One Child, No Teacher

Well, there are problems I can take care of, and problems I cannot.

Hold it—my own problems? Curiously, I’m completely incapable of solving them. However, I may have come through for Elizabeth, the manager of the sister store of the café where I write, but then again…no. Whose shoulders does it fall on?

You.

Elizabeth has two children: a boy and an 11-year old girl. It’s Wednesday, the first day of October, and shortly after noon. So, stretching—and boy, what a stretch it is—back to my own schooldays, I would imagine that this child, like me, would have had English, Arithmetic, Social Studies, and now be in the lunchroom, facing down that peanut butter sandwich that was as invariable as the old green couch in the living room. But what is this child doing?

…lying on two pillows in  the Sala Poética—the back of the store, where poetry is read every Tuesday night. And why is she there?

There’s no teacher.

Somebody finally said it, and he can commit every sin in the book until the end of his days: he’ll still fly through the tollgate into heaven, his heavenpass secured to his forehead. And who is this man? A federal judge, Jose A. Fusté, who said the following:

El juez federal José A. Fusté destacó que "no es un secreto" que la calidad de educación en las escuelas públicas en Puerto Rico es "deficiente, incompleta, vergonzosa, negligente, lamentable y no honorable…"

I could translate, but it’s easier just to do this:

1.     juez/ judge

2.     destacó / stressed

3.     calidad / quality

4.     escuelas / schools

5.     vergonzosa / shameful

Bijjte, as we say down here?

The judge, you see, has been appointed to…wait, I’m too tired to look it up, and the nice thing about the chikungunya, now in its seventh week? I don’t have to trudge fruitlessly through Google. More to the point, it’s a detour. Through the French countryside? Nope—think New Jersey.

“Thirty-four years,” thundered (well, you translate tronó) the judge, referring to the case of Rosa Lydia Vélez, a desperate mother with a kid who needed special education, and who took the school system to court. And guess what? The case is still going on. And the great thing, at least in this case? Judges get to be as peeved as they want, and to say stuff like this:

El juez federal José A. Fusté, utilizó una opinión el martes para dirigir una amenaza de cárcel a los funcionarios del sistema público de enseñanza que no implementan la orden del tribunal para cumplir con los servicios del Programa de Educación Especial para una niña con síndrome Down en el tiempo determinado.

(Short version—the judge is gonna throw the Education Department officials in charge of complying with a court order in the slammer if they don’t get their act together pretty soon….)

Can I be a judge?

What else did the judge say? That there are two systems of education in Puerto Rico: public and private. No surprise there, and that’s true in many countries. But he went on to say that it was completely unfair that those who cannot afford a private school are completely…

…you know, I’m a writer, so I should have a word for this. But I don’t, because the word hasn’t been conceived for the atrocity of taking a child’s future and tossing it in the gutter. Oh and then parking your Jaguar on top of her.

Think I’m exaggerating? Think the schools aren’t that bad?

Well, I can’t find it now—but Puerto Rico ranks 50-something out of 60-something countries. I think we beat out Haiti, though! Oh, but I did come across this:

El Departamento de Educación (DE) publicó sigilosamente en su página de Internet un informe que refleja un panorama muy preocupante de la educación pública puertorriqueña, al concluir que el 91% de las escuelas no cumplen con los estándares de calidad educativa.

In other words, the Department of Education (caps by convention only) is itself admitting that nine out of ten schools don’t meet their own standards.

Enter the governor, who came out yesterday, pointing his finger at the…

…parents!

Sorry—it wasn’t pointing the finger: it was raising the finger. The middle one, if you hadn’t guessed….

Can I find the article? Of course not, so I’ll repeat what Elizabeth—remember Elizabeth, whose child has now seemed to have disappeared?—said:

“The governor said that it was the parents’ fault, for not sending their children to school! So he’s going to crack down on those parents….”

Well, Elizabeth is sending her child to school, and what is the school doing? Sending her child away!

Enter Nico, the father of Naïa; Nico’s the (part) owner of the store. So I ask, “hey, where’s Naïa?”

“She’s in school, of course…”

…a private school.

If anything happened to Naïa, my heart would break. But for Elizabeth’s child?

My heart is breaking….

“The teacher will be out for the entire week.”

That means that this girl will be playing video games all week.

“Great,” I tell Elizabeth, because the chikungunya? It doesn’t improve the mood.

“On Friday, get all the parents who are attending Lincoln School in Old San Juan and whose kids don’t have a teacher together. Demand that the kids go to the school, and then walk their children down to the governor’s mansion, and tell the guard that they’ve gotta do something with their kid, ‘cause they’ve gotta get to work.”

Well, that was the plan, but now? It turns out that there will be no classes for anybody tomorrow, and very likely no one will be at the school. But no problem, since the governor's wife will be up at the school on Monday! And what will she be doing?

Planting a garden

So now the parents are planning a protest for Monday. Will it happen? Who knows?

Did somebody put LSD in the water?