"You are too dangerous to teach in my school," I heard my principal declare from the other end of her conference table. So did the others who had gathered to pay witness.
My heart skipped a few beats. A lump swelled in my throat as her comment sunk in. Oh, I knew she was annoyed with my grades, that I was spoiling her numbers, and that in her effort to garnish awards and accolades, numbers had become everything. But, not for one minute did I think it would come to this. Sure, she wanted to cut me, the ex-grievance chairman of the union, down to size, get me to play the statistics game, get me to be like the others who conformed to survive. But this was different. This was not just censuring. This was career threatening and with her, there would be no backing down.
How could this be happening? How could I become a "throw away" teacher? Could she prevail? What about my passion for teaching? And my thirty-one years? How could she, without flinching or a sign of remorse, actually question my ability to teach? Am I dreaming? Is this meeting really about me and my removal from teaching?
"You are too dangerous to teach here," she said again. "I have asked the Superintendent to have you removed immediately."
It is something of an irony that Superman played such a role in my approach to the issues of the day. Right was right. That was all there was to it. It was easy to be that clear at five years old, when my heroes were Robin Hood, Liberace, Kate Smith, Captain Zero, Pinky Lee and Mickey Mouse. That changed by junior high, when I heard John F. Kennedy say, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." From that moment, I had a real hero.
Childhood was no shield from fear or evil. I saw my dad watch the McCarthy hearings. As a family, we talked about the Holocaust. I was frequently reminded that an expanding mushroom cloud could mean the end of the world. Even my favorite place-school-reinforced fears of annihilation. Loud bells drilled us to hide from flying glass. We complied, dropping beneath our desks or huddling in hallways. When the bomb got bigger, we were dismissed. It was better to go home. In theory, if we were going to burn, we may as well do it hugging our Moms.
Still, my heart believed in white knights and happy endings.
I shuddered as I signed the Affidavit of Appeal in 1993, but by temperament, commitment and job description, I did not equivocate. The Appeal to New York State's Commissioner of Education was a proper union action and any fear of consequence had to be put aside. I did it, despite a decade of witnessing personal attacks on public figures, the witch hunt called Whitewater, judges victimized for unpopular legal decisions and teachers vilified for maintaining standards. I imagined there would be a reaction to the Appeal, but had no sense of the magnitude. With price unknown and warnings ignored, I went forward without suspecting that this business activity would unalterably change my life and my career. Would I have done it any other way? Probably not, not with my long history of doing very much the same.
In 1967, when I began teaching, I hadn't thought twice about going to Mr. Lewis Lauer, my principal at Sandyfield Junior High. I wonder now if he could have survived the era of the nineties, but then, I kind of marched into his office, in my very short gym clothes, announcing to a man whose face got redder as I stood there, "Mr. Lauer, we need a new class. We have to do something for students who aren't allowed to play gym. The law requires it."
It's hard to believe that I, barely over five feet three inches and straight out of college, made our southern gentleman principal tremble, but I was told years later that I did. How, I wondered? I was such a small thing, a nobody really and he, even before age thickened him, was a big man, the head of a school, a symbol of authority. Anyway, he never said a nasty word. In fact, he hardly said anything. He was so laid back, so passive, so retiring that he merely nodded when we passed him in the halls. All of us laughed about it behind his back, but to this day, we acknowledge that he headed a great school and deserved the credit for it. He hired a terrific staff and let it run; taking care of the other things, the unknown, unsaid things that make schools function well. So what if he did not look us in the eye and say a few casual words?
Lewis Lauer is retired now and his school, Sandyfield Junior High, the stand alone junior high in our five junior-senior high school district, is a decaying relic of the past. Still, old staffers never fail to acknowledge his effectiveness in creating an environment that worked well for children, parents and teachers. Hands down, his laissez-faire policy of hiring good people and letting them run was far superior to the blight of top-down management, its encroachment on the educational system, and its usurping of professionalism. How did it happen? How did top-down management, a system that didn't work in the once mighty USSR and a system that industry found necessary to discard, wind up infiltrating education? I can't tell you, but then, in 1967, when I spoke to Mr. Lauer about Christine's physical education needs, he said, "Oh, really?" I thought he was surprised, not intimidated and that I was informative, not threatening. "I'll look into it," he promised.
Christine had been relegated to the sidelines, not by her doctor's doing, but by the District's. Similarly, eight other perfectly healthy boys and girls, kids with the misfortune of being born with only one of two eyes, or ears, or kidneys or testicles, were excluded from most of what we taught in gym. The District feared its liability. Anyway, I did not think it would be long until the adaptive class was authorized, but it was. Weeks went by without hearing anything. When I asked, Mr. Lauer said he spoke to Central and that it was "being handled" so I waited, but waiting was hard. Christine was like an alley cat who we caged. She and the others begged for the "okay," while straining to do anything other than watch. Each day, their wait became mine. It seemed endless. Finally, after seeing that Mr. Lauer could not hasten Central's clock, I told Christine's mother, "You know the District is bound by law to provide adapted physical education for kids with disabilities. Christine qualifies."
