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Our Last Best Shot
An Excerpt
By Laura Sessions Stepp
The five girls have been called to the assistant principal's office after several days of griping at one another. Two of them are petite, blond and white; the other three are taller, wirier and black. All five are sixth-graders in their first year at Chewning Middle School in Durham.
"All right, girls, let's get everything out in the open. Why are taunting each other?" The assistant principal, Edna Vann, wants answers, now.
Jessica Johnston, a white wisp of a child, glances over at the black girls. Speaking up has never been easy for her. How can she describe what she has been going through?
So far she likes the learning part of sixth grade. "You have more chances at doing things, a lot more teachers and you learn mainly different things every day," she says two months into the school year. But the social part, well, that's another story. She doesn't know many kids because her friends from elementary school attend a different school. She thought she was going to the their school because is was close to her house. But when fall came, she discovered that she lives in a neighborhood assigned to a school across town for the purposes of desegregation.
She is one of only three or four white students in each of her classes. Many of her classmates come from the projects in Durham. Taller and more outspoken than she, some of the call her "Mickey Mouse" because of her protruding ears. Every morning she climbs the steps into the school bus with a big knot in her stomach.
***
With all the attention we pay to grades and test scores, it is easy to forget that schools are the primary places where kids learn to get along -- or fight -- with other and be tolerant or intolerant of individual differences. Home life provides the foundation for values, but schoolyards and classrooms are where those values are tested hour upon hour, day after day.
