A Bird . . . Arrested?

From The National - News from my neck of the woods 

‘Spy pigeon’ arrest harks back to an era of 

low rent India-Pakistan espionage

Samanth Subramanian

NEW DELHI // India’s recent arrest of a pigeon, on charges of spying for Pakistan, is the latest instalment in a long and often quirky history of espionage between the two countries, with each side eager to gain the upper hand in their 68-year-rivalry.

The pigeon, which landed in an Indian village in Punjab, was seen to have a message in Urdu stamped on its tail feathers. The message was mostly illegible but included a Pakistani phone number. The pigeon was then taken into custody by police and X-rayed, with the Times of India reporting that the bird was listed in police records as a “suspected spy”.

Since they gained independence from Great Britain in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars – in 1965, 1971 and 1999. The friction between the two countries has revolved around the region of Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pakistan, and the venue for numerous skirmishes and standoffs. 

A fence now lies along most of the common border – which stretches for roughly 3,300 kilometres on India’s north-west frontier – except for in sections of the arid and thinly populated Rann of Kutch, in the Indian state of Gujarat. 

But over the decades, as the fence was gradually being constructed by Indian and Pakistani border security forces, both countries would deploy locals as low-level operatives, to accidentally “wander” across the border, Sushant Singh, a retired Indian Army lieutenant colonel, said. 

“These aren’t high-flying spies,” Mr Singh told The National. “You’d pay a young man something like 2,000 or 4,000 rupees (Dh115 or Dh230) to cross over on foot and cross-check to see if say a bridge had been built or how good a road was.”

“This was the era before satellite imagery,” he said. “And these guys would be maybe local petty criminals or men who wanted to make some quick money. If they were caught, the countries would be able to deny that they were operatives, because they were such small fry.”

But the stories of these ad hoc spies on their walkabouts did not always end that smoothly. 

The tale of Vinod Sawhney is an illustrative one. In 1977, when Mr Sawhney was a 24-year-old taxi driver in Jammu, a passenger asked him how much he earned. When Mr Sawhney said that he made roughly 300 rupees a month, the passenger replied that he could make much more by doing a little light spying.

The very next day, Mr Sawhney, given the code name “Vinod 22,” was sent across the border into Pakistan, as part of a small detachment led by a minder. The team rotated through a few Pakistani towns, but Mr Sawhney then got arrested. After a nine-month trial, he spent ten years in a prison in Multan, before being repatriated to India in 1988. 

Mr Sawhney has established a body called the Jammu Ex-Sleuths’ Association, to represent the welfare of hundreds of other casual operatives like himself. 

“We want compensation for the time we were in prison,” Mr Sawhney said in 2013, when he was conducting a small protest in Delhi. “We have many secrets to hide, and we do that even now out of love for our country. But the government has failed us.”

These low-level infiltration practices followed by both governments has generated deep suspicion of wandering men on the wrong side of their border. If such men are caught, prison sentences are inevitable. 

Most famously, an Indian national named Sarabjit Singh, who claimed that he had mistakenly crossed the border in Punjab in a drunken haze, was arrested in Pakistan in August 1990. In a trial, he was convicted of organising bomb blasts in Lahore three months earlier and sentenced to death.

Mr Singh languished in a prison in Lahore until May 2013, when he died of injuries inflicted upon him by other prisoners. 

So much attention is paid to the border that, for a few years in the late 1990s, India recruited Puggees, a tribe in Gujarat known for its ability to read footprints, to work the border in the unfenced Rann of Kutch, a massive salt marsh.

Studying the soil and the impression of a footprint, a Puggee could determine the weight of a person or a camel that had passed by, as well as how long ago and in which direction the trespasser came through. 

The Puggees “are our anchormen on the Pakistan border in the Rann,” AK Singh, a police superintendent in Kutch, told the India Today magazine in 1999, shortly after the police, with Puggee help, arrested five Pakistani intruders armed with explosives and firearms. 

