U. S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ May 22nd visit, and her advocacy for “school choice,” reminded me of an incident of school choice with my eldest daughter. When her parents hauled Lisa away from her friends in Madera, California, to her new home in Clarksville, Indiana, she was not a happy child. At the the time, she was six years old, but she had already developed lasting relationships with her neighbors and school-mates in California. When it was time for her to enter grade school, her parents chose what they believed to be the superior option: a Catholic school education. Lisa was enrolled in St. Mary’s school in New Albany, Indiana. After a few years, Lisa’s desire to ditch the white shirt, navy skirt or pants and blue and green plaid jumpers required of students of the school soon became her overriding concern, but her parents turned a deaf ear on her pleas to attend public school. Lisa finally wore us down, and we agreed to enroll her in River Valley Middle School, in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Now, instead of riding in the car with her dad to a private school, she was to take a bus to public school.
My memory of the transition from Catholic school to public school was centered on Lisa’s new concerns about her manner of dress. In Catholic school, the uniform was — uniform. In public school, one could wear anything that a parent (and the school board) did not object to. I remember Lisa’s mother and I urging her to PICK AN OUTFIT and get to the bus. Lisa spent about a year at River Valley Middle School, and in that time, her parents’ wobbling marriage fell apart and her father moved out. Her mother got a promotion that required the two of them to move to New Jersey. And very recently, I learned something about Lisa’s “Year of Living Dangerously.”
“I’d get on — the only black kid — and every kid on the bus would slide to the outside of the seat, and refuse to let me in,” Lisa told me. The bus couldn’t move until everyone was seated, but the bus driver ignored the behavior of the riders until Lisa shoved her way onto a seat. Her parents were not told about the time three boys donned KKK hoods just as Lisa got on the bus, nor the time she was told, “We’re gonna burn a cross on your lawn.” She did not tell us of the racial epithets spat at her, but she also did not tell us of these things: When threatened with a cross-burning, Lisa replied, “I’ll buy you the plywood,” and when warned of a night visitation, her response was, “My daddy’s got a gun.” She won the right to a seat by announcing to the bus riders, “Not everyone on here can kick my (butt).”
More than 30 years later, Lisa’s friends and associates are a reflection of the multi-cultural life she has lived. “I couldn’t have told you about that (fight), after trying so hard to get into that school,” she told me. She had not chosen to leave her friends in Madera, the house with the pool in the backyard, the room she and her father had painted purple and yellow. She did not choose her preschool, kindergarten and grade school, but she wanted to attend public school. Her refusal to give up or give in, her “honey badger,” take-no-prisoner approach to the defense of her rights may have been honed on the bus in Southern Indiana, where she stood down those who sought to take away her school choice.