Cash-Strapped School Districts Find Parents Filling Gap

There are 32 children in my daughter’s kindergarten class. This is standard in California’s public schools. This is insane.

This has been going on for a while.

Last week, 127 school districts from throughout the state came together to file a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against the great state of California.

The school districts, including eight in Orange County, charge that our kids are being denied their constitutional right to a decent education. They are demanding that the state spend more on education and spread its education money around more equitably as well.

Go visit an average public school classroom and you’ll see why the districts have cause to complain. You’ll see what it means to be ranked 33rd in the nation when it comes to the amount of money spent to educate kids through the 12th grade.

If you’re like me, you’ll see how things have gotten worse. When I graduated high school in Northern California, the state ranked 16th in educational spending. This was not great, of course, but it was considered good enough.

Now mediocrity has become something to work toward . California, the dream state, the one with the big ideas and the big ego, is much closer to the bottom than it is to the top.

What’s left for the average public school kid--the one who doesn’t benefit from generous private donations, or an extra “parcel tax” on property--just isn’t good enough.

I stopped by my daughter’s classroom the other morning to help out. “Helping out” used to be a nice thing that parents, usually mothers, did. They would assist with special projects, maybe decorate the classroom, bring some cupcakes when a 5-year-old was turning 6.

They still do all that, of course, but now they also keep their fingers in the dike--because they love their kids and because they end up loving yours and mine as well. They direct, they guide, they discipline, they teach .

In my daughter’s classroom, mothers help keep the chaos under control, most of the time. The teacher needs the volunteers, who are called that only because there is no money involved; they are not a luxury anymore. The teacher praises them a lot.

And the mothers, the ones who have seen the classroom action up close, are rather in awe of the teacher. They wonder why she does this when none of the kids are actually hers . They figure she must have a gift--for patience, endurance, for public service--and they feel lucky for that.

There are many other teachers whose passion has long since burned out.

The other day, JoAnn Kemp, a computer science teacher at Ball Junior High School in Anaheim, won a big award. She was one of 15 teachers nationwide that Reader’s Digest named an American Hero in Education. Mrs. Kemp picked up $5,000--and $10,000 for her school--but the important thing here is the hero part.

Mrs. Kemp arrives at her classroom at 5 a.m. every day to meet the children whose parents have to get to work early. She usually leaves after 5 p.m. Mrs. Kemp, who has been teaching for 9 years, looks upon her job as a mission. She says she hopes to repay the debt she owes to teachers who took some extra time with her, who showed that they had faith.

Which is what all of this has come to. Competency just isn’t enough these days for a teacher in the public schools. Teaching is not a normal job, not if it is to be done well.

A good teacher in an overcrowded classroom, with inadequate supplies and inadequate help, can become a lousy teacher fast. A great teacher, a JoAnn Kemp, has to feel called. A great teacher must do a hero’s work.

Yet most of us are made of more mortal stuff. Which is not to say that we don’t try.

Back in my daughter’s kindergarten, I, too, was trying my best. I was assigned the red group--four girls and four boys--for cut and paste. We would be making bunny masks and bunny bags and I was to show them how.

Whitney started off in tears. She had wanted her mother to be placed in charge of the reds. Charlotte was bothered by Nicole’s rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Brandon had just been to the Angels game and wanted to talk about that. Joseph was very annoyed that anybody would mistakenly call him Joe. He let me know that he plans on being a cop when he grows up.

So the normal kid stuff took a lot of time. Share the glue. Don’t hoard all the cotton balls. Be good while I track down the classroom’s only stapler, which another mother needs too.

And, still, even though I thought I was doing so well, I didn’t notice that Jan had glued his bunny on the wrong way, or that somebody--how could this have happened?--had taken the sample bunny mask as their own.

As I was leaving, I apologized to the teacher for my lapses. I am still not sure what went wrong. The red group, I hope, had had better days.

“Don’t worry,” the teacher said. “I appreciate your help. Come back when you feel adventurous again.”

And then another mother added this: “Can you imagine how it would have been if you hadn’t come? Lots of times they just have to do things on their own.”

This is something that I’d really rather not imagine, yet now I am forced to think about it head-on. I hope the school districts win their day in court.