She Had Potential
It’s summer! School is out and the living is easy, if you are a kid. You can stay up late, ride your bike around town all day, and eat watermelon and ice cream until you burst. Unless you are my kid; then, you will also hear a lot about responsibilities and be encouraged or ENCOURAGED to just read a book for a while please. The truth is that I always loved school and I think that my children love it too. I had a client who certainly didn’t take it for granted:
Unsurprisingly, and to Donna’s great and perpetual regret, her mother did not make school a priority for Donna and her siblings. Before she went to live with her grandparents, Donna attended kindergarten at Washington Elementary School—at least for one day. She was sent home because she was dirty and had lice.
Living with her grandparents, Donna got to experience the joy of education for at least a little while. She attended McKinley Elementary School. She loved her first-grade teacher there, Mrs. Wilson, who was built just like Big Grandma. Mrs. Wilson noticed Donna—something not everyone did. What’s more, she liked Donna. Donna felt special, for once, and she never forgot that feeling or the kind lady who gave it to her.
Elementary school continued to go well for Donna for the next few years. She received comments on her report cards like “A class full of Donnas would just make life so easy.” She moved over to Barker Elementary School, just for fifth grade, the year that her grandparents lived on Ferris Avenue. Mr. Metz, her sixth-grade teacher at Longfellow Elementary School, was another memorable teacher: “Donna has been working in two separate reading groups. Her progress is good. She tries very hard to please and is very well mannered.”
Donna was happy at school despite the fact that she didn’t have friends there. She was something of a loner; she just went to school, waited for her little brother, and walked home. She wanted to be a girl scout, but her grandparents were too busy and too exhausted for those kinds of things. So she never joined any extracurricular activities or sports teams, even when she moved on to Roosevelt Junior High School, which was otherwise okay.
The tone of the report card comments changed once Donna was back in her mother’s home, and they tell the story of what happened. “Donna is absent too much.” “I had to give Donna an F in sewing class because she didn’t have fabric or the supplies she needs.” At fourteen, Donna was taking care of her baby sister—as well as her three other siblings—because her mother was never around.
Donna tried to go to high school. She thought she was supposed to go to East High School, which is where her boyfriend, Michael, went. She walked in on the first day, but she didn’t know where to go; she had no papers or directions. She went to the office. “My name is Donna,” she said. “I’m here to go to school.”
But they told her she wasn’t registered, and that she wasn’t a student there. So every day that Donna went to “school,” she actually went to the department store across the street or walked around town with her cousin, who often skipped school. She never went to high school, not even for a day.
At sixty-eight, looking at those elementary school report cards still brings tears to Donna’s eyes. “She has much enthusiasm for school and can develop into an outstanding student,” Mr. Hapfal wrote.
She had potential.