It's a warm night. The sky is clear and even at 11.30 pm the heat of this early September day still radiates from the High School parking lot, and the surrounding buildings. I get out of the car leaving our youngest daughter curled up on the back seat. She didn't have to come with me, but she wanted to tell her sister that she just made Honor Choir in her fifth grade.
The sister she has been waiting all day to see is Mackenzie, a newly minted member of the "Pride of Owasso", her High School Marching Band. Tonight they played their first gig of the year, the opening game of the football season.
Occasionally I have "moments". Those times when I simply stop and wonder how my life led me to the place I am in at that moment. This happens most often when I am riding my motorcycle, especially when out of my own immediate locality.
An odd feeling of wonder washes over me like the tide racing up the sand, turning over the grains and rolling thoughts, like strands of seaweed, uninvited but not unwelcome, into my consciousness. Not so much deja vu, already seen, but how am I seeing? I value these moments. They are infrequent opportunities to simple wonder at the extraordinary paths we can take, often without much planning and sometimes without the joy I usually feel. I remember the last time very clearly. I was at the visitor center in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX. I had just dropped my bike for the first time in twenty years and was feeling pretty sick about it when ... Wham! You just have to stop and look around at the beauty before you, and simply conclude that if fate is a thing, it is sometimes a very good thing indeed.
Tonight I stood in the parking lot and reflected that all over this country, in High School parking lots, Dads were waiting for their sons and daughters to return, ready to share their triumphs or commiserate with an outing less successful than the hope that carried them to that road game. My feelings were pretty much the same as theirs, with one difference. This is not my heritage. I didn't grow up concerned with, or even knowing much about US High Schools, their football teams or marching bands. So I get that feeling, and marvel at an experience I would never had been privy to had my life taken a different course.
One thing I am well-placed to do is make comparisons between the schools of my own country, and those of my new home. This has to be seen in the context of the State I live in too, because schools, and states vary although some of the better ones appear to be trying to race my state, Oklahoma, to the bottom. In comparison with England, France, Germany, Scandinavia and a few others, American schools really don't fare too well. Academically they are woefully behind at all age levels probably up to Masters degree. At Phd. the students and their colleges appear to catch up, each Phd being individual research, and that is pretty much the same wherever it happens.
In high school, however, the US lags behind in terms of academic rigor and attainment. In Oklahoma we lag behind much of the rest of the United States, never mind the rest of the world, and we have just cut the per student spending to a little over $7000. Shameful, by any measure.
That is the bad news, but the news is very far from being entirely bad although I do accept that if you are a classroom teacher, the additional workload and the vast reams of new and completely unnecessary paperwork are disheartening and don't help the students. The constant harping on about how overpaid and undeserving you are doesn't help either. In Oklahoma schools it is far more important that you help put a check in every box. It doesn't help educate children, much less teach them to think for themselves, but it does protect the District from lawsuits from the parents smart enough to realise that you have been prevented from educating their kids!
The thing I marvel at is really not related to what happens in a science class. At this moment I am relaxed about the very necessary need to invest more, and invest it more wisely. Right now I am thinking only of the things that this country, even this state does so incredibly well. So well that I am proud to be associated with the Public Schools, and pleased that my three American children attend one.
I watch as thirteen school buses, thirteen, brings the band home. Not their instruments, they are all in the massive semi that arrived five minutes ago and is now parked next to the Band Room, waiting for over four hundred students to collect their weapon of choice. In Mackenzie's case that happens to be an alto sax that she is becoming very accomplished on. The Band Room, by the way, is joined to the Performing Arts Center, built a few years ago at a cost of several million dollars. The football team has its own five buses. They will be home a little later than the band.
The way that schools are right in the center of the community is something I am simply not used to. The involvement of parents and alumni in the activities of the students is a new experience, and an eyeopener to this Brit. When I was at school there was a strict demarcation line between school and home. It was rarely crossed either by parents, student or teachers. Not here. If little Johnny does something really well, or really not well, it is quite likely the teacher will text his Mom!
My day had even started with two experiences that would never have happened in England. At eight am I was at the Elementary school with the youngest daughter. "Donuts with Dad", an annual event, and only one of many such opportunities to visit with the kids and staff. While that was happening I received a text message from my wife. Her classroom computer had a dead mouse and could I get down to the High School and fix it ... please! Without her mouse, my Special Ed. teacher wife is quite unable to complete all that paperwork, and boxes need checking. So my day, as a husband and step-father, started in school. At 11.30 pm here I was, waiting outside school, for the band.
These things are beyond value. The game tonight was against local rivals, Owasso Rams and Broken Arrow Tigers. Both are 6A schools with high reputations for football, and even higher national profiles for the marching band. The Broken Arrow band has either won, or placed second at "Bands of America" for the last three years, and the Pride of Owasso has placed in the top ten as well. They take this stuff seriously around here.
As dismayed as I am at the attitudes in my home state to the academic progress of our students, this community involvement, and pride in sport and music is incomparable. A crown jewel of public schools and still provides a solid foundation on which we could make the changes necessary to return public schools to excellence.
When I was a kid, and things have not actually changed that much, I played football (soccer) for the school and the audience was a few Dads and an old guy walking his dog. When Owasso faced Broken Arrow tonight, they did so in a modern stadium that seats five thousand, and it was full.
I might be tempted to wonder if Owasso, and other Districts in this area, have their priorities right. The Band and football facilities would be the envy of many professional soccer teams in the UK, and Owasso is actually even better at baseball! I am told that the football program doesn't actually cost the district much, if anything, they are very well supported by Boosters. Maybe though, it would be nice if some of those boosters helped out with Special Ed. or the English and Maths Departments too.
When Mackenzie finally found us, she was beaming. She gets anxious about things like this, but her wide grin and shining eyes were all that was needed to let me know she had a whale of a time, and this was just the first real event of a four year path.
"How was it?", I asked her. "We were great", she replied, "But the football team came in second!".
This I already knew. They lost, badly.
But the Band marched on!
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