Posted on 03/14/2009 7:54:27 PM PDT by devane617
Tracey Keim had been a bartender for years and thought she'd heard it all.
But even the crustiest of gutter-mouthed drunks would have been hard-pressed to match the verbal barrage unleashed by a 15-year-old in Keim's 10th-grade English class last fall.
It was the first day of school at St. Petersburg High, and the student, who was black, was trying to rattle Keim, 40, who is white.
"Listen," Keim said, "you can't yell like that. I work really hard not to interrupt you guys, and I … "
"F--- YOOOUUUU!!!" the girl bellowed.
Some of the nouns and adjectives that followed were standard issue. A few referred to Keim's anatomy. Others, such as "white bitch," touched on the color of her skin.
Racist? Yes and no, Keim said.
"I think she was just saying 'white bitch' because that's what she could come up with. I think she was just being as outrageous as possible."
Keim shared her story in the aftermath of provocative statements made recently by Pinellas School Board member Mary Brown, who said during the board's annual retreat that the district needed to address "the elephant in the room" — persistent complaints that black students in south Pinellas schools are intimidating white teachers.
In a series of interviews with south county teachers, the St. Petersburg Times found many agreed with Keim, saying kids tend to dish out whatever they think will rile teachers the most. Sometimes, the dish comes with a racist edge.
Barbara Thornton, associate superintendent for high school programs, thinks such over-the-top comments are rare. And while she says she doesn't doubt Brown's sincerity, racially motivated slurs are beyond the realm of her experience.
"I've never in my 36 years in this district felt intimidated by a black child," said the former Largo High principal, who is white.
Superintendent Julie Janssen, who also is white and was an assistant principal at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg, said she never experienced racially motivated aggression either.
"I honestly never felt threatened, even when I stayed late (at school)," Janssen said. "I sometimes took kids home. For me, it's never been a problem."
• • •
In south Pinellas, it's a fact that a largely white, middle-class teaching corps is teaching a student body that is increasingly poor and black. Many of those teachers say they have been bombarded by rude behavior from black students.
But almost all of them said Brown's remarks didn't quite hit the mark.
It's not racism, the teachers say. It's rampant disrespect and dysfunction.
They say there are far too many wounded, out-of-control kids, both black and white. And with the return to neighborhood schools, fears are mounting that those students are being concentrated in a handful of schools and disrupting them to the point of paralysis.
In south Pinellas, those students happen to be black.
"You go to Gibbs (High), you go to John Hopkins (Middle) … and you'll see it," said Sherry Howard, a media assistant at John Hopkins who is black, referring to the behavior of black students. "You shouldn't be coming to school wondering what's going to happen, what kind of fights, what kind of nonsense."
The teachers' concerns are rooted in the always shaky ground of race. There's reality, perceptions of reality, and perceptions that become reality.
Beyond that, questions and complications mount. How much of the problem behavior escalates because of poor classroom management? How much can be blamed on school administrators who don't mete out discipline consistently, or don't back up teachers?
How often do white teachers set off black students with unintentional sleights? How often do they do it intentionally? Could better training for teachers help?
Would it be effective to hire more black teachers?
"I don't know what the answer is," Howard said. "I just know if we keep going in this direction, we are never going to educate our kids to the level they deserve."
• • •
Earlier this year, Karen Kisten was in the classroom she shares with another Gibbs High teacher when her colleague asked a girl to sit down.
The girl, who was black, refused. She then pointed to Kisten and the other teacher, both of whom are white, and said, "You don't belong here. This is a black school."
Kisten, a 37-year veteran who began teaching before Pinellas schools integrated in 1971, was shocked and saddened. She knew the girl from a previous teaching stint at Riviera Middle School.
"I took her outside and said, 'What has happened to you?' " said Kisten, who told her story to Mary Brown.
The girl rolled her eyes.
Teachers like Kisten have been dealing with unruly kids forever. But some south county teachers worry that things may be reaching a tipping point.
After decades of court-ordered desegregation, when the Pinellas school district capped black student enrollment at 42 percent, the demographics in south Pinellas schools are shifting rapidly. Two years ago, no south county schools had a black majority.
Now, nine do. Five more will join them soon.
Brown, who opposed the return to neighborhood schools, said she raised the teacher-intimidation issue in part to prod the district to fulfill its promise to south Pinellas. To smooth the transition to neighborhood schools, the School Board had said it would send more resources to schools with fast-rising numbers of low-income kids.
"I will not let the board forget that," Brown said.
Some schools were on edge before the demographic shift.
Two years ago, teacher frustration boiled over at Gibbs in the wake of rampant vandalism and disturbing tales of student defiance. In an unsigned letter to then superintendent Clayton Wilcox, teachers said they were fearful. Among other complaints, they said some black students called white teachers racist when the teachers asked them to follow the rules.
