Even Congress Gets a Recess

Mary Baird
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

When Savannah Duly arrives at school, the sun still hasn’t risen. Her car pulls into the parking lot out back filled with holes — the car is old and small enough, and the holes are big enough, that if she hadn’t had to do this over the summer and every day for most of a year, it would have been a rough ride. It’s 6:50 AM, she is 16 years old, and school begins in 15 minutes.

The air is cool and there’s a steady rain falling, but if she arrived too early, she won’t even be able to get into the building until a staff or faculty member comes around and unlocks the door. Today, she hides under the bridge connecting the two separate buildings of the high school. One, build in 1904, was meant to accommodate a few hundred students at its peak. The other, a newer addition arriving in the 1980’s, was primarily a science wing, but because of budget cuts, only two rooms were now used for a science class.

When the door does open, Savannah is let inside, but other than being dry, the air here isn’t much better. The boiler broke down again, leaving the school cold and damp for the rest of the students, and the poor insulation means that it won’t keep in any warmth when the sun does rise, after classes have begun.

She walks to her first class, Advanced Mathematic Systems, and sits in front of the door. She’s arrived before the teacher. The class has almost 40 students crammed into a 20–30 room. There aren’t enough desks for everyone. Usually everyone gets to sit, though. It’s assumed that several people will be absent.

The class proceeds as usual, but the teacher, Ms. Maccabe, can’t give out the handouts many students need — the school won’t give her a large enough printing budget for all the students she has. Instead, she copies the information onto the board, and the students copy it from there.

At least, the ones who aren’t asleep at their desks. After all, it is still before dawn.

Savannah’s next class Advanced Biology 2, taught by Mr. Snows. They don’t have the money for textbooks for the class, so everyone shares a copy as they try to finish the lab with substitute ingredients. For isolating DNA, they’re using dish soap and chicken liver rather than Methyl Blue and a proper protein catalyst. But that’s nothing new. That class has been dissecting the same pig eyes for 12 years. They would have done sheep hearts, but the bucket went bad and some kids needed to leave for the nurse’s office. The smell made them nauseous.

The nurse wasn’t there, of course, because it was a Tuesday and she was only there every other day. So instead a secretary gave them some water and sent them back.

Classes went on like this for the rest of the day, with never enough to go around and never enough time to teach what needed to be learned. Supplies ran short, and the pencils that students borrowed or the staples that they used in their essays were bought by the teachers out of their shrinking budget. Even the cafeteria, to which attention had been raised during the last few years, didn’t have enough space, let alone enough room, for most of the students. Savannah ended up eating on the floor in the hallway, as she did most days. After she finished eating (she had learned to scarf down a sandwich and the apple she brought in 5 minutes), she sat in the hall or made her way into a teacher’s classroom. In the classroom, she sat at a desk and began working on homework that was either due later that day or tomorrow. There was never enough time to finish the work asked of the students. Sometimes she was up until 3 AM.

The 100-year-old school front looks out onto Main St.

There was never enough anything for the students, the teachers, or the school. The school had a turf field, so there was no place to walk outside on some grass within the large school except the flooded soccer field that played host to a few hundred migrating geese. Everything around was cracked cement and stray crabgrass. Everything was old, worn out, and tired — the teachers and the students as well. There were too many students, not enough anything else.

The funding had washed up, the student count was increasing, the supplies were running out, and there was nowhere left to go. Even Congress gets a recess, taking their mind away from the decisions that determine the future of the country, but the students who will form the future of the country can’t even get a pencil, let alone a reces for the body or mind. When underfunded teachers need to create a future for the next generation out of the budget they use to pay off college debt and keep themselves fed, one begins to wonder why we care so little for the students who are in our communities, our parks, our neighborhoods and our homes. It shouldn’t be this way, any student knows, but the burden of making the future has rested on their shoulders from the moment they stepped onto the grounds of the school.

When Savannah left school that day, she headed home and started working. At 6, she stopped for fifteen minutes, ate dinner, and then went back to her work. This continued until she was done with however much homework had been assigned, and then she would go to sleep.

She woke up at 5:45 the next morning. She packs her bag, gets into the car, and drives to school. When Savannah Duly arrives at school, the sun still hasn’t risen. Her car pulls into the parking lot out back filled with holes — the car is old and small enough, and the holes are big enough, that if she hadn’t had to do this over the summer and every day for most of a year, it would have been a rough ride. It’s 6:50 AM, she is 16 years old, and school begins in 15 minutes.

A student at George Fox University with a vested interest in seeing the world last another generation.

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