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Photography by Whitney Curtis
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Bernestaine Harkins is halfway through her freshman year at Oakville High School, and her first class of the day is physical education. She and three other girls, all wearing some combination of hot pink and black, sit cross-legged on the gym floor, waiting to demonstrate their Justin Bieber workout routine. They chatter about the weekend and groan about the upcoming Spanish exam. “Y’all don’t want to try to get this beat together?” Bernie asks. “’Cause I promise we are going to be off beat!”
She finds the song on her phone, and they practice, with self-conscious giggles. Caitlin* is exhausted; she had to drink warm milk with whipped cream the night before to fall asleep. Bernie, who gets up at 4:50 a.m. so she can shower, do her hair, pray, and catch a 5:59 a.m. bus from Riverview Gardens School District, just shakes her head. “I don’t use that to fall asleep. I use my eyes and I close them.”
They deliberate—is warm milk gross? Somebody says there was a fight in the commons, outside the cafeteria. “I hope it wasn’t my friend,” Bernie murmurs. “She’s got a temper like that.” She snaps her fingers.
“Are there a lot of fights?” I ask. I’m sitting on my heels, awkwardly, just outside their circle.
“Out here? Not that often.” She gives me a wry smile. “Until we got out here.”
Emily comes over to try a fancier knot on the hot-pink scarf Caitlin lent to Bernie. Just then, the teacher calls: It’s their turn. Bernie quickly reties a simple knot.
“Caitlin’s crazy, but in a good way,” she tells me as we head for American government class. “Emily’s quiet. At lunch, you’ll meet Andrea. And you’ll meet my friend Crystal; she’s all over the place. You will meet Michael in the hallway. He’s a dude that rides the bus [from Riverview Gardens]. And you’ll meet Jenny in math and American government. I wanted you to meet Leah—she and Andrea, I met on the first day of school. I thought, ‘OK, I’m good.’ I had already made the two little friends I needed.”
Her warm, happy personality bubbles over like soap in a fountain, so it surprises me when she says, “I try to keep my circle as small as I can.” Her very best girlfriends are still three girls she went to middle school with. Ironically, they were the ones who wanted to transfer to the Mehlville School District, “I guess because of so many things they got there, like scholarships and clubs and getting a computer and all that.” Bernie figured she’d manage at Riverview. But then her mother asked whether she wanted to transfer, and they prayed about it and entered her name in the lottery at the last minute, and she got picked, and her friends didn’t. Now one friend goes to North Tech High School, another to McCluer High School. The third stayed in Riverview Gardens and finds that she likes it. “She’s in band and ROTC, so she’s really enjoying herself there,” Bernie reports.
And how about her—is going to Oakville worth that bus ride? “It is,” she says fervently. “It is way worth it.” Asked the difference, she says, “Money and opportunity.” When I probe a little, she tells me about Riverview Gardens: “It is not that bad, but sometimes people get out of hand. And if you just ask somebody for help or just say something at random, they will go off. At Oakville, if you need help, all kinds of people will help you. At Riverview, you are scared to go to somebody, and you, like, have to bring your mama.”
Darius Kirk became principal of Riverview Gardens High School last July. It had been six years since the district lost accreditation, and just a few weeks since the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that students in unaccredited districts could transfer out of them.
“I did walk into a challenge,” he says. “But this is what I honestly believe: Great hurdles define who people really are. If you say the situation is just too much, it’s overwhelming, then you don’t really know who you are as a person.”
Kirk will need that resilience: He came into a school where “everybody was on an island by themselves. They had issues academically; they had issues as far as discipline. We’d had a large number of suspensions. Our attendance was extremely low; so were our test scores.” He chose to treat the problems systemically: “You cannot just fix discipline. You have to say, ‘Are we giving them a curriculum they can relate to? What culture are we creating?’ When students are disengaged within the learning environment and there is not a culture that creates a positive atmosphere, that becomes a breeding ground for altercations.”
He refuses to panic about the budget: “We are extremely intentional about the money we spend now. There may not be an overabundance of resources, but the district has a financial reserve from the past. It’s not hurting us right now.” It will, the Missouri chapter of the National Education Association predicts; the district could run out of money by 2015. But Kirk’s hoping to improve the high school so dramatically, students will remain. “I cannot control their leaving, but what I can control is that they have a learning experience that makes them say, ‘You know what? I will stay here.’”
Some media outlets reported that 25 percent of Riverview’s students chose to transfer. The real number was much lower, says district spokeswoman Melanie Powell-Robinson. “Of 1,100 students [who transferred], about 400 of them we’ve never seen before. Maybe they were in kindergarten or homeschooled or in private or parochial schools or just moved from another district. But it’s more like 15 percent that actually chose to transfer away.”
