Missing Persons

One of my first acts at ACE was to yell at a student and make him cry.

I forget exactly what happened, but I caught him in the hallway and realized that he had lied to me. He kept trying to lie to me, was being difficult, and sarcastically shrugging off everything that I said, laughing at me and refusing to look me in the eye. I just kept talking getting frustrated and a little bit intimidated by how little effect I thought I was having on the kid, wondering what would happen if an administrator came and saw a kid completely ignoring me. Until finally he stared at me, and I stared at him.

And I could see something in his eyes break.

We obviously did not get along very well after that. He was probably the highest ability level student of the special ed students. And eventually we formed a relationship when he lost his ID and could not return to class without a replacement. I paid the five dollars for the replacement. He promised me that he could pay me back in two weeks. I shrugged, I was used to him lying.

But he paid me back.

When I started teaching there, he had all F's. As the semester ended before spring break, he had all A's and B's with the exception of two classes, which he was failing because he did not like the teachers.

But he had a lot of problems. He was only 13, small for his age. He lived with his brother and his wife, his parents lived in Mexico and he had not seen them in years. He broke down crying at Christmas. We talked a lot about my time in Mexico, and about other things that he liked. He was very talkative, very much the stereotypical boy in a man's world, and suffering because of it.

He wanted to transfer to Kelly High School, his neighborhood school. He said that this school had too many rules, and that all the teachers hated him (he may have had a point here). I thought for sure that if he transfered that he would start a fight and get killed or beat bad.

He never returned from spring break. I called his brother after a couple of days and spoke with him in Spanish. The brother agreed that Daniel would come back to school. If a student under the age of 16 misses school for 5 days, the guardians receive a certified mail notice. This happens at the 10 day mark, and by the 15 day mark the police become involved and the parents report to court. It is also possible to call DCFS (Dep of Child and Family Services) and try to get the student separated from their parents on the basis of criminal neglect, but this is very hard to do.

Daniel came back for one day. He smiled and talked about how much he hated it here, and how he would be gone as soon as his brother could come and fill out the paperwork.

But his brother never came, and Dan never came back. The only thing I had to go on was a list of three addresses, and Dan said that he worked at a little corner store called Los Gemalos.

***

Avon was a student that I initially did not realize existed. He would miss two or three weeks and then come in two hours late for one day of school, and then leave. He always reeked of weed.

So when a teacher finally pointed him out to me when he walked in a half hour late (I asked who he was and she said "one of your students") I pulled him out to do work.

It was quickly obvious that he was almost completely blind. He could not read without glasses, which he refused to wear because they looked like two telescopes hanging off a coat hanger (the origianl frame had broke and they now dangled off a coat hanger.

The first day back, he got into a fight with another student.

His file said that he operated at a second grade level. He seemed like a nice kid, and he did not refuse to do anything. But he just had nothing in his eyes, no energy in his body. He lived with his grandmother, and she said that he lay in bed all day.

Another one of my students lives by Avon. He says that the local gangs use him to buy drugs, and that Avon is always giving away his own weed to other kids. Avon wanted to join a local gang, but they laughed at him, took his money, and said maybe they would hire him as a lookout.

Had an emergency meeting with the grandmother after Avon was caught smoking weed while he was in the dean of studetns office. I have never seen someone so addicted to weed. The grandmother was very nice but very old and did not understand what was going on. She told us how Avon's mother and brother had died the same day of completely seperate circumstances, and that Avon was the one who found his mother. Avon does a good job of taking care of his grandmother, but it seems obvious that she is in poor health.

He stopped coming to school
***

There were a total of 12 students that were missing. In an area where minority drop out rate is fifty percent, 12 missing is not bad. As a result, no one else seemed to care. They made it purely a matter of choice. The office was not doing what they were supposed to be doing with keeping definitive attendance records and sending certified mail and court notices. So myself and out scary dean of students decided to clear our schedule and go hunting around the south side for them.

We were wearing ties and baseball caps, driving around in my dented teal pontiac . Enoch the dean is a black man in his thirties. He grew up in the Ida B Wells homes, and got out with a football scholarship. He played defensive end with the New Orleans Saints before he ruptured his Acheilies tendon, after which he had to travel all over the country and Canada playing football. He had a wife and kids, and finally decided to give up on football and return to Chicago.

I am not ripped like Enoch but I am tall, and as a result when we walked through the neighborhood everyone thought that we were cops. First stop was Dan's house in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. As soon as we stepped out of the cars people started whistling in warning and yelling five O. We had to walk a couple of blocks because the street was blocked off, people left their front porches, went into the house, we could here locks snap. I said good morning to old ladies, who glared at me. A group of teenagers watched us, but dan was not with them. I wanted to ask them what school they went to and why they were standing out at 10am on a Wednesday, but decided to chose my battles.

The house looked like a fortress and also looked like it was uninhabited. Enoch went around back while I screamed in Spanish and English. Finally a women came to the window and said that no one by the two last names that I knew lived in the house. I looked at her, tried to figure out if this was Dan's sister in law. But we were at an impass and so Enoch and I left.

We then hit Inglewood and the Crazy hundreds. Every house we went to we could here footsteps or see a curtain move, but no one answered. We would stand on the porch for ten minutes, talking quietly with ourselves, and hope someone would think that we had left and look out.

We then went to Avon's house, somewhere on 98th st west of the Dan Ryan. We drove through more groups of gangbangers until we got to a bungalow house. Two old men were destroying the concrete stairs. They said that we just missed the grandmother and Avon. The man swinging the sledge hammer told us that he was 92 years old, and that he still liked the ladies.

We went to more houses.
We never found a single student.
None of those students returned.