Blackstone Valley

Poor motivation engenders fights, boredom

09:46 AM EDT on Thursday, June 9, 2005

By CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
Journal Staff Writer

Fourth in a five part series

WOONSOCKET -- The cafeteria is empty and silence fills the cavernous room.

Then the bell rings.

Footsteps, at first muffled and far away, pound closer.

In seconds, the lunch room is alive with eighth graders. They jostle for spots at the long tables and complain about the menu.

"Yo, over here, we got you a seat."

Girls toss their carefully straightened hair and tug at snug shirts while boys in baggy pants pretend not to notice. Everyone shouts to be heard over the unbelievable noise.

It's lunchtime at Woonsocket Middle School -- a time teachers say represents the school at its worst.

In recent months it's seen chaos, fights, outraged faculty, even a cockroach infestation.

But this day, it appears a remarkably orderly place.

Even the cafeteria hierarchies that dominate many lunchrooms are hard to pick out.

"It's not like what everybody says," eighth grader Tiara Bottachiari says, nibbling idly on a piece of pizza at her seat near the center of the room. "Once in awhile you see fights, but it's not like an everyday basis."

Tiara, 13, is an honors student with a too-big basketball jersey and a pretty smile.

Classes, she says, are easy and sometimes she gets bored.

That's when she gets into trouble.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Crystal Negron, with friends Brittany Tessier, left, and Eliana Matos, talk about life at Woonsocket Middle School over lunch.

Earlier that morning, her teacher was busy helping a struggling student and Tiara and some of her friends were joking around. She threw a candy bar wrapper at a classmate and the teacher caught her.

"I got detention," she says, slightly embarrassed.

It's the second time she's gotten in trouble this semester.

"We all get detention," Travis Cote, 14, yells to be heard from across the table. Travis is also an honors student. So are the rest of the students who sit around them on low-slung seats.

These are the good kids, the smart kids, the ones who are supposed to set the example.

But they're bored.

The bell rings and the group waits patiently until it's their turn to file towards the door.

"Thanks for talking to us," Travis says, flashing a quick smile before heading off to class.

"You know what the real problem is?" says seventh grader Hilary Fakhry as the next lunch group settles in a few minutes later.

"The biggest problem is that the teachers have to pay attention to the bad kids so much that the good kids get ignored and then they turn into the bad kids."

'I used to be a bad kid," Hilary continues, biting on a fingernail, her brown eyes wide. "Last year, I was horrible. One day I just flipped out and it got so bad I got suspended. Now my attitude is totally better cause the teacher had to deal with me."

And her grades? "Yup, good now."

Like her friends, Hilary speaks with such frankness about her problems, it's easy to think she's years older than she is.

The girls in her circle are stylish, they're mostly well-spoken and they're not afraid to be honest.

Huddling around a table with her friends, Hilary explains that the good kids who would normally shine in class often end up in trouble because they see that's how to get attention.

THE PICTURE "You just saw it on the good days," teachers insist.

In fact, during that same lunch period, while a Journal reporter chatted with students in the cafeteria, faculty members say a fight broke out in another part of the school. Teachers from several classrooms had to break it up.

While fights are frequent, teachers say disrespect is even more of a problem. Last year, students were suspended 622 times for insubordination.

Often when they discipline students, the teachers say, they are cursed at, called names and even threatened with lawsuits.

Teachers' union president Richard DiPardo says the union is considering filing a civil suit against the family of a child who brought criminal charges against science teacher Linda Jellows for allegedly hitting their son in February. Jellows was acquitted in District Court this week.

"We're not going to let students take open shots at us. The fact of the matter is that kids lie and they make up stories," DiPardo says. In this case, he says the boy "fabricated" the incident to get back at Jellows for disciplining him.

Despite all this, most administrators interviewed for this series said they do not think a police officer should be assigned to the school, although that's a solution even suburban middle schools are trying.

Officers patrolling school corridors is not the message Woonsocket educators say they want to send to children. Plus, they say police aren't necessary when most of the problems are caused by about 5 percent of students.

But students say gangs have become popular social outlets, attracting increasingly more and more members.

The middle schoolers tick off the latest additions on their fingers, as if reciting their favorite rock bands: The Revolution, The Infighters, The Outfighters, the Boriqua Don't Play. The list goes on, though administrators and police believe there is little gang activity on school grounds.