The district has to pay all of those students’ tuition. Riverview gets state money for every day a student goes to school, so the reimbursement fluctuates, but it’s generally about $4,500 per student per year. That money now flows straight to the districts where the students have transferred. But it has never covered more than half of Riverview’s costs; federal subsidies and community taxes make up the difference.
Riverview’s cost per student before the transfer expenses was $9,400. This year, the district had to make drastic cuts, dropping the cost per student closer to $6,000, because it has to pay higher tuition to the other districts. Only two, the Mehlville School District (which received 207 students) and the Wentzville R-IV School District (which received three), have lower costs
per student than $9,400 per year. In the 21 other receiving districts, tuition can go as high as $18,000-plus per year. For the period of August through November, Riverview Gardens was billed $4.8 million for its transfer students.
I ask Kirk if he thinks Missouri’s transfer law is fair. He hesitates, then says quietly, “Whenever you take money out of a school district that is in need, we have to look at those practices to see if that’s the best thing for students. And that’s how I’m going to address that question.”
The law was written back in 1993, to goad unaccredited school districts into reform. It gave students the right to transfer to another district and forced the home district to pay their tuition, as well as provide free transportation to another school in the same or an adjoining county. The law was first invoked when the Wellston School District lost accreditation; it promptly ran out of money. The Missouri Board of Education hastily changed its accreditation status to “provisional.” The Wellston district was later dissolved altogether; its students entered the Normandy School District (which lost its accreditation last year).
In 2007, the St. Louis Public Schools lost accreditation. The School District of Clayton fought the state law. It took six years for the courts to reach a final decision. By 2013, the original point was moot; the public schools were back to “provisional” status. But Normandy and Riverview Gardens had lost accreditation.
“The ruling came at the very end of the school year,” Powell-Robinson points out, “and there was no road map, no sense of how many students would want to transfer, and no notion of whether the district could limit class sizes.” The Cooperating School Districts organization (now renamed EducationPlus) created an application form for all students who wanted to transfer. They could write in three choices, and every student got one of those three choices. But for those in Riverview Gardens, free transportation was initially promised only to the Mehlville district. When Mehlville insisted it couldn’t take many kids because it was trying to reduce its class sizes, Riverview Gardens added a free bus to the Kirkwood district.
Many parents were already furious at the choice of Mehlville, the southernmost district in St. Louis County, 22 miles away. They saw it as an attempt to make transferring as unappealing as possible. Riverview Gardens superintendent Scott Spurgeon said the choice was based on tuition costs and performance data.
But he urged parents to consider keeping their children in Riverview Gardens schools.
At press time, multiple bills were pending in the state legislature to soften the effects of the transfer law, which will have huge implications for rural and Kansas City schools as well.
Bernie’s favorite color is “pink, because it’s eye-popping. It’s a happy color.” Her favorite food is toasted ravioli, because “it’s weird. You would never toast a ravioli.” She dreams of becoming an inspirational speaker. What would she say to kids her age? “Come as you are. People talk about people’s shoes and how they dress—like, name-brand stuff. If you have just got one pair of shoes and they dirty or whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you have goin’ on up in your head and in your heart.”
The fashion scene’s less intense at Oakville, she says. “It’s two different types of systems. Riverview, you are going to see a lot of Jordan, Adidas, Nike, and people really trippin’ off Trues.” I take a stab: True Religion jeans? She nods.
The atmosphere at her Riverview Gardens elementary and middle schools, she says, was… “I don’t know the word for it. More mean people.” Tough? “That’s the word! Trying to act better than people and stuff like that. I’m not a person who likes to fight. I keep my distance. But the kids at Riverview, they extra. People get mad over petty stuff. They raise their voice and get other people’s attention, and it draws a crowd, and then everybody and their mama got to be interested in what happened.” Her words come in an exasperated rush. “Even if somebody does something to you, you don’t have to be all extra about it.”
Bernie hangs out with the kids on her bus “like every blue moon,” she says. “I still talk to them. But I’ve got a mixture of friends.” Despite all the media hype and demographic differences (Riverview is 97 percent African-American; Mehlville is 82 percent white), she says she hasn’t seen much racism. “The kids are fine. Right now, racism is a big issue, so if you are racist, you are going to get talked about.” She’s decided adults, in general, are more racist than kids. “Most of the people I chill back with, they don’t have racist issues.”
The real adjustment at Oakville was working on a school-issued laptop and mustering her way through tons of homework. “Some of the kids who came out were not the best students at Riverview,” she says. “A couple of my friends got suspended, but they’re doing better now. I think they are knowing they need to be about their business.” Classes don’t get interrupted at Oakville, she says. At her middle school, “if there was a fight in the classroom, and we were in the middle of a lesson, it would get aggravating. ‘Can you guys just shut up?’ When you get to the test, you’re like, ‘What is this? Oh yeah, that’s when so-and-so and so-and-so were fighting.’
