Once upon a time, in the years prior to the pandemic, there was a fragile, waifish girl I will call Amy. She was a student at Monument Mountain Regional High School, but chronically absent. Her older sibling had recently died a death of despair, exacerbating her mom’s alcohol issues. The school’s student-support team of counselors held weekly meetings to problem-solve their many students’ many problems, none of which had anything to do with the subjects taught in schools. They returned often to Amy. She had promised her guidance counselor to get to school more often. Yesterday, she came to school but was found weeping in the hallway.
The support team’s job was to ask, and then to ask again, and again, as many times as necessary: What can we do to help Amy? What supports can we offer? Is there a teacher with whom she is connected? Has anyone noticed a friend who is a positive influence? Any skill or interest to build on, like babysitting, or painting, or interviewing fellow students for MMTV?
Amy graduated from high school, and while I cannot report a list of well-recognized accomplishments she has achieved since then, I can report that she is doing OK. She has friends and involved family members. She is moving into an apartment. She shares news about food drives on social media to help other people. How do I know all this? Because I was an English teacher at Monument myself, in 2011–2012, and since then, I have been attuned to the kids and the people who shepherd them, especially the troubled ones, through high school.
Monument Mountain does not judge success by test scores, the number of AP tests it administers, or impressive college names alone. Many, perhaps most, of its students would never experience success if it were defined solely by those exclusive measures. The real work of the teachers and guidance counselors and support staff is to meet the kids where they are and figure out what success means to them. For some, it means getting into an Ivy League university. For others it means getting to school on time, and sober. The school’s most important successes cannot be measured at all because you cannot prove a negative. You cannot name the bad outcome that was prevented by some combination of factors, though surely many were prevented.
It is sadly true that within my lifetime, in the ’80s or ’90s, a Monument student who had lost a parent or sibling might not have received a single hug or encouraging word from a school employee. High school culture of the past was not big on “social-emotional learning.” Bullying was just a fact of life.
Some things have gotten much, much better. Today, a Monument student who loses a family member, as one recently did, is held close. It is not hard to imagine the support team members, the teachers eating lunch, the students chatting with the librarian, and the coaches before practice, all asking, “Has anyone seen so-and-so? How’s he doing?” The Unified Basketball season just ended, where typical students ensured that their developmentally disabled classmates got to take as many shots as it took to get the ball in the basket. Ask anyone lucky enough to attend a game and they will tell you that Spartan Unified games were the most joyful part of their fall.
My point is that the successful November 4 vote on a new Monument has me thinking, unexpectedly, about the extraordinary role of an American public school. It must open its door to every child who knocks on it, no matter their state of wealth or poverty, literacy or illiteracy, ability or disability. In this way, every year, the staff of Monument Mountain Regional High School are called upon to help hundreds of kids define success for themselves, and they take up the call quietly, out of sight, behind closed doors where the strategizing happens. There is sometimes a public acknowledgement for helping to get a kid into a fancy school, but certainly not for the years spent trying to help kids succeed in so many less obvious ways.
The only gas that that work can run on is pure faith, and here I get to my real point. If Monument’s adults did not believe that things could get better, if they did not think that putting their heads together might make the difference for a kid, if they did not believe that teenagers were capable of miracles, they could not make it to work in the morning.
They show us every day what faith looks like.
We showed them on November 4.
No one can predict the future. We do not know if 485 students will attend the new Monument, or if the new school’s expanded career, vocational, and technical education options will help staff up our local trades, or if a shiny new building will attract new families to move here. But I have faith that all of these things will happen, in the same way I have faith that the lines on the charts showing southern Berkshire County’s population decline will not decline all the way to zero. I have faith in this place, and her people.
Tuesday’s successful vote to approve the funding for a new Monument Mountain Regional High School building might look like a straight-up question of dollars and cents. But to me, it feels like quite a bit more than that.
We were asked: “Are better days ahead of us?”
We responded: “Yes.”
