George,

I was surprised and a little amused to see ideas that I had told the Daily Progress reporter were "radical," "wacky" and "never going to happen in a million years" ended up getting such prominent play in yesterday's paper. But though there's a danger in "thinking out loud" for every politician--people assume you're talking from settled policy positions rather than just brainstorming--on the whole I think it's very positive that these ideas be aired at this time.

The school board is justly proud of having chosen a superintendent whom they think to be exactly what Charlottesville needs: a curriculum leader with great listening skills who can be both strong and caring. This is a signal achievement and both the board and the wider Charlottesville community--which is still recovering from the painful, divisive, and personal infighting of last year--should bask in the glow.

But we can afford neither to rest on our laurels nor to sink into a collective denial as to the magnitude of the problems facing the school division in general or the teachers on the front line in particular. They paid the price last year for the community's hysteria, maintaining a focus on teaching despite all the distractions that resulted in higher test scores. But all the talk about "gaps," all the targeting of children who were struggling, and the spectacle of a largely white opposition taking down a black superintendent have had bitter consequences this year.

The trust between low-achieving students and teachers is strained to the breaking point. According to one principal, there have been 10 assaults on teachers this year. The crackdown this has sparked certainly sounds as if it might be necessary. But according to parents and community advocates, the discipline has been too harsh, too punitive, with children too often being marched in handcuffs past their peers, an action that shames and brands them and makes it more difficult (and eventually impossible) for them to be accepted back into the community. Morale among teachers, according to that principal, is as low as it was at its lowest point last year.

I believe it. I'm having too many conversations with despairing teachers, strong women wracked with tears by their inability to help. I'm hearing from too many child advocates, who are telling me things like "I mop up blood every day." These conversations have precipitated a personal crisis for me as someone who flung my own childhood on the bonfire of the grand social experiment in integration. I could have been a student leader or a prom queen at a black school--I traded that for social ostracism and the cold comfort of being "the first" to graduate from my almost all-white school. It's a sacrifice I never would have made had I known that we would still be having these same conversations, these same problems more than thirty years later.

But this is not about me, this is about kids in Charlottesville who are suffering today. I'm told by principals that there are at least 30 students at every grade level from 5th grade on who are not just "at risk" for dropping out--they are *going* to drop out by 10th grade. These are not severely learning disabled kids, not kids with IQs of 50, or emotional problem severe enough to require a special facility. They are kids who are of average intelligence--and sometimes they're very bright--but they hate school, they're constant discipline problems, they have poor attendance (often due to family issues), and they're failing the SOLs (or passing the SOLs and failing their classes). They're doing these things not because they're the "bad seeds" and criminals in training some consider them to be--but because they are kinesthetic learners who *cannot* learn in the one-size-fits-all environment of the Charlottesville schools. At least 40 percent of these kinesthetic learners are white. Unable to meet the expectations of the system, the kids rebel and we respond by cracking down, crushing their spirits, tossing them onto the scrap heap of the Alternative Program, the Suspension Center and, eventually, the criminal justice system where we, with our tax dollars, pay the final price for our failure to educate them to a level where they can find a way to live lives of meaning and purpose.

You may be saying to yourself, it's not possible; things couldn't be that bad. They're worse, in my opinion. By any objective measure, the city of Charlottesville is failing to educate these children. Our high school may be ranked in the top 25 in Virginia, but we rank 130th out of 132 districts in the state in African American pass rates on the SOLs. I'm offered the excuse by central office that the other districts are lying and the numbers are not as bad as all that. I say, even if they're lying, that shifts our position upward by 10 or 20 points--not the 100 points that would bring our "alternative" programs in line with the high school's performance.

So my question to the community is this: How long are we going to be content with failure? You may not feel a sense of urgency because "my kid is doing fine." To you I offer the comment of an especially passionate teacher and Greenbriar-area parent: "You might think your kid is doing fine--they might tell you they're doing fine, but no kids in a dysfunctional system are really OK." You may feel a sense of urgency in the opposite direction--toward silence. Indeed, many people have urged me privately not to speak out or become active in this issue out of what appears almost a terror of producing more white flight. But what's going to bring parents back to the system, in my humble opinion, is not marketing campaigns, as Ned Michie suggested at a recent school board-city council lunch--but performance. And performance will not improve until we can be honest with ourselves and with each other about what our core problems and issues are.

I keep hearing that that this honest assessment must wait, wait for the new superintendent, wait till the time is right, wait until our budgetary problems can be addressed, blah-blah-blah. I say all I've watched us do is wait. We became aware of the problem last year, but weren't able to implement any strategies or solutions because we were too busy fighting among ourselves. We couldn't do anything this year because the school board was consumed with strategic planning mandated by the state and with a superintendent search. The superintendent won't make any sweeping changes next year--and possibly not even the year after that--because she'll be occupied with top-to-bottom review and building buy-in for her solutions. So it could be five years before any action is taken--an entire generation of children lost, not to mention the teachers who'll be used up and burned out. With research aplenty available on the pedagogies and approaches that are effective with kinesthetic learners, with children's lives on the line, how can we justify this pernicious waiting?

I can no longer do so--it would be both morally and politically indefensible for me to even make the attempt. Therefore, I'm writing this in the hopes of sparking an honest and searching debate on what we as a community can do *now* to help our new superintendent succeed. This debate cannot degenerate into the name-calling and finger-pointing that consumed us last year--I can think of nothing more destructive--but it must take place.

There's a school board election coming up, the first we've ever had, and these venues may provide an appropriate place for the debate to begin. Please, I urge you--educate yourself about the issues, talk to the candidates, challenge them to move beyond vague generalities about bringing the community together. But even more importantly, challenge your neighbors, challenge yourselves, to think creatively and to demand that we innovate.

Failure cannot continue to be an option--not for the No. 1 city, not for our kids, not any more.

- Kendra Hamilton (electronic mail, March 6. 2006)