The Academy (2 page)

And no one would know if something happened to them.

“Skills!” Van shouted.

Kurt looked over to see the ball bouncing underneath the basket. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see it.”

“What?”

“I was distracted.”

“Automatic F!” Van told him. “And I get to go again! Pay attention this time.” He dribbled the ball between his legs as he ran in a figure eight, then did a left-handed hook from the free throw line and swished it in.

Kurt grabbed the ball and attempted to imitate his friend, but on the first dribble the ball hit a crack on the asphalt and bounced back quickly at a sharp steep angle, smacking him hard under the chin and slamming his teeth together. “Shit!” he yelled, holding his jaw and letting the ball bounce away. He ran a finger around the inside of his mouth, checking for blood.

“U!” Van cried triumphantly.

“I’m not playing anymore, asshole! I quit!” Kurt tried wiggling his two front teeth with his finger and was grateful to find that they were still in place and unmovable. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw motion, a furtive shadow the size of a skinny girl that darted between two of the buildings so quickly that he was not sure it was even there.

In the window of Mrs. Habeck’s classroom, the shade was swinging from side to side, as though someone within the room had been peeking out and had quickly backed away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kurt said.

“Fuck you,” Van told him. He took a shot from the side. The ball bounced off the rim and he quickly rebounded and put it in.

Too embarrassed to let Van know that he was scared, Kurt stood there for a moment while his friend dribbled around the court and made a layup. He still wasn’t sure
why
he was scared, but he was, and despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, and hot and sunny to boot, the fear seemed to be intensifying. He moved beneath a tree for the shade, leaning his back against the trunk, trying to think of a way to get his friend to leave.

A nut fell from the tree and hit him on the top of the head, bouncing to the ground. “Ow!” he yelled. The damn thing felt more like a rock than a nut. He pressed a finger into his hair, felt a bump starting already.

Another nut came speeding down and hit his forearm, a round red bruise appearing instantly on the skin.

On the blacktop, Van tripped and fell, landing hard and letting out a cry of surprised pain. “Shit!” he said, getting up and examining the knees of his jeans. Even from here, Kurt could see ripped denim and blood.

What the hell was happening? Maybe it was just his imagination, but it sure seemed to him as though the two of them were being attacked.

Another nut landed at his feet, missing him by an inch.

Kurt moved quickly away from the tree. “Come on!” he called out. “Time to bail!”

“No,” Van said defiantly.

“Dude . . .”

“I said no!” There was real hostility in his voice, and Kurt was not sure where it had come from or what had brought it on. This wasn’t like his friend. He tried to think of something to say to Van that would convince him to leave, something that sounded reasonable and not completely insane, but when Van purposefully turned his back on him, picked the ball up off the ground and started shooting at one of the baskets facing in the opposite direction, Kurt decided to leave with or without his friend.

The ball hit the edge of the metal backboard and came shooting back at Van, hitting him in the stomach and knocking the wind out of him for a second.

“I’m going!” Kurt announced.

“Fine,” Van said without looking at him.

Kurt walked away. At the end of the teachers’ lot, before the buildings blocked his view of the field and the courts, he turned around and looked back. Van was still shooting hoops, practicing his free throw.

It was the last time he ever saw his friend.

One

The letter came in mid-July and that was weird. Notification from the district didn’t usually arrive until late August, and even before Linda Webster opened the envelope, she was mentally calculating her seniority, trying to figure out how far down the line she was, just in case the district had decided to cut positions and lay people off.

To her surprise, the letter had nothing to do with layoffs. Indeed, it said that the district projected an increase in enrollment this year and a need for two to three
additional
teachers per school. That was certainly good news. The real reason for the early communication, however, was to inform the faculty and staff of John Tyler High that the board had voted to consider its proposal to become a charter school. There would be a discussion of the subject at the next meeting on July 23, the following Monday.

Linda put down the letter and looked over at her husband. “They’re talking about Tyler becoming a charter school.”

Frank looked up from his computer. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Does the letter—”

“It doesn’t really go into any detail.” She looked at the paper again and shook her head. “Charter school. There was no talk about this at all. I never even heard any rumors about it. But it mentions a ‘proposal,’ which means that Jody must have submitted something to the school board. It’s just weird that she didn’t discuss it with faculty and staff first to get our take on it. Or at least give us a heads-up. That’s not like her.”

“Well, it might help you get out from under the district’s thumb.”

He was right. In the last election, a slate of conservative fundamentalists had won a majority on the board and were now attempting to push through their bizarre and incomprehensible agenda, which included doing away with any and all Halloween dances/parties/ celebrations, removing Harry Potter books from the libraries, stopping the teaching of evolution and canceling the breakfast/lunch program for low-income students on the grounds that it was not the schools’ responsibility to provide social services. Attempts had been made by the principals of each of the district’s six schools to argue on the new board’s home turf. With the breakfast and lunch issue, in particular, they’d pointed out to the board that Jesus was a strong advocate for the poor. Not only that, but in doing away with the program, the district would lose federal funds. The board had not budged. And ever since, the schools and the district had been at loggerheads over a myriad of issues big and small. It would definitely be a relief to be free from the edicts of those fanatics.