Srinath Raghavan, a New Delhi-based military historian, told The National that espionage between India and Pakistan ran hot and convoluted, although he also said that none of the tales came close to, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency’s outlandish plots to kill Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

“My favourite story has to do with the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane in January 1971, by people who were suspected to be Kashmiri militants,” Mr Raghavan said. 

The plane landed in Lahore, where the hijackers were welcomed by Pakistani officials. The passengers were released, and the plane was set on fire. 

“But there is a version of the story that says that the hijackers were actually agents of the Research & Analysis Wing [R&AW, India’s intelligence agency],” Mr Raghavan said. 

India was able to react to this supposed hijacking by imposing a no-fly zone between West and East Pakistan, a development that contributed to the eventual break-up of Pakistan later that year, during which East Pakistan became Bangladesh. 

“India has never really confirmed or denied this story of the hijacking,” Mr Raghavan said. “The hijackers stayed on in Pakistan after the incident.”

The story, contained in a book titled Mission R&AW by a former operative RK Yadav, published last year, has been denied by one of the hijackers, Hashim Qureshi. Last November, Mr Qureshi promised to sue Mr Yadav for defamation, calling the version a “baseless allegation.” 

Domestic Terrorism Lives On

From Salon - 

America’s war on Black girls: Why McKinney police violence isn’t about “one bad apple” 

Many have been quick to dismiss or make excuses for the shocking video out of Texas. Here's the truth of the matter 

BRITTNEY COOPER 

(Credit: MSNBC)

In just over two months, we will commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster that ravaged communities along the Gulf Coast. This tragedy was made infinitely worse not only by decades of governmental neglect and far-ranging poverty, but also by the fact that so many Black people could not swim.

That nearly 60 percent of Black people cannot swim is directly attributable to decades of segregated pool facilities in this country. While that problem ostensibly went away with the desegregation efforts of the mid-20th century, de facto segregation of pool facilities persists to this day, because community pools are now largely private amenities in suburban neighborhoods that many Black youth don’t have access to.

This is the backdrop of the troubling and traumatizing incident that occurred in McKinney, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, over the weekend, when 19-year-old Tatiana Rose threw a pool party and invited several friends to use the community pool in her neighborhood. Many of those friends were Black, and many of those Black friends also live in the neighborhood. At some point, as Tatiana says in a video interview, two white adult women began yelling at her and her friends to “go back where they came from,” “back to section 8 housing,” and calling them “black fuckers.” When a 14-year-old girl responded, the women further ridiculed her, prompting Tatiana to tell the adults that the girl was 14 and their comments were inappropriate. According to Tatiana’s account, the white women then approached her; one “hit her in the face” and the other began participating in the attack.

According to reports, multiple calls came into police. At least one call came from either Tatiana, her mother (who was present) or her friends, reporting that these white women had attacked the partygoers. Other calls came in from residents who reported that many Black children who were unauthorized to be there were there and fighting. Apparently, the party got larger and some children jumped over the fence to get to the party.

When the McKinney PD showed up, Officer David Eric Casebolt arrived on the scene out of control. He yelled and cursed at teenagers, who were unarmed, many of them wearing swimming trunks and bathing suits. He approached a 14-year-old girl and wrestled her to the ground as she cried and called for her mom. Even after she was seated, crying and clearly subdued, he grabbed her braids, demanded that she get on her face, and then kneeled on top of her where he remained for several minutes. It is unclear what this child did to elicit such ire, but what she did not do was verbally threaten the officer, wave a gun at him, or present a physical threat — as she is, by the look of it, just around 100 pounds, and he is a fully grown man.

When her friends attempted to come to her aid, the officer drew his gun, and waved it at them wildly and haphazardly, prompting two other officers to come over and indicate that this was inappropriate behavior. The officer stopped pointing his gun, but took several more seconds of holding it, before finally placing it back in the holster.

He has been suspended. The two adult white women who started this confrontation by reportedly slapping Tatiana Rose in the face have not been arrested or charged. A young 14-year old girl is traumatized, and a community who rallied at the police department on Monday night is outraged.

