By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN

We careened from storm to storm for six weeks here in Florida, complaining about our bland hurricane food.

I couldn’t seem to get rid of our three cases of energy bars bought before Hurricane Ivan. I tried to choke them down, but they tasted like vitamins and dry oatmeal. None of my friends would take them.

Then I was sent to Haiti to cover the catastrophic flooding caused by what then was Tropical Storm Jeanne. I filled my suitcase with bottled water and dozens of energy bars, just in case.

I had no idea how valuable they would be.

By the time we arrived in Gonaives, the city was desperate for food. Looters mobbed relief trucks. United Nations troops used riot shields to hold people back when bags of rice arrived.

Five days after the floods, a dozen men crowded our SUV and demanded food or money. Our translator hesitated, unsure of what we should do. One man got angry, shouting through the driver-side window. It looked as if the crowd was growing.

From the back seat, it looked as if the men might mob our SUV. I rifled through my suitcase and came up with a fistful of the energy bars. We handed them out the window.

We need to go, I said. Just drive. Go.

The men still were fighting over the bars as we pulled away.

That same day, I slipped a bottle of water and two more bars to another man who was helping to give us directions. He gulped down the first one in two bites, and slipped the second one carefully into his pocket.

Then he nodded thank you, over and over.

I ate the energy bars myself for most meals in Haiti. But I didn’t pull them out until we got out of the disaster area, and I drank my water only when I thought nobody was looking. I didn’t want to call too much attention to our SUV.

But mostly, I was just embarrassed to have so much.

Death in the rain

From the weather maps, it is not easy to see how Jeanne could have left more than 1,500 people dead in Haiti’s third-largest city.

The storm came ashore in Martin County as a powerful Category 3, and killed only a few people. Its tropical storm-force winds barely scraped the northeastern edge of Haiti, at least 50 miles from Gonaives. Flimsy houses built from tin still were standing.

But the forests all have been cut for charcoal, and people have settled in dry riverbeds. When the water comes, there is nothing to stop it. Life in Haiti is so tenuous, so fragile, that thousands could die just from rain.

After the storms in Florida, people dragged the trash from their ruined homes. Everywhere homes flooded, soggy mattresses, broken toasters and old dolls sat by the side of the road. Some left signs after a week went by, begging trash collectors to take them.

In Gonaives, almost nothing was thrown away.

There, where people survive by selling things that people in richer countries no longer want, women sat for hours trying to scrub plastic cups. Small children dug into mud stained ruddy brown from sewage, pulling out anything they thought they could use.

One man dipped a radio into the floodwater again and again, washing it with his hands. Muddy water poured from the sides, and the cord dangled limp in the water.

I thought about that later, and wondered why a man would clean a broken radio. A veteran correspondent explained to me that a radio is a status symbol, broken or not. The man probably planned to display it on a shelf, he said.

This, he could tell his visitors, is the radio that I once had.

Order vs. chaos

Less than a week after I saw U.N. troops fire a warning shot into the air to prevent a food station riot, I went to cover hurricane relief efforts at the South Florida Fairgrounds.

The wait was long, and the trucks were late. But compared with the chaos of Haiti, it was a wonder to behold.

The crowds were managed with the cheer and efficiency of an Orlando theme park. Deputies directed traffic and kept cars in orderly lines. Cheerleaders bounced and waved, and a furry Miami Dolphins mascot handed out water with his fins. Volunteers counted cars, popped trunks and dropped in ice and water. People who are used to making it on their own thanked the workers, saying they were grateful for the help.

In a small way, the storm gave us sense of what it is like to be poor in the United States. The phone lines weren’t predictable, and the power was off. We lived in motels, waited at laundromats and slept on the floor. We waited for government aid.

But most of us still lived better than the Haitian elite in the best of times. And we have help that the flood victims of Gonaives could not imagine.

We have leaders who need our votes and come promising billions of dollars. We have emergency food stamps and FEMA and free ice at the fairgrounds. We have ambulances and antibiotics. We can go to Publix and pick from a hundred different kinds of rice.

Four hurricanes have knocked us down this year, and more may come.

But we are still so lucky to live here.

Copyright 2004 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
October 3, 2004 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: OPINION, Pg. 1E
LENGTH: 835 words

At Indiantown Middle School in rural Martin County, many children who grew up in poverty, speaking Spanish or Kanjobal, an unwritten Mayan dialect, are earning better writing scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test than some schools in affluent communities such as Wellington and Boca Raton.

In a perfect, egalitarian world, that accomplishment would not be noteworthy. But in real-life Florida, it approaches the miraculous.

A pile of gloomy evidence suggests that despite increased spending in poorer schools and a host of reform initiatives, public schools have not become the great equalizers the American Dream promised. In a recent study, the U.S. Department of Education concluded that more than three decades of higher spending in poorer schools nationwide under the Title I program has not significantly narrowed the gap between rich and poor.