“Or,” Frank continued, “it might mean that they’re going to contract out all of your jobs and hire some private company to teach the kids.”

That was a possibility, too, and though Linda wanted to be able to discount it, the fact that the principal had been so closemouthed about changing Tyler to a charter school made the idea not seem so far-fetched. She called her friend Diane Brooke, chair of Tyler’s English department, to see if she’d heard anything, but Diane was just as in the dark as she was. Aside from the sketchy general information she’d read in the district’s letter, she knew nothing.

“Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” Linda asked. “You’d think Jody would’ve
mentioned
it.”

“I know. And there had to be a ton of paperwork involved. You know the district. Which means that it’s been in the pipeline for a while.”

“Bobbi!” they both said together.

Bobbi Evans. Linda should have thought of her before. Not a thing went on in Tyler’s office that the secretary didn’t know about. Of course, Bobbi hadn’t said a word about this either.

“I’ll call her,” Diane said. “Then I’ll ring you right back.”

Linda didn’t even have a chance to go into the kitchen and get a drink of water before the phone rang again.

“Her machine picked up,” Diane said. “I had to leave a message.”

“I’m going to send out a global e-mail, see if everyone else is out of the loop or if it’s just us.”

“Are you including Jody in that?”

“It can’t hurt. Maybe she’ll let us know what’s going on.”

“What do you know about charter schools?” Diane asked.

“Not much,” Linda admitted. “They operate independently from the district, right? They’re almost like private schools?”

“In California,” Diane said, “there are two main types of charter school. I looked it up online. In fact, that’s what I was doing when you called. The one where a private company is brought in to run the place is usually used for failing schools in poor districts, which, obviously, is not us. In Orange County, charter schools are most commonly schools that are still overseen by the district but given a certain degree of autonomy. My guess is that that’s where we’re headed.”

“Why do you think Jody would want to do such a thing? Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

“There are some good points. Textbook adoption, for one. We wouldn’t have to go with the district’s choice of textbooks, which, as you know, is horrible. We’d be able to pick our own. And we’d have more budgetary discretion. The theory behind charters is that individual schools know what’s better for their students than the district does. On the other hand, there’s probably a lot of potential for abuse with such a lack of oversight.”

“So what’s your gut reaction?” Linda asked. “Yea or nay?”

Diane sighed. “You know me. I don’t handle change well. Better the devil you know and all that. You?”

“I should probably wait until I have enough information to know what I’m talking about, but it seems to me that no matter which way this thing plays out, it’s going to mean job instability for someone. I hope I’m wrong, but I see negotiated protections going out the window.”

Diane laughed. “Spoken like a card-carrying union member.”

“Well . . .”

Linda did send out an e-mail to the rest of the faculty and staff after hanging up, but it wasn’t until the next day that she began to receive responses. Nearly all of them commented on the seeming secrecy surrounding the proposed change and the fact that the principal had not mentioned anything about it to anyone,but a surprising number were already gung ho supporters of the charter idea. Frank was right—it was probably more a reaction to the school board than anything else, an opportunity to get out from under the board’s thumb—but she couldn’t help thinking that they shouldn’t jump into anything right away, that a lot more study was needed before anyone made any permanent decisions.

Frank agreed. “You should talk to people from other charter schools, see how different the reality is from the promises, see what they like and don’t like about it, find out, like you said, about job security and whether the protections you’re afforded now will be cut or abridged. And you need to think about the long term as well as the short term. Yes, it would be nice to be free from that lunatic school board, but on the other hand, there’s an election next year and the whole makeup of the board could shift. What would be in the ultimate best interest of the school? No one should be taking this lightly. This is a major decision.”

She kissed him on the nose. “I love your logical, Spock-like mind.”

“Just my mind?” he hinted.

“Tonight,” she promised.

Linda spent most of the day answering e-mails and talking on the phone to other teachers. No one had heard from either the principal or her secretary, and though many messages had been left for the two of them, there’d been no response.

The charter proposal was public information and was posted as an addendum to the school board agenda on the district’s Web site, but viewing the document provided more questions than answers. It stated that the petitioner’s proposed charter followed state guidelines and had been certified as acceptable by the state board of education, that the implementation plan had been approved by the district’s superintendent, that each of five mandatory educational goals had been met by the school over the requisite three-year period.

A charter had been written already? An implementation strategy had been submitted to the superintendent? This whole thing had been in the planning stages for the past three years?

It made sense that this had been in the works for a while, but Linda and everyone she spoke to were shocked to learn that they had been kept in the dark for so long while so much had been going on. According to the proposal, one of the reasons for switching over to a charter school was that the teachers would have more input; they would be able to collectively choose their curriculum rather than simply follow the district’s edicts. If that was the goal, they were starting off on the wrong foot, because everyone she talked to was angry that they had not been consulted or even informed about what was happening.