Meanwhile, many residents of the community are thankful to the police for “keeping them safe,” as one sign reportedly posted at the pool the next day said. The rest of us are now forced to endure the deeply dishonest and irrational kind of conversation on race that proceeds from the mouth of far too many white folk after these kinds of incidents occur — with stunning regularity, I might add.

Among more well-meaning interlocutors are those who keep pointing out that David Casebolt is a bad apple. “He has been suspended,” they say. What we know for sure is that a suspension is not a clear indicator that charges, the loss of a job, or a criminal conviction are forthcoming.

Moreover, people continue to deploy the “one bad apple spoils a bunch” analogy as though the predicate of the sentence is of no consequence. Spoils. The analogy is less about the singular bad apple and more about its multiplicative bad effects on those it keeps company with. I agree that David Casebolt was particularly out of control. I agree that the other officers saw that and got him to stop waving his gun. They did not keep him from kneeling on top of the girl or berating and intimidating the other youth. This means that in a scenario where multiple children were being unfairly treated, the presence of multiple officers did not offer them substantial protection in the face one officer becoming entirely rogue.

Those officers did not demand that their colleague take a breather while they got the situation under control. They let him go on and on, half-cocked and ridiculous. The material impact of that was a bunch of children feeling unsafe and traumatized by those sworn to protect them.

The 15-year-old white kid who recorded this incident on his smartphone made it clear that what he saw was a bunch of police mistreating his Black friends, while leaving him alone entirely. For the white people who need to hear it, yes, his presence indicates that “not all white people” are racist. Clearly his parents are doing a good job raising an anti-racist teen. But if the white people who need to hear such things hope to float their consciences to safety on the back of this one kid, the ride might be bumpy. Again we don’t combat racism just by raising our children to have anti-racist attitudes. We also have to confront the systematic residential segregation and privatization that makes pools inaccessible to children who don’t have the privilege of living in suburbs.

Few white people have stood up and called out the white adult women who harassed a fellow neighbor having a pool party with her friends, and with her mother’s permission. But many white people have watched the video and concluded that the officer’s treatment of the 14-year-old girl was justified. The gender dynamics in this moment are interesting. There is no universe in which a police officer would drag a young white girl in a two-piece bathing suit by her hair, demand she put her face on the ground, and then kneel for several minutes on top of her adolescent body. If such a thing occurred, it would elicit massive moral outrage on the part of white people (and Black people, too).

But Black girls are never deemed feminine enough for their sexual and adolescent vulnerability to register for white people. They are frequently viewed as aggressors by both police and regular citizens alike, even for doing very adolescent things like mouthing off to those in authority. This is the reason why education scholars suggest that Black girls are suspended from school six times as often as white girls, because even simple adolescent forms of testing boundaries are perceived as far more aggressive based on race.

And let me be clear: Citizens have the right to “mouth off” to police. We have the right to question how we are being treated, why we are being arrested, why we are even being approached. Far too many police deploy accusations of disturbing the peace or obstructing justice to quiet citizens who question them within legal bounds. As long as we don’t threaten or enact physical harm on police officers, we can “mouth off” all we want. We don’t have to be polite to police officers, and they clearly have very little interest in being polite to us. And for those who keep demanding that we act civilly, the point is, “incivility” is not a crime.

If it were, half of America’s police forces would be behind bars.

Moreover, the violent incivility of the white women who harassed and physically assaulted these teenagers who had every right to be there escapes notice. White women have been some of the worst perpetrators of racial aggression and racial indignity in this country, but their aggressions frequently escape notice, precisely because white womanhood and the need to protect it animates the core of so much white supremacist aggression toward Black people. The domestic sphere, much to the chagrin of my fellow feminists, has long been considered the sacred domain of white women. Many a Black man was lynched in service of protecting white women’s domestic sanctity and sexual virtue. Meanwhile, white women have been emboldened by such a system for centuries to police, demean and humiliate Black people, and Black women in particular, within domestic spaces.

But you won’t see white feminists contextualizing or calling out this long history of white female bullying of Black women with less social, political or economic power than them. They leave that work to Black feminists. Meanwhile, I hope that Black men begin to understand that they don’t have a monopoly on being violently mistreated by police. Black girls are brutalized, too.

