Public School

When I was young and went to Catholic school, there was never a question about whether I would actually go or not go. School was school. It was the way of the world. Mom went to work and we went to school. Then one day I overheard mom stressing about our tuition payments. It was going to cost $3000 next year, and she wasn't sure she could get enough assistance. This was in the early 80's and Reaganomics hadn't trickled down to our neighborhood yet. The church didn't have much money to pass around to the hundred or so families that used the school.
My sister had chosen her high school when she was in the fifth grade, and was working her butt off to get a scholarship. She took her entire set of textbooks home every night to study. She sweated every detail of every report she had to write. A mediocre grade could mean the difference between St. Elizabeth's High School and public high school. Saint Lizzies was $4000 a year. There was no way mom could pay for that and my education too. So I made a sacrifice and turned it into a "brilliant idea".
I have always had a talent for art, and FAME was a big hit on T.V., so I decided I wanted to go to Visual and Performing Arts public school. I was confident that I was good enough to get in, and going there would ensure my sister's ability to attend St. Elizabeth's. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't think saving $1500 a year would cover the expense. I fully expected my sister would get at least a partial scholarship, and she had been working part time jobs since she was 12. I really believed that me going to public school would be best for everybody.
The St. Louis City Magnet (read: public) School system sucks. It was intended to promote integration without encouraging black people to move into white neighborhoods. They called this "desegregation", and it was a disaster. In order to get into the magnet school system, I had to take whatever was available, then work my way up the list to the school of my choice. So I left my 20 or so classmates behind and went to Waring Academy of Basic Instruction. Each magnet school had a specialty. Some offered foreign languages, some offered the arts, some specialized in math and science. Waring offered a no-frills education, and two history books. We had history and (I'm not kidding you here) Afro-American history. This was a thick black textbook with silver drawings of people with afro's on it. I asked my teacher why we needed two versions of history segregated by color? Didn't we all live through the same things? In Catholic school, this may have earned me half an hour of kneeling in the corner. At Waring, my teacher told me "because" and kept her eye on me for the rest of the year.
I came to dread the 45 minutes each day we spent with that awful black book. All I learned from it is that history book writers are terribly biased. I started looking for bias in our "white" history book, and I found it. That one was titled "American History" and really was a white book with an eagle and a flag in it. It had 2 paragraphs on the Korean conflict, and referred to Vietnam as an ongoing police action. That's how old this book was. I changed schools in 1981. Our class never made it past the great depression, however, because we opened the white book on Tuesdays and Fridays only. The other 3 days a week were devoted to PE or double math.
At Notre Dame Elementary, lunch was cooked by neighborhood moms who worked in the cafeteria to help pay the tuition for their children. We had a food mom, a milk mom, a money mom and a playground mom. At Waring Academy of Basic instruction, lunch came in a little paper box with no lid. It was served to us by 2 nice ladies with hairnets, and we paid with tickets we had bought Monday morning. You could not go back for seconds and you could not buy extra milk. I would sometimes swipe my mom's cigarettes and trade them for extra food tickets. Apparently our government thought a microwaved chili dog and 5 fat french fries constituted a balanced meal. We never knew what would be served until we smelled it. There was a 6th grader who would sell counterfeit tickets on pizza day. The school tried to outsmart him by changing the colors each week, but he made up food tickets in all 4 colors we used. The lunch ladies didn't care either way. Perhaps they were doing their part to fill the bellies of hungry kids everywhere, and went home happy. I don't know.
Recess was spent on an acre of blacktop with no shade and very little to play with. The school had 5 double dutch ropes and 2 dodge balls. This was our playground equipment. Everyone went out at the same time. Kindergarten through 8th grade spread out across the pavement, the little ones huddled in defensive groups, the big ones running roughshod over them, while the eldest smoked cigarettes on the side of the building. We were sent out in rain or shine. The only time we weren't let out was when there was snow.
It took 2 1/2 years for me to get out of this armpit of education, but I finally reached my dream and went to Visual and Performing Arts Middle School. VAPA middle was like a breath of fresh air after Waring. It was cleaner and rigorous and history was history, not pap about the history of oppression that put you where you are today. My Afro-American history book had 2 chapters on Malcolm X, but only one for Dr. Martin Luther King. Every chapter had something inflammatory in it, and whoever wrote it needs to be publicly flogged.