“The teachers wonder why the kids act out, but I don’t totally agree when they say, ‘Oh, it’s because of what happens at home,’” she adds. “It could also be the teachers not taking care of what they need to, or not caring about their students.”
Mehlville School District’s BuildYourOwnCurriculum webpage for freshman year shows courses in 15 subjects. Riverview Gardens’ BuildYourOwnCurriculum page comes up with four math courses and one English Language Arts course. They all say “Being Revised.”
“The media made race the story, but the challenge for us is if the students are unprepared,” says Oakville physics teacher Kristin Pierce. “‘You mean you are going to grade this homework and not just give us credit for doing it?’ That was the big attitude adjustment. It wasn’t just a completion grade.” She watched the realization dawn: “OK, it’s going to be more work than I’m used to, but I’m going to do it.” That clicked for all but one of her transfer students, whom she says “had some issues and just never came back. He had some issues with fighting and using inappropriate language, and he did not adjust well to the, ‘Oh, wait. I have to do work.’”
Another transfer student panicked initially, blurting, “I don’t know how to do this!” But Pierce gently reminded her, “You don’t have to do it alone. You can come to me for help. I am here to walk you through.” She remembers Bernie groaning over her math: “I’m not getting this. I’m not getting this.” “Oh yes you are,” Pierce assured her. “It’s just that comfort level.”
In the morning, the transfer students come off the bus sleepy-eyed, and it’s hard for them to stay late for extracurricular activities or extra help. (Oakville added a second bus to meet those needs, but kids have to find a ride home from its central drop-off point.) Placing students in the right course level was a game of blind man’s bluff: “We didn’t have information on their background,” Pierce explains. “Paperwork came after they were enrolled. If we had known in June, we could have had them come to summer school.”
Overall, Pierce hasn’t seen any more challenges than the district faced when voluntary-desegregation students arrived from the city. And despite Bernie’s worries, there really haven’t been many fights. The trick, she says, “is getting to know the student, not assuming anything about them, and making your expectations very clear. The more expectations you have for the kids, the more they are going to live up to them.”
Back at Riverview Gardens, Kirk’s taking the same approach. “We don’t give out completion grades,” he says firmly. “I don’t know about practices last year. But my focus this year is to make sure that the students’ grades actually reflect what they are doing.” How did the district’s quality spiral so low? “Honestly, I don’t know how,” he says. “But I’m giving teachers instructional coaching, working with them one-on-one.”
Bernie fringed and ruffled a stack of fleece throws, just for fun, and she’s already sold several. She hands the pile to Michael to carry to her next class. He’s tall and thin, hair close-shaven, and his eyeglasses give him a brainy, Ivy League look. He doesn’t make eye contact, just takes the blankets and lopes ahead, weaving through the crowd. A teacher teases him as he passes: “What’s that big ol’ blanket for, Michael?” He stops at Bernie’s classroom door, hands her the blankets with a pained expression, and leaves.
“Toward adults, he’s off to himself,” she tells me, “but with us he’s cool. He’s comfortable.”
After American government, she has lunch. Crystal announces that she wants to buy five of Bernie’s blankets. “I’m not letting you spend $50 on that!” Bernie retorts.
“Well, then teach me how to make them.”
“No, then you will cut into my business!”
In sewing class, they join an elfin white girl with hair dyed pink, a strong-minded African-American girl named Kiara, and a Korean-American girl named Mi Sun, whose white glasses dominate her face. Another student comes up talking about dreading a team-sports phys ed class. “You know I’m gay, right?”
Kiara says, “Have me to go down to your team sports. I’ll fix ’em.”
Mi Sun is already pinning her next sewing project. “I’m going to go crazy,” she says. “I have so many things to do.”
“She overstresses herself,” Bernie informs me as she pulls out her pajama pants, one leg two inches longer than the other. Mi Sun comes around the table, whisks the pants away from Bernie, and smooths them. “She is sometimes helpful,” Bernie remarks.
They debate the value of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I love this book,” Mi Sun says, clutching it. Bernie pronounces it boring. The girl with pink hair calls, “It’s not boring. I love that book.”
Kiara talks about coming back to Oakville from Mehlville High School. She lives in Soulard, so she’s in the voluntary-deseg program. She says there are more North City kids at Mehlville, and they fight more than the South City kids.
“Who fought in the commons?” Bernie asks.
“Nicole. This was her first day back from suspension, and she got in another fight. And that one girl, she’s pregnant, so I don’t know why she’s trying to fight. That’s on her.”