And to continue to tell Black people — as many white folks and respectable black folk on the social media threads I participated in have said — that if these children “would have just done what the officers said, none of this would have happened,” is to be deeply invested in exercises of racial ignorance. Proper behavior has never, ever protected Black people from police.

Most of these children came to a pool party with an invite, got harassed and physically assaulted by white residents who didn’t want them to be there, and then mistreated by the police. The ones who didn’t have an invite came because perhaps it was a rare opportunity to get in a clean, safe swimming pool in the heat of a Texas summer. Good policing could have dealt with this matter sans violence and without incident.

But that didn’t happen here.

Instead, the police mistreated these teens (including those who had been invited) because they started by giving the white residents the benefit of the doubt, even though good credible evidence suggests that white racial aggression spurred this incident in the first place. But Black children and Black people are never given the benefit of the doubt. We are policed first, and only ever apologized to later, if at all.

White people in the aggregate value the “safety” of their private, segregated, residential spaces far more than they value a system of policing that protects and values all lives equally. It is clear that the anxiety that many white suburban residents feel about having their communities “overrun” by Black people feels far more “traumatizing” to them than having to stand idly by while a few teens get roughed up by the police. If the cost of making white people safe is more than a few Black communities being systematically traumatized and made always to feel unsafe, then so be it. The notion of white safety has its foundations in Indigenous, Black and Brown unsafety. Until white people begin to question the violent origins of such a concept, the police will continue in the name of “white safety” to go around terrorizing communities of color, mostly with impunity.

Six Year Old Earns Some R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Can you identify the "Beyonce" in this trio?

Top 5 Great Prison Escapes

In light of the recent prison escapees, I've seen a couple of these clips featuring famous escapes.  Interestingly, there are no black guys.  Wonder why?

Black Film on Display at MoMA in New York City

An excerpt from The New Republic's "Black America's Forgotten Film History"

~~~~~~~~~~

Anyone who took silver screen representations of blacks at face value would come away with the notion that black folks were, by and large, stupid, cowardly, lazy and worthy of subjugation, censure and plunder. That this is just how America has largely treated its African American population both before and since is no accident. When the blustery but occasionally insightful critic Armond White said “you have a culture of criticism that simply doesn't want Black people to have any kind of power, any kind of spiritual understanding or artistic understanding of themselves,” he wasn’t wrong. 

“ARoad Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration,” a series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that began last Monday and runs through June 12th, provides a much-needed corrective, a narrative of black resistance to the dominant mode of slanderous Hollywood storytelling—both now and, somewhat miraculously, in the days of Jim Crow. Curated by MoMA’s Joshua Siegel and independent curator Thomas Beard of Light Industry, the country’s leading micro-cinema for experimental film, the exhibition is pegged to the Museum’s show of Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration paintings. “A Road Three Hundred Years Long” includes many films that catered to black audiences in the era of their flight from terror, showcasing a significant amount of pre-war black filmmaking as well as movies by contemporary black filmmakers that explore the mysterious legacy of the Great Migration.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121994/black-life-remembered-film?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TNR%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%20-%206%2F9%2F15

When Will This End?

It's only funny if you don't have a gun pointed at you.

The Box

Here's what I know for sure:  When one door closes, something extraordinary is behind the next one.  Weep if you must at the closing of the first door, but get ready for the spectacular things that lie ahead.  The best is yet to come.

~~~~~~~~~~

From Longreads - 

The Box and the Basement

“On the last day of my old job, I stumbled out the door, holding aloft that iconic emblem of termination: The Box. Though from the outside it might look wholly indistinct, we who have felt its symbolic weight know this is no ordinary box; this is a box that can make grown men cry.”

Nathan Rabin | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,900 words) 

“Working in the media in 2015 is like being part of an epic game of Musical chairs. Every day the music starts and you race madly to hold onto your fragile place in the world.”