Since then, the percentage of black students at Gibbs has risen from 43 to 51 percent. Frustration still simmers. Gibbs produced 42 teacher transfer requests last year, more than any other school in Pinellas.
A few miles away at Boca Ciega High, the percentage of black students has risen from 38 to 44 percent in four years.
Former Boca Ciega English teacher Y'Desha Alsup, who is black, said she could see the change.
In the past, kids with neighborhood feuds would go their separate ways when they got on different buses to go to different schools, she said. Not anymore.
"A lot of neighborhood stuff started coming in," said Alsup, who left the district in January to pursue a doctoral degree. "A lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school."
But she said the tension never spilled over into her classes.
"I believe it has a lot to do with my demeanor with my students," Alsup said. "I treated them with the utmost respect."
Other south Pinellas teachers, though, said that no matter how respectful teachers are toward students, some students aren't respectful in return.
"There are kids who do not learn to respect any authority whatsoever," said James Masson, a former Gibbs teacher who's now at Pinellas Park High. "Most of the kids (at Gibbs) were wonderful and nice. But there are kids, like at every school, who were defiant."
Like Keim, Masson said he was inclined to think that on those occasions when defiance sported a racial edge, the kids were motivated not by racism, but by a desire to push the envelope. In the context of a black student and a white teacher, a racist barb raises defiance to a higher level.
Harry Brown, the district's deputy superintendent in charge of curriculum, agreed kids will use whatever weapons are in their arsenal. At affluent, majority-white Palm Harbor University High, where Brown served as principal, students occasionally threatened teachers with lawsuits, he said.
• • •
Sometimes, what appears to be an impossible situation ends up a turning point.
The girl who cursed Tracey Keim, the St. Petersburg High teacher, was suspended for five days. When she returned to school, Keim took her aside and said, "Let's start over."
The girl is now one of the best writers in the class. She recently attended a writers workshop at the Poynter Institute and is headed to a leadership retreat for St. Petersburg High students later this month.
She has not raised her voice to Keim since.
“If people don’t know the amount of unbridled, absolute hatred that inner city blacks have toward whites...they need a dose of reality.”
Oh, I got to listen to it at the utility company the other day. One particular woman went on a rant in front of me, the only white in the room, about how white people didn’t want blacks to have @$%#. About how it was time for black folks to “make they own jobs.” She then proclaimed that she was going to buy some socks and start selling them.
I snickered at this a bit silently.
Then she got up and started asking everyone in the room if they’d got their free cellphone from the government, yet, and telling them how to get one. One girl in the room noted how she thought she was getting free service, but they charged her $20 per month and to be careful.
It’s rampant, alright. I deal with it everyday in an inner-city hospital, as well. The most racist people I’ve ever known can get away with public racism without batting an eye.
I attended HS in the 1950’s and graduated in 1960. In all my time in the school system I NEVER saw anyhting remotely close to the disrespect shown today’s teachers.
I can recall a student in my Biology class being taken out of the classroom by the teacher because he had the nerve to groan as the teacher was writing the homework assignment on the blackboard. This teacher had from day one informed us, in effect, we would all sit still, shut up and LEARN. He would take no commentary except that pertaining to the work at hand and as happened with this student that day, he would follow the student out the door and the sound of 2 or three loud “bangs: could be heard as the student was slammed up against the lockers which lined the halls.
This teacher like most of them was always addressed as sir or Ma’am. No student would ever think of complaining to the folks about being disciplined in this way since it would result in even more pain from them. After all, if the teacher said you did it, then you did it, case closed.
This all took place during a time of double sessions in the HS while a new school was being built and the number of students per class reached into the 40’s. Yet we all received great educations which are in my opinion the easy equivalent of what kids with 4 years of college get today.
The difference between today and yesterday is explained by the following imo. Discipline, accountability and parental backing and involvement in the learning process.
In the black community it is not cool to learn, You are made fun of if you make an effort to learn, do the homework assignments, and participate in class. The leaders of the black community never step up to the mike and state the real problem in the black community. The last, and current generation is lost. I see nothing but drug addicts, and criminals coming out of that community.
This woman needs to get her head out of the clouds and into a classroom. She is an example of the ignorance that is destroying this nation.
This is mild compared to what I have experienced. It is to the point where many ghetto kids are unteachable, and schools have become a mere holding place before the kids enter prison.
Everyone who voted for Obama is a racist.
Anyone who uses the phrase “white bitch” (or white anything) is a racist.
Principal: student can’t wear Obama mask in show (it’s racist)
AP | 3/14/2009
Posted on 03/14/2009 8:09:10 PM PDT by james500
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206824/posts
Children Are Now Sexually Abusing Children
http://wowktv.com/ | March 14, 2009 | Story by D.K. Wright
Posted on 03/14/2009 8:32:37 PM PDT by Morgana
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206829/posts
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