Missing You

It seldom occurs to me that the kids like our school and are happy to be there. They are. It makes no sense to me when I'm surrounded by chaos but they do love it. Even the ones that say they hate it. One of my boys, Mo, was reading the calendar for June. "Mr., we get out of school on the 15th and then we're back on September 6th. That's too much time. I'm going to miss this place because I like it so much. I don't want to be away for that long." I had to smile and I felt a pang of sadness. Mo seems like such a tough guy and all this time he's sad inside because he'll be missing us.

I'm going to miss them, too. I regret the fact that I haven't been able to spend enough time with each of them. I've tried but there's too many. Thirty-eight kids by myself is not an easy thing to swing. They are good kids and they have awful hard lives. I'll never let them off the hook academically, but they're aces in my book for just getting up and coming to school. They do so much just to survive. What do I do? I eat three squares a day, live in a decent house, and have a wife and daughter who love me. I have nothing to complain about.

One of my boys told me about his weekend trip to Delaware. "Mr., You can go outside at night and see all the stars. It's so quiet, you can hear the bugs. If you leave your bike outside no one will steal it. If you walk around there's no police or guns or drugs. It's nice up there." Why doesn't Tino get to live in a place like that? Why is he stuck in a broken down rowhome in a drug-infested neighborhood? It breaks my heart.

I'm coming back to my school next year. I want my kids to succeed.