I published that in a Facebook post after being let go from my latest employer, comparing working in pop culture media in 2015 to participating in an insane daily game of musical chairs. You try your best to keep up, to maintain the heat, the buzz, and the pageviews to stay in a game that has a disconcerting obsession with putting aging writers out to pasture to make way for younger, cheaper, more malleable replacements.

Every time you see that one of your film critic colleagues has been let go or taking a buyout (see: Lisa Schwarzbaum, who was at Entertainment Weekly for 22 years before taking a buyout, or Claudia Puig who took a USA Today buyout after reviewing films there for 15 years), you breathe a nervous sigh of relief. For that day, at least, you are safe. 

The music stopped for me on a recent Wednesday, and I was left standing. I was a 39-year-old man without a job, but with many other accouterments of adults: a wife, a mortgage, a baby, and a dog. Within a few days (and in a frenzy of panicked number crunching), my wife and I decided to pack up and move in with my in-laws in Atlanta while my wife hunted for a job, and I figured out life as a freelancer. Truthfully, we had been priced out of the city long before my termination. Between the gaspingly high costs of child care and the mortgage on our modest condo, we were coming to terms with the fact that we would have to leave Chicago. But there is a big difference between choosing to leave a place and being forced to do so by dint of financial necessity.

On the last day of my old job, I stumbled out the door, holding aloft that iconic emblem of termination: The Box. Though from the outside it might look wholly indistinct, we who have felt its symbolic weight know this is no ordinary box; this is a box that can make grown men cry. It is a box of sadness, a box of shame, a box of regret and a box of dreams never to be fulfilled. It is the box the fired are given (generally by an HR person with a very sad face) in which they are to place the detritus of their work life, because they are no longer welcome at their former employer.

The contents of my box of shame represented my attempts to transform a workplace I had entered into two years earlier—brimming with hope and idealism—into a place that felt like home. I surrounded myself with some of my favorite tackiest things, things that told me who I was: I had figures of Homer Simpson as King Kong from Burger King and framed pictures of Tha Dogg Pound and the leads of Elizabethtown as well as a clipboard from Patch Adams where I wrote my weekly schedule that somehow survived Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and, now, two jobs.

You see people with Boxes Of Shame on buses and trains sometimes. Sometimes the look on their face is one of noble forbearance, a clear-headed look of purpose that implicitly says, “This is but a mere bump in the road to be endured with stoic dignity.” Sometimes the look on a man with the Box of Shame betrays the sadness and brokenness and rejection the man is feeling. In this case the man and the box are in perfect synchronicity, each silently but powerfully telling an achingly sad tale of rejection and failure.

I am a man who regularly vomits from anxiety, a man who burst into tears upon first reading my infant son the childhood story, Corduroy, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was the latter kind of a man with a Box. As I humped the collection of work knick-knacks home on the Kimball bus post-termination, I imagine I bore the haunted look of a lost man, a formerly capable provider who—how quickly these things happen! By how little are we undone!—had been relinquished not just of his job, but of his professional identity as well. As is typical of the frigid Midwestern city in which I reside, nobody on the bus would look at me, let alone give up their seat. Everybody was too wrapped up in their own business to pay any attention to mine.

I grew up in a group home, the son of an absentee mother and chronically unemployed father, so I clung to security fiercely. Growing up, my greatest dream was owning my own home, something that was mine, where I could raise a family and be the man I always wanted to be.

So, when I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife, I used the money from the advance for my memoir about my terrible childhood, The Big Rewind, to buy a modest two-bedroom condo in Albany Park. It wasn’t much, but I loved it. After a lifetime of skulking about in subpar rentals, I finally knew the pride of ownership and community, of truly belonging to a place and being deeply invested in its future. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking things like, “Get the hell off of my lawn.”

Just as I filled my workspace with knick-knacks, I filled my home with symbols of previous achievements: blow-ups of my books and framed copies of glowing reviews from The New York Times and TIME and Rolling Stone. I kept them at eye level in an attempt to trick my bipolar brain into thinking that I genuinely was the man of substance and importance described in the articles and not the sad, broken, overwhelmed pretender I felt like most of the time.

