Failure

This afternoon I have been working in preparation for what is a big event for me--migrating our computer system from one school year to the next. The term coined for this is "rolling over" our district database, and it's a time-consuming process. I just finished one of the steps that I have to do before the rollover, and that is marking in the database all of the students in the district who have been retained (They have to be marked so that they don't automatically move up to the next grade when the rollover happens).

I don't want to get into details about numbers, but there are more retained students than you might think, especially in the middle school and high school. And as I mark student after student as retained, I feel my spirit sinking. All of these names. Behind all of these names are people who failed. More importantly, behind all of these names are people who WERE failed by the school district. What could we have done differently? When the student is selected our student information database shows--in addition to more information about each student than you could ever want--the photo of that student taken on "Picture Day" at the beginning of the year. And I look at each of those photos, of students smiling into a camera, and I imagine the stories behind the failures. Which students have no parents at home to encourage them to work hard? Which are suffering from alcoholism or drug dependency or some other addictive issue that is slowly destroying them? Which students have parents going through a divorce?

It's just a list of names on my desk, but my heart breaks when I think about the individuals represented by the list. And it's at times like this that I think, "What am I doing here behind this desk? Why did I ever leave the classroom? I could have SAVED these kids."

But I know that's nonsense. Sure, I have former students (and I'm not guessing about this. I could tell you the exact student I'm thinking of for each example) who are doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, city councilmen. But I know my influence on each of them was slight. And besides, I also have former students (and again I'm not supposing but thinking of specific students) who are drug dealers, strippers, armed robbers, and child molesters. Again, I know my ability to have altered the trajectory of their lives is minuscule, blown out of proportion by silly movies like STAND AND DELIVER and TO SIR, WITH LOVE and DEAD POET'S SOCIETY.

But it still haunts me that my district graduates about 120 seniors every year while there are about 160 freshmen. What happened to those 40 students who disappeared in the three years in between? It's a question that matters not just to those 40 students, but to all of us.