Kids in a Hot Tin Trailer
Charlotte friends, please vote YES on the school bond referendum.
I spent my first year out of college teaching social studies in an overcrowded Title I middle school in Charlotte. With over 1,100 students, we were one of the largest middle schools in the sixteenth-largest school district in the country.
My classroom was a cramped trailer with a highly unreliable HVAC system. In the late summer and early fall months, by the time fourth block rolled around, the thermostat read in the 90s—92 on a cool day, 97 on a hot day. The tin box baked the thirty-nine 7th-grade bodies in my class (yes, you read that correctly—39) well beyond the point of perspiration and mere frustration.
It was a health hazard. We were miserable.
We were thirsty, sweaty, smelly, sleepy, and understandably, the last thing the students wanted to do was learn about the difference between physical and political maps. And the last thing I wanted to do was stand in that oven teaching them those differences.
“You gotta pay the bills on time!!”
The first day that the temperature in my classroom hit the 90s, I was not entirely sure what to do. The kids were complaining and my forced smile and feeble reassurances that it would get fixed could not be heard over the dull roar of grumbles. “Well someone clearly ain’t pay their utility bill,” one of my students shouted out.
Everyone tittered and began chorusing out different variations of “Yeah, Ms. Knicely! You gotta pay the bills on time!!”
I had totally lost control of the class. I called the office to tell them about the temperature.
“I can’t hear you,” the secretary said.
The students were being so loud that I had to all but shout into the receiver.
“Ok,” she said and hung up.
Unsure of what that exchange meant, I called back, asking explicitly what I should do.
“I’ll tell an admin,” she said.
“Thanks,” was my meek reply.
Nothing happened that day. I sent an email after bus duty. No response.
A fan. Tears.
When I got to my trailer the next morning, someone had placed a fan inside. I cried.
A nice gesture, I suppose, but there was nowhere to put it. With thirty-nine desks piled in, we were already on top of each other. After just a few days of teaching, my slender hips were peppered with bruises formed from bumping into desks—battle wounds from shimmying back and forth all around the room to help students. I ended up placing the fan smack in the middle of my desk in the corner, cushioned atop a depressingly tall stack of ungraded papers.
I roamed the halls that morning desperately trying to track down someone who could help. When I finally found an administrator, the first thing they asked was, “Did you get the fan?” I suppressed the incredulous guffaw I felt bubbling up.
Instead, I nodded and thanked them. “It was in the 90s in there yesterday,” I said, “and the forecast is calling for even hotter temperatures today.”
They nodded sympathetically and acknowledged that yes, that particular trailer had faced similar problems in the past. I asked what could be done to fix it.
They said they would put in a work order, but acknowledged that the process could take anywhere between five to ten business days.
“And they are usually pretty swamped at the beginning of the year,” they said.
I felt like they had shoved a brick down my throat. I felt helpless. Fully inadequate. I had little experience challenging authority figures. My naïve, inexperienced 22-year-old self did not know how to respond. But the thought of another day in the trailer hell kiln helped me find my voice.
“I’m not able to teach in these conditions,” I told her. “It’s not fair to the kids. There are health risks involved. Is there anywhere else we could go in the meantime?”
I landed in the media center that week. That was a nightmare for several reasons I won’t delve into here,1 but at least I wasn’t stressing about my students passing out from heat stroke.
Doing the best with what I had.
The work order eventually got processed, and it got a little better in my trailer, especially as the temperatures cooled down as fall approached. But in the winter we faced the other extreme. I began arriving at school at 6:45am, two hours before the first bell range to give the heat time to kick in. Even still, my first-block students and I would keep our hats, coats, and gloves on. Most days you could see your breath inside.
I have countless more stories of how the old buildings made it nearly impossible to do my job. There were mold and roach issues in the 400 building, massive dehumidifiers and bug traps lining the hallways. There was the tart, unpleasant stench of urine that permeated the 300 building thanks to plumbing issues and old mops. Nursing teachers pumped in dusty utility closets. Parent conferences took place in the book storage room. At any given moment, we had a total of 3-4 working water fountains for a student body of 1.1K and staff of 80+. There was no teachers’ lounge, as it had been converted into offices for support staff. And then there was the week had to evacuate the building four days in a row due to an ongoing gas leak issue.
This is all obviously unacceptable, and I can assure you that if I found myself in that same predicament today as a 36-year-old, I would be handling it much differently than I did back then. But I was just a few weeks into my first-ever full-time job, reporting to and working alongside people old enough to be my parents. I was clueless, exhausted, stressed, insecure.
I did the best with what I had and what I knew. And I believe my school administration did as well.
The problem was that what we had was not enough.
The container matters.
Four years later, those trailers were demolished. The 400 and 300 buildings were torn down, and we finally got a functional space thanks to bond money. It wasn’t fancy, but it was new and safe. It was what we needed to teach effectively and what the students needed to learn effectively.
A former boss of mine always used to say, “The container matters.” Indeed it does, and I shudder to think of the implicit messages my students internalized about the worth and value of their education—nay, their worth and value as humans—going to school in those conditions for years on end.
There has been a shocking amount of anti-school bond buzz making its rounds. Some of it appears to be rooted in misconceptions about tax impact. Some of it seems to stem from anti-CMS rhetoric.2
I’m no tax expert, and I’ll readily admit that our school district has its flaws. There’s plenty I don’t understand when it comes to county budgets. I know very little about the technical aspects of expenditures, appropriations, and maturity dates.
But I’m still out here simply trying to do the best with what I have and what I know. Which, for me, is this—what I have experiential wisdom and an unwavering belief that our students deserve to attend school in functional facilities. And here’s what I know: I have been on the receiving end of school bonds, and the impact was transformative.
School bonds are a no-brainer. Mecklenburg County friends, please vote YES. Our students and teachers are worth it.
Ok, I’ll share just one. Our first day in the media center, we shared the space with our Zone Superintendent and members of his team. They were visiting for the day and that was where they had camped out. I felt so exposed having them right there watching my every move.
I hesitated to share my experiences here because I do not want to give people more reason to bash CMS or be fearful of public school. Let the record show that I loved my job as a CMS teacher, and my children attend the CMS school in our neighborhood and we love it there.