If he gets back in school, Jose insists, he will pass. His limited reading skills don't pose a problem, he says. He will just go into a "resource" group where they do "baby stuff." He says that the only thing he has to worry about is math. But then he reconsiders: He says science is hard and history is just a pain. So how did he pass before? "Sometimes you work in groups. This was good for me. I could ask, 'What does this word mean?' " Other times, he says, "I'd cheat. It was cheat or flunk."
His social studies teacher gave Jose extra time. He let him take books home, and spend more time on assignments, just to make sure he got them right. His no-nonsense reading resource teacher was strict, but she really taught him a lot, too.
Margaret Downing
Jose and mother Juana Vega can't seem to get him back in school.
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Only one teacher was bad to him at Black, Jose says. She nagged him a lot, but if he knew then what he knows now he would have just toughed it out. He should have just toughed it out, he repeats.
His mother has recently learned about a local private school. She could work two jobs. It would cost her $200 a month to get Jose in there, but he vehemently says he'll have no part of it. "It would cost too much money, money we need for food and to pay our bills," he says, angrily ticking off his objections on his fingers. "I can go to public school. Everything's paid for there. And I bet the schools are just the same."
So where is he going next fall after this disaster of a school year? He swears he won't go back to Black. He's given up on Lanier, rejected too many times. He might go live with his uncle, he says, on the west side of town. Maybe the school will be better there. He won't go to a private school.
He resents all the time he sat out, blames his mother for not trying harder to get him back in school. If he gets back in, he'll do it differently this time. He'll sit down and just be there to learn.
His mother keeps going back to the same thing, though. He can't read. At the very least, he desperately needs someone to volunteer to tutor him this summer to give him a chance in the fall. She wants him in private school where she thinks the smaller classes could save him. She is no match, though, for her son. He's going to decide where he's going to go, and it will be up to her to make that happen.
For all these months, Juana Vega was unable to get her son back in an HISD school. For all these years, Jose has not learned to read at an HISD school, although he has been promoted. For all this time, HISD, despite the best efforts of some of its teachers, surely hasn't done its best by this boy.
There seems little to signify that something will change over the summer break. We have a lost boy, a mother ill-equipped to fight for him, and a school district more concerned with attendance zones than attendance. It seems an overwhelmingly sad and wasteful thing.
