Stranded
As I entered seventh grade I, along with the other fifty six students in my class, realized something rather scary to most of us: after we graduated from eighth grade the following year, we had no high school to go to.
For three decades, the Ellis Elementary School students, like I was, had been sent to Sanborne Regional High a few towns over, but over the summer before my seventh grade year, our principal was caught having an affair with the Sanborne’s principal’s wife. Their principal then told our town that he didn’t want Fremont students in his school anymore. So after the year 2000, our unwritten contract with Sanborne Regional High was over. I’m sure it was a lot more complicated than that, but that’s how my parents explained it to me.
So, once school started in September of 1999, the town hall meetings began. These meeting were far too large to have in our town hall, so about three quarters of the town, that has a population of maybe 2000 was crowded into the dimly lighted echo-y gym/cafeteria/auditorium of Ellis Elementary school. Some of the orange lunch table benches had been pulled down of extra seating after the chairs in the outlined basketball court had been filled.
Fremont contains three groups of people, one is the really old people who hate change, second is the people actually affected by the issue, and third are the young couples with young children, as one would imagine with only fifty-seven students in my class, and four sets of multiples, our parents were greatly outnumbered by people who thought they understood the issue more that the people being actually, you know, affected by it.
My parents decided it would be a good experience for me to attend these meetings, every Tuesday and Thursday for the first two months of school, I did my homework in the girls’ bathroom across from the gym. There was a table hinged to the back wall of the pink bathroom that smelled of stale perfume and body odor. I still have yet to figure out why there is a ten foot table nailed to the wall of the girls bathroom instead of, let’s say, a third stall, but it does. Also forced to attend these meetings were Kathryn Graves, and Bobby Smithson. Kathryn and I had been best friends in second grade, but I hadn’t really spoken to her since, so topics of conversation were quite limited as we sat next to each other in chairs stolen from a first grade classroom. Bobby was the “I want to stand up for what’s right” kid in my class. His mom actually didn’t want him to attend the meetings, but she also couldn’t leave him home alone, so he sat, every Tuesday and Thursday, across from the doorway of the girls’ bathroom against a mural of a dragon we all called Elliot.
At the beginning of November, Bobby approached Kathryn and I in Social Studies class. “Hey, I think we can convince the adults that we know what’s best for our futures.” He said. I looked over to Kathryn, she rolled her big brown eyes, we’d both heard this before; Bobby had tried to get our third grade substitute teacher fired, he was a really horrible teacher, but Bobby had a tendency to take thing too far sometimes. Still Kathryn and I listened as he laid out his master plan: “I got my mom to reserve time to talk at the meeting next Tuesday, we’ll talk, the three of us and who ever else wants to stand up and say something about our educational lives. I mean, seriously guys, the old people and the people with no kids are deciding for us. I know we all would rather spend high school together in a small school like Epping High, than end up in the crazy large school of Exeter.”
He had a rather good point, but I wasn’t about to be the one to stand up in front of the whole town and voice my opinion, I didn’t talk in class, let alone to over a thousand people. Bobby told me that my main role would be writing. He didn’t want to sound like an idiot talking off the cuff, and I had a way to make him sound “less like a twelve year old, and more like a very intelligent fourteen year old.” That was the first peer complainant I had ever received, so I was in.
The next three days were we spent every moment of Social Studies on the computer writing out our proposal. Our teacher, Mr. Harrow, looked on in amazement; it was his teaching that put us in front of that screen. It was really him that got us to do this. Without Mr. Harrow I honestly have no idea where I would be in life right now.
On our big Tuesday, fourteen of my classmates, met Bobby, Kathryn and I outside the gym before the meeting started. Bobby found out that his mom would be called to speak third that day so we didn’t have much time to rehearse. We all lined up in the girls’ bathroom, most of the boys commented on how their bathroom didn’t have a table, Kathryn and I laughed and told them they could have it, the table was completely pointless unless you were stuck at town hall meetings of hours on end two nights a week. Bobby stood in the door way, listening. He was easily the shortest kid in our class, not much of an authority looking figure, but our whole class looked to him for the right answer in situations like this.
Mrs. Smithson’s turn came about a half hour in; Bobby waved us toward the gym doors. I wasn’t really a surprise that we were all there, seventeen twelve year-olds are kind of hard to hide when they rush an SUV in a parking lot, but Mrs. Smithson told the school board that we had a big Social Studies project due, technically she wasn’t lying. Mrs. Smithson stood tall and straight at the microphone: “I don’t have anything to say, but my son and his friends have quite a bit to say on the matter of their education.”
The room was much warmer than I remember it ever being before, the body heat of over half our small town. The dim lighting made it hard to see the wires for the microphones and speakers that lined the floor.
Bobby was elected the leader and speaker for the group, we all wanted to be there, but this was really Bobby’s mission. He tapped the microphone to make sure it was working, like he’d seen in the movies, of course it had been Mrs. Smithson had just spoken into it. He raised our speech close to his face so he could see it in horrible lighting and began to speak. “As the class that will be most affected by the decision you make about what high school we attend, we, the Ellis Elementary School class of 2001, would like to have some input on the matter.”
“You’re not of legal age to vote,” said one of the school board members, as if we were unaware of this fact. That’s why Bobby’s mom had to reserve our speaking time, that’s why we all had to hide in the bathroom until it was time to speak, “If you can’t vote on the matter you can’t speak about it.”
“But it’s our future not yours!” Kathryn yelled from beside me, I could see her mom, seated next to mine, sink down in her chair, as if she were embarrassed of us. We were the only ones doing anything. All the adults had done was argue about how a bigger school meant better education. We spent a week in a classroom discussing it with Mr. Harrow and writing a report about it. No one in that room over the age of eighteen had put any serious thought into what this decision meant to us, the kids, the people who had no where to attend high school in a year and a half.
Several of the townspeople stood up and yelled that we hadn’t even been at the meetings, we didn’t understand. Mrs. Smithson, the only parent not incredibly ashamed of us, told them that Kathryn, Bobby, and I had been, and that all the rest of us had heard what was going on from us, and their parents. We went just a group of kids trying to cause trouble we were actually doing the right thing.
We all just stood there while adults argued, looking defeated. We couldn’t do anything. No one wanted to listen to us. The people that wanted to take a stand for what was right, had been turned away. We we’re allowed to have a voice, even though our voice the one of common sense.