Woonsocket is an urban community with its share of drug abuse and crime. It's also a economically distressed city. Nearly 50 percent of the students at the middle school come from single-parent families. Some 61 percent of the children come from low-income families and 32 percent of them live in poverty.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Students head for lunch in the cafeteria at Woonsocket Middle School.

Research has identifed poverty among precursors for academic problems in school, notes School Supt. Anthony D'Acchioli. So, he says, it's no wonder the children are struggling on state achievement tests.

Since 1998, when testing statistics were first published online, more than 90 percent of middle school students have failed at least one section of the state math tests.

So why then aren't Woonsocket elementary and high school students failing at the same alarming rate as those at the middle school?

Part of their problem is puberty hits at the same time children enter middle school, stress D'Acchioli and Woonsocket High School resource officer Michael T. Cahill. That's when children start to test authority, pushing boundaries.

That situation, which exists in all middle schools, is magnified in a school as large as Woonsocket's.

TO ADDRESS the needs of adolescents, Woonsocket Middle School switched from a junior high school model in the 1990s. It was one of thousands of schools to do so nationwide under the guidance of the Carnegie Foundation.

The foundation's report "Turning Points" encouraged schools to abandon the mini-high school approach and develop smaller learning units, intended to promote more personalized schooling by eliminating ninth grades and adding practices such as team teaching.

Some in Woonsocket's education community credit the middle school's team-teaching system, which rotates clusters of 100 students through four teachers, with providing personalization. Teachers more familiar with the students are better able to identify their weaknesses and tailor support. Additional help is available from after-school tutoring and extracurricular programs.

Still, most Woonsocket educators acknowledge that the current support system, which includes a single school psychologist for 1,551 students, is unable to address every issue.

Another critical concern, teachers say, is the lack of parent involvement.

While teachers report that many parents are receptive to phone calls and do what they can to help their children, others fail to even return calls from teachers. More often than not, teachers say, it's those parents whose children need the most help.

While 26 percent of parents in a survey reported they are involved in the school, teachers and administrators insist they never see participation that high.

No more than 10 to 15 parents attended monthly PTO meetings last year, according to administrators. This year, the numbers are even lower.

In struggling elementary schools, certain federal programs have succeeded in increasing parent involvement. And, by the time students get to high school, it's expected they've matured enough to be responsible for their own studies.

But in middle school, teachers say, a parent's guidance is invaluable.

THERE ARE PARENTS who take that responsiblity seriously.

Tracey Belliveau, whose daughter is in seventh grade, drives her daughter the two blocks to school each morning and back home each afternoon.

Two blocks.

"That was one of the recommendations from parents who've had children there who have gone on to the high school," Belliveau said. "They said most of the problems happen before school or after school."

Belliveau lived in Chicago years ago and the experience taught her that it's common sense to take precautions in any urban environment. It doesn't mean the school is unsafe.

But Belliveau, who is a co-chair of the district-wide parent advisory council, acknowledges there was a time when she "definitely gave a little thought to Mount [Saint Charles Academy], or a parochial school."

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Eliezer Ortiz works on a math problem in an English as Second Language class at Woonsocket Middle School.

Last year, her daughter was placed in a particularly unruly sixth-grade cluster with lots of disruptions. The situation improved this year, but Belliveau has learned that part of her job is to monitor her daughter's classroom experience.

Unlike Belliveau, many parents just opt out of the middle school.

At Good Shepherd, a Catholic middle school in Woonsocket, principal Larry Poitras estimates that each year as many as one-third of his incoming sixth graders -- some years as many as 20 students -- make the leap to Catholic education as a way of avoiding Woonsocket Middle School. Most of them return to the city's public school system for high school.

Even more parents express interest in transfering their children, Poitras adds, but find they cannot afford it.

In Belliveau's case, it wasn't the money that changed her mind. It was the principle.

"Life is full of imperfect situations and I think [my daughter] can get just as good an education at this public school as she can get at Mount or a private school," Belliveau says.

A state report by visiting educators noted students do enjoy coming to Woonsocket Middle School, but they wish teachers would "teach us more."

In the cafeteria during The Journal's visits in May, students offer ideas about what they think might help their school.

They want fewer fights and better cafeteria food and maybe teachers who yell less, laugh more, and stop using detention as a solution for everything.

Sixth grader Casey Taillon, an honors student, says she'd like to see better lighting in the basement, which the school uses as classrooms.

Many students just shrug their shoulders. They say they'd rather the adults make the decisions about the school and just let them be kids.

Staff writer Cynthia Needham can be reached at (401) 277-7374 or at cneedham@projo.com.