"Really? Adapted gym? Christine's been watching her twin sister and is so envious. An adapted class would be great."
"Maybe if you tell Central that you know it's required by law, that it's your daughter's right to participate, maybe you'll be more effective than I've been and the program will be in place before she graduates."
Oh, the power of a parent! I still laugh about Commissioner Sobel's 1990 promotion of "community-based management." Parents always pulled their weight. Christine's mom did in 1967. She went straight to the top and must have been harder to ignore than Mr. Lauer and me because, within a short time, she accomplished what we could not. Adapted gym began. So, too, did my reputation for being a wave maker.
Not long after, I took up another cause-equity. You see, until 1976, physical education was taught to girls by women and to boys by men, and no one could have said that the two camps were separate but equal. Men coached and were paid. The women coached and got emotional rewards.
It is hard to know why we accepted it that way, whether it was the times, our maternal instinct or an education that brainwashed us into thinking it was our duty, but there was consensus among female physical educators. Without benefit of money, we built after-school programs, wowed the girls, got them active and when the girls were ready for more, every woman in Phys Ed I knew gave it to them. We worked like crazy, scheduling games, buses, officials and sometimes even sewing uniforms and got more kids involved than ever. Without assistants, we fielded multiple teams, spending every free minute, and there were not many, on the phone to other schools saying, "Hi, I have a large group of ninth grade field hockey players who need some games. Can we schedule two?"
"Sure. How about seventh and eighth grade?"
"Sorry, they do soccer."
"What about volleyball?" And so it went. I called until I found schools that could accommodate us. It got easier. I learned who played our sports at our grade level and which schools we enjoyed playing. If there was money, it was for buses and officials. If not, we asked high school leaders to officiate. If they couldn't, I asked my leaders. If that didn't work, we officiated ourselves, feeling it preferable to canceling the game. At first, the girls' enthusiasm was reward enough. It had to be. There was nothing more. As for the girls, there were no athletic scholarships or professional teams to aspire to. Intrinsic reward had to be enough-for all of us. After-school pay amounted to little more than $1.50 a day, three days a week. To add insult to injury, despite our time, expertise and interscholastic events, we were only considered supervisors, not coaches.
That first year, I followed my co-worker, Midge's lead. I stayed three afternoons a week and ran an intramural program, but as I got to know the girls, the hour seemed too short, so I stayed longer. The following fall, though enrolled in a demanding graduate program, I stayed daily. My stipend remained the same. It was something I accepted until economic reality struck a sour note. Then I totaled the hours I worked and figured my real hourly wage-twenty-five cents-and was horrified. Here I was, a permanently certified teacher, and I was making less per hour than a babysitter. Even they got fifty cents.
That reality hit many of us at the same time. At a women coaches' meeting to set up rules, schedule games and arrange officials, we ended up discussing our conundrum-coaching without proper remuneration-and before long made our disparity with men a hot issue. In the end, the women chose the most outspoken of us to take up the quest for financial equity-Peggy and me.
Seeking fairness, not a fight, we went to our chairmen. When that went nowhere, we approached the men at Central whom we regarded as father figures, not bosses. Frankly, we had the feeling that they'd take care of our problem once they heard it. What an illusion! After months, with nothing changing but our patience, we realized that doing what the District learned to expect from us prevented us from getting our due. The straw that broke the camel's back was our being given copies of the school budget and being asked to help get support for it so we didn't go into austerity.
When I saw that $14,894 was set aside for boys' athletics and $4,207 for girls, I was disgusted. After years of running a program that paid next to nothing, thinking that the women at the high school level were paid for coaching, I saw that there was no interscholastic budget for girls and no budgetary item for women coaches. There wasn't even a provision for a girl's sports program. It was mid November, 1972. I called our union president, Mr. Gold, who said, "You allege inequity. I need proof. Get me the facts and I'll go to the negotiating table with them."
So I researched the facts further and wrote a letter outlining the inequities. In a fait accompli, Mr. Gold won women a $150 increase to be shared in each school and signed a 3-year agreement committing us to more of the same.
Need I explain? With patience exhausted, it was an easy jump from our in-house efforts for equity to the Human Rights Commission. Our complaint led to a full investigation. Eventually our District was instructed to treat its female coaches equitably. That meant anteing up money for women. It did not mean doing anything for the girls . . . and they didn't. That required federal legislation. Title IX would come in 3 years.