Now this condo that I love so much will have to become a part of my past. There is so much collateral damage when someone loses their job. My wife and I adore our nanny and her three-year-old daughter, who seem to love our son just as much as we do and surprised us regularly with unusually beautiful pictures of our child at play, at rest.

Now, because I had been let go, I needed to let this wonderful woman go as well. It was a game of dominoes, with only two dominoes, really. One fell, and knocked over the other. “I just want to say how much we appreciate everything you’ve done for our son and just to see you guys together just warms my heart,” I said sobbing, as I incoherently ambled up to the subject at hand.

“And I would love nothing better than for you to be his nanny forever but,” the crying started again, “I just lost my job and I’m not going to be able to pay you, or to keep our condo, or stay in Chicago, so we’re going to have to let you go.”

Our nanny was far more understanding than I had any right to expect. It was the rare instance when the person doing the letting go is more upset than the person being let go. But beyond having to leave Chicago and the modest little condo of my dreams lies an ominous proposition: The Basement.

Now, I love my in-laws dearly, and they have a lovely home with a very nice basement. If, as a 39-year-old new father, you should find yourself in the untenable position of having to live in someone’s basement, my in-law’s basement is about as good as it gets. But I have lived the last 18 years of my professional life online, and, within our online culture, basements occupy a very specific and very negative emotional space. One might even argue they occupy a very specific and very negative emotional space right next to the screaming sadness of the Box of Shame.

In online culture, parental basements are the official homes, literally and figuratively, of trolls: nasty little people who devote their days to saying nasty things about people under the comforting cloak of anonymity. In the world of online culture, parental basements are tiny little Loservilles, pathetic havens for people who cannot deal with the crazy rhythms and random cruelty of our hectic online world.

One of the most ubiquitous insults on the internet is to accuse some poser acting like a big shot online of living in his parent’s basement. In movies and pop culture, an adult living in his parent’s basement is shorthand for the character being a loser, or, at the very least, an emotionally stunted man-child.

Now, after four books and 18 years at the top of the pop-culture-media food chain, I am preparing to pack up my family and move into my in-laws’ basement. I’m not even moving into my own parents’ basement: My dad lives in government housing and my mother abandoned me, so I didn’t even have the resources to move back in with my biological parents; I have to move in with my wife’s parents.

When I met my beautiful, glamorous South African wife I wanted to give her the world. Instead, we ended up on a crazy five-year roller coaster that somehow ended with us both being rudely ejected into her parent’s basement, with our newborn and crazy-ass Yorkie in tow. And now we are preparing to box up our belongings and put them in a U-Haul as we prepare for our new life in Atlanta with equal parts trepidation and excitement. We’ll be doing our damnedest to transform this basement into the home our son deserves. He’s an unusually sunny little man, so I hope that he’s still too young to associate boxes with anything negative. Surely, the darkness of these boxes can be redeemed by the incandescent light of our son’s oblivious but life-affirming smile and laugh.

Boxes and basements can be dark, grim places, but they don’t have to be. I’m trying to see Atlanta as a healthy and necessary fresh start. I’m excited about doing new kinds of writing for different kinds of people. I’m excited for my son to grow up surrounded by sunshine and love and grandparents who have embraced him as if he were their own child and derive no greater joy in life than in spoiling him.

The Box of Shame is a grim thing to carry, but once you bring it home and sift through the contents, it ceases to be a Box Of Shame. When you open a box, a lot of light can flood in. For the sake of my family, and for the sake of my future, I’m a whole lot better off contemplating all that light and all that potential rather than brooding over the infinite darkness inside of a box.

* * *

Nathan Rabin is the former head writer of The A.V Club and the author of four books, most recently You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.

Is This What Happens . . .

When I call you guys?

OK, fess up Ben and Frankie.

When Hard Work Wasn't Enough

A dear friend contacted me recently to ask about the last speech I gave at the 6th grade promotion ceremony at the last school where I was principal.  This school was 100% Title 1, which means all of the students' families were on welfare.

