Gore’s Campaign Trail Leads to the Schoolhouse Door

Al Gore is trying to win the presidency an old-fashioned way: one classroom at a time.

It’s a risky business. The last time a vice president spent time like this in a school, he misspelled “potato.”

This vice president on Tuesday spent a second full campaign day in a public school, and he is spending a third on Thursday in North Carolina--in effect going door to door in a campaign built increasingly around education.

The Avondale Elementary School, at which the vice president spent seven hours, offers a microcosm of some of the most difficult challenges a school can encounter. Its issues are reflected in the words of the children themselves and posted in a hallway display about what their body parts would say if they could talk:

“My stomach growls when it wants food,” one student wrote. Or another lesson, written on four-leaf clover cutouts: “I feel lucky because I have a mom and my sister.”

Meeting with a small group of parents at the end of the day, the vice president heard concerns about violence in schools, the stress caused by proficiency tests and the impossibility of saving for college tuition.

“Better parenting is the No. 1 solution to a lot of the problems we have in this country,” Gore said, adding that government could help parents by encouraging flexible work hours, increasing the minimum wage and making it easier for parents to spend time with their families when children are born.

The vice president missed little at the school:

He slept Monday night in the home of a kindergarten teacher and her family and arrived with her at 8:15 a.m. He went to the boiler room to talk with the custodian about the challenge of maintaining a century-old building. He took part in a fifth-grade geometry lesson, helping children sort plastic shapes into triangles and parallelograms.

He sat through the lower-grades’ lunchtime--sausage, French toast sticks, maple syrup, apple and milk--while engaged in a lengthy discussion with a dozen children about the names of pets.

The vice president broke no policy ground. But he used an assembly to present to the youngsters seated on the gymnasium floor the essence of his education policy: preschool for all children, better pay for teachers, increased school construction, improved school access to the Internet, programs to help parents save for college tuition, and “more effective” drug and alcohol abuse programs for parents and children.

Avondale Elementary draws from its neighborhood of crumbling wood-frame houses. The approximately 400 students crowd a building designed in 1895 for 325 students. They are largely white, their parents either on welfare or working in service industries, and 90% of them qualify for free or reduced-cost school breakfast and lunch, sometimes the only meals they get, said Principal Mary Ann Burns.

Asked what are some of the toughest challenges of her day, first-grade teacher Stacie Magill said without hesitation, “Clothing; head lice.” And, she added, it is not rare to encounter parents who have not gone beyond ninth grade.

“Education is not a big priority” in the homes, she said.

An hour earlier, she and another teacher, in a federally funded program that puts two instructors in a classroom, conducted a language arts lesson that Gore joined. The class collectively wrote a letter to Mother Nature, promising “we will pick up trash” and then, with Gore pointing to words, read it back.

Yet the picture is not entirely bleak: Last year, the school won citywide honors for improvements its students had shown on standardized tests.

For Gore, the days he is spending in schools provide an opportunity to draw attention in individual communities to a policy arena in which he is in a head-to-head battle with Republican rival George W. Bush of Texas.

His choice of Avondale for his visit had as much to do with politics as it did with education policy.

Ohio, like Michigan, where he spent the first of the daylong school visits that he has promised to make a centerpiece of his race for the presidency, is a crucial state in the battleground Midwest. He has visited it more than half a dozen times already this year.

According to the Almanac of American Politics, no Republican has ever been elected president without carrying Ohio, and since 1896, it has been on the winning side of the presidential vote in every case, except in 1944 and 1960.