A First Daughter May Head Back to Class

For a while there, it appeared Jenna Bush might be mimicking her father’s youthful taste for the partying lifestyle. She was caught with a phony ID in a Mexican restaurant and photographed fallen on the floor at a frat party, cigarette in hand.

But now, at age 22, she’s starting to act a lot more like Mom.

She has decided to settle in sedate Washington, and she’s applied for a job teaching disadvantaged children at a public charter school about three miles north of the White House.

If she lands the job, she will pursue a calling much like that of her mother, Laura Bush, who worked as an elementary school librarian before turning political wife. Except that when the first lady went to work, half the world wasn’t standing by with a scorecard and a telephoto lens.

“I don’t know how they are going to pull this off,” said Doug Wead, an aide in the first Bush White House and a close friend of the current president. “That school is going to get more scrutiny than ever. It’s going to be a zoo.”

After all, Jenna Bush has applied for a job in a town already preternaturally interested in every move its Pennsylvania Avenue neighbors make.

Moreover, the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School sits near a busy four-lane road where, on Wednesday, a TV truck was already parked. The number of media outlets on Executive Director Linda Moore’s call list made clear that the little 7-year-old school with 250 children was on the brink of a new era.

And Jenna Bush hadn’t officially been hired yet.

Assuming she gets the job, Secret Service agents will inevitably stand sentry over the playground. Teachers will be cornered for interviews. Children may be grilled before bedtime with “What did Jenna wear today?”

“They’ll have to be careful nobody sneaks in to write about her,” said Carl Sferazza Anthony, a Los Angeles historian who specializes in first ladies.

Moore declined to discuss her potential new hire. But she nonetheless fielded an awkward political moment when a reporter asked her views on President Bush’s controversial education policy, No Child Left Behind.

“We have had our challenges here,” she responded deftly.

Landing a first daughter could be a fundraising boon for a public school where 90% of the students come from low-income families. If presidential offspring arrive with anything, it is money and contacts, historians say, noting that when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son started selling life insurance, big shots all over the country lined up to buy it.

“Just wait until Jenna Bush sends her students out to sell wrapping paper, because there is some fat cat out there who would be glad to have her call her dad and say, ‘Hey, this guy just bought $10,000 worth,’ said Wead, who is also the author of “All the President’s Children,” a history of first sons and daughters.

It is rare but not unprecedented for the children of presidents to enter the workforce while their fathers are still in the White House.

One parallel is Helen Taft, a progressive suffragette and reformer who taught poor children in Washington in 1910. She was hounded by photographers and reporters even then, but her most embarrassing moment amounted to getting caught on a road without toll money.

Past indiscretions by Jenna and her twin sister, Barbara, have been somewhat more inopportune -- the underage drinking at a Mexican restaurant in Austin three years ago that resulted in a strained Camp David family weekend, for starters.

And though at least one parent interviewed on the school grounds welcomed the idea of a famous addition to the staff, he made it clear that education was foremost and no funny business would be tolerated.

“I would assume that Ms. Bush would ... certainly not be doing anything to draw public attention, because then it would be about her, not the student,” said Wayne Jackson, the father of a third-grader and a sixth-grader at the school.

It isn’t clear why Jenna Bush chose the Stokes school after having earlier spoken about teaching in New York’s Harlem. Ninety-six percent of the Stokes students are black or Latino and the school features immersion classes in Spanish and French.

But her choice of such a vocation for her first job out of college is evidence of her dedication, historian Anthony said. “She obviously could have done anything she wanted,” he said, referring to a recent summer internship at a glitzy New York public relations firm. “She’s got to want to be doing this because she is going to be under a lot of press scrutiny.”

The Bushes fiercely protected their daughters from publicity during their father’s first four years in the White House, but making the transition to adulthood in a fishbowl was inevitable for them when he won a second term.

Jenna graduated this year with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Texas in Austin; Barbara earned a humanities degree from Yale and is interested in working with HIV-infected children.

This summer the twins campaigned with their father, made a speech at the Republican National Convention and posed in gowns for the August issue of Vogue.

If a little media attention is the only obstacle to a career in public education, Wead believes Jenna showed she had the stuff to handle that when she dispatched a pesky reporter by sticking out her tongue at him.

Anyway, as does everything else in Washington, that attention, too, shall pass.

“In a couple of weeks, it will all go away,” Anthony said.