as bulls.
At the front of the line stood a brown-haired girl with a single pigtail on one side of her head. She looked up at Shirley, waiting for the order to walk, and spotted Dale. She announced her discovery by hollering “Hello Mr. Copeland!”, which started a chain reaction. He waved back modestly, a bit sheepish at having been caught. As they receded from the open floor and gravitated toward their class, he hoped that most of his predictions would prove wrong.
Wendy greeted him back to the office with a reminder that they should start preparing for the state tests being administered later that spring.
“Maybe we’ll begin with some announcements in the morning,” he deliberated aloud. “Then we can decide in the faculty meetings how much class time we want to devote to test-taking strategies, and what those strategies should be.”
“Performing well on these tests would really look good,” she said.
Dale shuddered faintly.
“Let’s just hope it still matters by then,” he said.
Wendy smiled at him, and he couldn’t quite decide if she was expressing sympathy or casting blame.