Mi Sun stares, blinking fast behind white plastic frames. “She’s a student?”
I ask the girls why people fight. “Maybe they just want to get out of school,” says Mi Sun.
“That ain’t it,” Bernie tells her.
“Or maybe they can’t control their anger,” Mi Sun continues.
“I can’t control my anger, and I don’t go around fighting,” Kiara says. “They try to blame their anger issues.”
“Maybe they haven’t been treated right at home,” offers Crystal.
“That irks my nerves so dearly,” Bernie exclaims. Granted, she learned gentle ways from her own churchgoing parents. But the issue’s not, she’s sure, that simple.
I didn't expect a story following a girl in the school-transfer program to turn into a story on fighting in schools. But for Bernie, it was the salient difference between Riverview Gardens and Oakville.
So why do kids fight more at one school than at another? Dr. Carole Lieberman, author of Bad Girls, treats adolescents and families in Beverly Hills, Calif., and she also works as a forensic psychiatrist, evaluating defendants whose criminal careers started with fighting in school. She boils it down fast: Kids fight either because they’re imitating the behavior of verbally or physically abusive parents or “because they are angry, depressed, frustrated, or confused and lack the verbal skills to communicate their feelings.” Frequent loud fights, she adds, “are disruptive to education and make the other kids feel scared of going to school.”
Margaret Dolan, a St. Louis education consultant who wrote Fight-Free Schools, was principal of a Hazelwood elementary school in 1990. In five years, she and her faculty reduced fights from 65 a year to five or six. “Sometimes, yes, the kids who fight have seen mental and physical abuse at home,” she says. But the main factor she focuses on is economic: “The schools that have problems with fighting are also schools with a higher percentage of kids receiving free or reduced lunches. It is not a racial issue; it is a poverty issue. The students are many times unsupervised at home. Many times, they have only one parent. They sometimes live with someone other than their mom or dad. They are lashing out, protecting themselves at a survival level.” Once the fighting reaches critical mass, it spreads fast: “Fighting is a learned behavior. And when you see it around you, you think, ‘I’ve got to take care of myself.’”
Kirk takes issue with Dolan’s emphasis on the poverty correlation. “I will not put that stigma on students from that demographic, because I have seen schools that have a high level of free and reduced lunch and there are no fights,” he says. “It goes back to the culture and the level of expectations. I don’t want us to get into the blame game. Kids come in with a whole lot of things. An effective instructor is able to have the student unpack those things and focus on the lesson.”
William Tate, chair of education and a public-health scholar at Washington University, agrees with both Dolan and Kirk. “There are discipline problems in all schools, but in affluent districts, they’re more often related to drugs and alcohol, and they’re more often treated privately, as mental-health issues. If you’re fighting, you are angry; you are depressed.” But in districts with less money, schools can’t afford to provide quality counseling, and neither can parents. Besides, “the principal of Riverview Gardens is correct,” Tate says. “It’s a stigma.” Parents may not want to acknowledge the need for treatment.
“When you have a higher percentage of those students who are untreated,” he says, “they create a climate of microaggression.” Meaning? “The small spats that go on between kids and require some type of conflict resolution. We need to ask ourselves how effective the adults are at conflict resolution.
“We know now from neuroscience that kids who live in poverty have very different cognitive development and social-control issues,” Tate continues. “Literally, their brains are developing differently.” The stress of living in a chaotic, unsafe neighborhood can affect brain chemistry; so can poor nutrition, making it harder to pay attention. “Once you start falling behind, those academic failures lead to a pathway of behavior that escalates in high school.”
You’re mad; you’re failing; you’re disengaged and bored and see no future—why not fight? And Tate adds another emotion to the list: fear. “This girl was telling you something that is important. A lot of kids there are afraid. And when you’re afraid, you want to defend yourself.” He sighs. “Probably 98 percent of the kids at Riverview Gardens just want to go to school. It only takes 2 percent to create a climate of fear.”
Bernie hates algebra; she swears the teacher makes it harder than it is. She’s determined to bring up her grade, which so far is her only C. “C’s don’t look right,” she tells me before math class, a rare but abject misery in her voice. “It’s going on my transcript!”
I hated algebra too. Bored by the quadratic equations, I look around at faces. Most of them are soft, their bone structure still emerging. Circumstances have done their shaping, but nothing’s hardened yet. Their lives could go any number of ways.
I think of the metro area’s crazy patchwork of school districts, and how money concentrates in some while problems get worse in others.
The algebra teacher’s at the board, demonstrating how to work an equation: “We isolate, we separate, we solve.”
Not always.
Source: Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2013
* The names of Bernestaine’s classmates are pseudonyms at the request of the district.