And an analysis I conducted with another reporter, William M. Hartnett, for the Dec. 16 edition of The Post demonstrated that family income was a better predictor of test scores than any other factor we examined, including class size, suspension and absentee rates, teacher experience and teacher education. We found that at schools like Indiantown Middle, where about 90 percent of its 450 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, only 37 percent of students on average scored in the top three of five achievement levels on the FCAT. But Indiantown Middle, one of Florida’s 10 poorest middle schools, nearly doubled that percentage in 2001. Only two other schools in the state exceeded expectations in math by a greater margin.

Though the school’s reading scores fell short of the benchmark to rank it an A, Indiantown Middle is exceptional, one of the state’s best by measure of obstacles overcome. The school has helped turn students into “little miracles,” in the words of eighth-grade teacher Consuelo Macedo.

But how?

INNOVATIONS THAT WORK

Principal Debra Henderson believes there are several reasons for Indiantown’s unusual scores. She cites an innovative schedule, begun three years ago, that assigns students to only two classes a day – math and reading. Students change classrooms only once a day. All other topics – history, science, government – are folded into the two primary subjects. Ms. Henderson also mentioned the school’s small class sizes and daily curriculum meetings, where teachers discuss the school’s intensive reading lessons. In the first year of the new lesson plans, the staff returned 10 days early in the fall, to learn the best and latest teaching techniques.

Other poor schools have tried different innovations – school uniforms, military-style teaching drills, academic pep rallies. Like Indiantown Middle, many poor schools stress high expectations for their students, some making the point with doggedly optimistic names like School of Success and Smart School charter. Even so, many of the poorest schools’ test scores have remained dreadful.

Few reforms seemingly have been strong enough to beat back the dragons of disadvantage, and it does not seem that any strategy or initiative alone could cause Indiantown Middle’s exceptional scores. The school’s answers, unfortunately, are as obvious as they are elusive: strong leadership, talented teachers, supportive parents and eager students.

Though all principals praise their teachers’ dedication, few have had the opportunity, as Ms. Henderson has had, to re-staff their schools. When she took over three years ago, some teachers considered Indiantown a temporary post, leaving as soon as positions came open in the more affluent coastal schools. She persuaded the school board to let her start over. Those teachers who did not want to stay got transfers. Only the truly committed were chosen to stay.

The school’s new teachers speak of their positions in the language of a crusade, not a job. Pam Peterson-Daly said her mission is to give her students the same advantages her own children enjoy. As an eighth-grade teacher, she relies on the Sunshine State Standards for most of the year, teaching her kids surface area to equations. But after the FCAT in the spring, Ms. Peterson-Daly spends most of her time urging on her best students to college. She knows that the kids, who write business letters for their illiterate or non-English-speaking parents, will have to rely on themselves to complete the paperwork. Before they leave her classroom, she makes sure that they can fill out applications for scholarships and financial aid.

Several Indiantown students said without prompting that they love their teachers. Some compared the school’s teachers to their own parents, saying the teachers can sense from a small frown whether they are confused or frustrated. The teachers, they said, often stop to help them before they have to ask.

Many Indiantown Middle students came to the one-stoplight community from Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The family of Amin Halum, the school’s student government president, is from Israel. The fact that many families have given up everything – home, relatives and country – for a new start in Indiantown makes the community’s poverty less hopeless, less destructive.

Ms. Macedo, who grew up in Indiantown, said many men in town become alcoholics, frustrated that they can hardly support their families in a new country. But in most cases, the dreams that brought them to the United States are not replaced with rage and recklessness. Instead, they are carefully preserved and lovingly passed on to the children.

Many Indiantown Middle students know by age 13 that they shoulder those dreams for a whole family. Eighth-grader Sonia Selvas said she works hard so she can vindicate her mother’s sadness. Sonia’s mother left Mexico for the United States when her daughter was 5 months old, leaving her behind with grandparents. Her mother worked in the fields, sending money back to support the family.

Years later, when she had saved enough money to return for her children, Sonia did not recognize her. She said she didn’t call her “Mama” for years after that. Sonia said she knows now that her mother’s decision wasn’t abandonment. It was the opposite. “She did all this for us,” she said, “so that we would have a better life than she did.”

Many Indiantown students know that they have to succeed because failure would be unthinkable, a rejection of their parents’ sacrifices. They attend school with maturity and a sense of urgency, encouraged by loving, committed teachers. In that regard, they have an advantage over some students at far richer schools.

But not all poor areas benefit from immigrants’ drive and spirit. In other places, the poverty has become more corrosive, eating away at lives until nothing remains but defeat. Teachers in those poor neighborhoods are still looking for the reforms and innovations that will reach children and parents who have given up on everything, including school.

Until they can find a way to inspire the devotion to school that exists in Indiantown, the gap between rich and poor likely will remain stubborn, and wide.

Copyright 2002 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 6, 2002 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: OPINION, Pg. 1E
LENGTH: 1206 words