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BEYOND THE DPS PICKET LINE – 2 By Grace Lee Boggs Michigan Citizen, Sept. 24-30, 2006 The 16-day Detroit teachers strike is over. Most teachers are back in their classrooms. So are students, - minus the hundreds, perhaps thousands, whose parents have transferred them to other school districts or to charter schools or who have dropped out because the strike was the tipping point. This means fewer students on “Count Day,” drastic cuts in state funding, increasingly contentious labor-management disputes over diminishing resources, etc. etc. That is why we urgently need to start thinking and acting “outside the box.” The strike has made it clear that solutions to the escalating problems of our public schools are not going to come from any existing organizations – not the teachers union, DPS administrators, school board, City County Building or Lansing. Instead, as Nate Walker said in this space last week, “Together as parents, students, teachers, administrators and members of a community, it is time to collectively commit ourselves to address the roots of the educational crisis. If we don’t, our schools will continue to fail our children and our city. We must work to create an educational experience that nurtures and prepares children to solve some of the problems in our communities instead of schools serving as a battleground.” To begin with, I suggest that teachers discuss the school crisis with students in their classrooms. It makes no sense to believe we can create a nurturing educational process for our children without including them in this discussion. It also means that we must stop thinking of the educational process as a sector of the economy which schools young people for jobs, teaching those subjects that the economy defines as important, and which provides jobs for teachers, administrators, custodians, book publishers, school supplies manufacturers and distributors, etc. Instead, we have to start with the human needs of our children. That means we have to acknowledge that as our cities have been falling apart, large numbers of our children come to school without the emotional support required for learning. They suffer 24/7 the enormous pain that comes from the absence of stable home lives. Teachers alone cannot provide this emotional support. So we/they need to begin exploring and gathering educational resources beyond the school walls. We/they need to reach out to members of the community - churches, businesses, block clubs. We/they need to invite and encourage them to become part of the educational process. In every neighborhood there are some elders who can volunteer to spend a day in nearby schools. People with life experiences to share and love to give have to step up. You don’t have to be a college graduate to provide the support some of our children urgently need. In schools where this is already happening, some kids only come to school on the days when elders visit their classrooms. There is a church on nearly every corner in this city. They can help get this process underway by adopting a classroom or classrooms in a neighborhood school and recruiting elders to become involved for a day or two every week, including those who now spend time feeding coins into slot machines because they have nothing to do. We/they need to invite Detroiters with visions of how to rebuild, redefine and respirit our city into classrooms to share their visions so that our children can begin preparing themselves to realize these visions and begin seeing their future as active citizens of Detroit rather than abandoning the city for the suburbs or other states. In the process of engaging in such activities we can begin to bring the neighbor back into the ‘hood, creating communities out of what are today only physical spaces where we live in isolation and fear of one another. So this crisis, like every crisis, is not only a danger but an opportunity. These are a few suggestions. I would very much like to know what readers think. What lessons did you draw from the strike? Please write me www.boggscenter.org/ Email Grace Boggs Center, |