After four years of incredibly hard work and dedication trying to get the students to where they needed to be, I was being replaced.

It was a difficult time, for sure.  At that point my future was uncertain, and truth be told, I was angry and bitter.

It was traditional for the principal to speak at the 6th grade promotion ceremony, and I had done this many times before, but this time, I took the opportunity to share some things from the heart.

Below you'll find my notes from that speech.

~~~~~~~~~~

ü STUDENTS – Thank you – for working hard and doing your best; I've witnessed your growth & maturity

ü We love you, but you must move on

ü Don’t fall into the trap of not doing well in a class because you don’t like a teacher – remember your teachers are being paid to teach you not to like you; if they like you, it’s a bonus.

ü Please allow me to deviate from my usual script as this is my last time giving these remarks here

ü Let me share a story about a former student who left here Proficient & Advanced

ü His principal & I were at a meeting and she asked if I remembered him & if I’d go by and chat with him

ü She said his grades were A+ in Leadership and F’s in all five of his other subjects; know this - your teachers will let you FAIL

ü I told him I was going to go by his classes and check on him to make sure he was going to class and doing his work

ü In a matter of weeks, he brought three of his grades up from F’s to C’s – not great, but a step in the right direction

ü One day I went to see him and he wasn’t there, so I went to his home to see what was up; when I knocked on the door, his Mom was incensed.  She asked, “What are you, the truant officer now? You’re doing too much.”

ü She was right.  So I publically apologize for trying to help her child.  It was not my job to get him to school every day.  It was her job.  It was not my job to make sure he was in class doing his work.  It was her job.  It was not my job to meet with his teachers to make sure he was on the right track. It was her job.  So I apologize for trying to help her child get ready for high school and beyond. 

ü Let me tell you another story that happened very recently

ü I witnessed . . . let me repeat . . . I WITNESSED students playing on their way to school throwing a basketball from one side of the road to the next in traffic; others were throwing pine cones at cars and each other

ü I slowed down and yelled at them to stop

ü I turned onto 5^th Street and looked in my rearview mirror and could see them chasing each other down the street

ü Shortly thereafter two of the boys entered the office with one crying where he had fallen and was bleeding and bruised

ü I shared how dangerous this was with the students at breakfast and at the Assembly that morning

ü At the end of the day I went to the homes of two of the parents and met the other in the court yard of the third parent and shared the incident with them, sharing how dangerous this was

ü The next day two of the parents were waiting for me in the office, accusing me of lying about what I saw

ü WHY WOULD I LIE?  WHAT PURPOSE WOULD LYING SERVE?

ü I simply stopped by the parents’ home to let them know their children were participating in CRAZY, OUTRAGEOUS, DANGEROUS BEHAVIOR!

ü So I apologize for trying to help these children as well.  The next time I see them playing in the street where the cars are swerving to avoid hitting them, I’ll keep going and let them play on, so that I’m not accused of lying on them again.

ü Someone asked me recently if I would miss being here

ü There are some things I won’t miss –

o  I won’t miss begging parents to send your kids to school and having to get the police to knock on your doors to do it

o  I won’t miss getting cussed out by parents who think their kids can do no wrong

o  I won’t miss students saying “My Momma told me to fight” and

o  I won’t miss students who disrespect staff

ü There are things I will miss -

o  I will miss being around some of the smartest students I’ve ever known

o  I will miss some of the kindest students I’ve ever known

o  I will miss some of the best staff I’ve ever worked with

o  I will miss the best support staff I’ve ever worked with

ü Remember this is a “Promotion, not a graduation”

ü I expect all of you to graduate from high school

ü I expect all to you to graduate from college as well

ü We visited Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, & CSUS because we want our students to feel comfortable on a college campus; we want them to start thinking about college

ü I wanted for your kids what was available to my kids – a great college education

ü My sons went to two of the best colleges and universities in the country, and that’s what I want for your kids

ü Everything I did here was to try and get your kids prepared for them to achieve that goal

ü But I realized recently that the dream of college for your kids has been my dream, but in order for it to happen, it has to be your dream as well