Inside Peter Vetal Elementary School in Detroit a teacher has lost control of the classroom. It’s TerraNova testing day and instead of answering test questions quietly, students are throwing books out of the window at people on the sidewalk. The teacher, a middle-aged man, has given up. He’s sitting at his computer waiting for help to arrive. Then the door opens and the help is there. A young teacher — instead of security — has come to the rescue. The principal had asked her to leave her own class to get this man’s classroom under control.

“You need to shut the f— up and sit down, Mr. Smith,” one girl shouts at the teacher. And he engages in the argument by shooting back, “Girl, I feel sorry for your mama.”

From there the student-teacher fight escalates. None of those students would take the TerraNova achievement assessment test that day. TerraNova is a series of standardized tests used to assess K-12 student achievement in reading, mathematics, science, social studies, vocabulary, spelling, etc.

Continued – The above account comes from the Vetal Elementary substitute teacher who was called to help that day. Jane, who asked that her real name not be published, has many shocking stories of what went on inside one struggling Detroit elementary school in the few months that she worked there before it was reconstituted.

Jane said that she was hired by Detroit Public Schools (DPS) as a full-time teacher at Vetal Elementary. But when she showed up on the first day, she had quite the surprise.

“When I got to the school she [the principal] put me in as a substitute teacher,” she said. “They didn’t tell me why I was subbing. Then I found out two students beat up the [previous] teacher. It was bad.”

The chaos Jane describes perhaps is a fragment of the management crisis facing DPS. In recent weeks, DPS has frequented the news since the school board announced a $408 million budget deficit – the highest debt gap for a school district in the country.

On top of that, enrollment is expected to drop below 100,000 this fall, which would remove the district’s first-class status, thus dissolving the state-imposed limit for the number of charter schools within the city. More charter schools would drain students from DPS, and funding along with them. In fact, in the past eight years, 33,000 students have left DPS for charter schools, each taking with them thousands of dollars in funding. As the Detroit Free Press reported today, the DPS financial crisis comes to a peak this evening when the school board will hit the deadline for submitting a final budget to the state.

Teacher’s view: mismanagement

On her first day teaching, Jane had a tough time keeping the children under control. But she used her talent as a teacher to deal with the unruly children.

“One cussed at me the first day,” she said. “You have to be very sweet with them and they’ll be OK, but some teachers would fight.” She said some teachers would cuss back at the students instead of trying other ways to gain the students’ respect.

One incident that took place ended in a police report. Jane said she saw a security worker holding down a thin seventh-grade girl by the shoulders and a secretary was holding down her legs and they were exchanging blows. “The principal has a police report on her from the secretary,” Jane said. “She [the principal] physically pushed her [the secretary] down into the chair and told her she could never come back [because of what happened in the hallway with the seventh-grader].  She ended up getting the police and got her job back. The DPS didn’t do anything.”

The glaring problem in this school according to Jane’s accounts seems to be with the management. The principal did not communicate with the teachers and she didn’t assign appropriate work within staff members’ job descriptions. School aides were doing administrative work, and often would get onto the PA system and cuss at teachers and even the principal while students were present. Also, it was unclear where the funding was going, since no one was inspecting what this principal was doing with the allocated funds.

Jane said toilet tissue, soap and paper towels were not provided by the school. Teachers had to pay out of their pocket for these items if they wanted to keep the bathrooms functional. But when Congressman John Conyers, D-Mich., and the DPS superintendent, Connie Calloway arrived for a visit, things changed for a day.

“When they found out John Conyers was coming to visit the school, every single stall had toilet tissue, soap was in every dispenser. The next day it was all gone,” Jane said.

Hidden debts

Similar management problems are facing the greater Detroit school district. The disastrous financial management of DPS funding has led to hidden debts in the previous budget. That’s why the $408 deficit million didn’t pop out of nowhere. For instance, a leaked draft report conducted at DPS by the Council of the Great City Schools found 166 teachers were on the payroll who were not accounted for in the budget, which contributed $50 million to the deficit. In the laundry list of problems, a common theme was the district’s inability to control costs. Due to short-term loans and untracked money, the district’s financial situation is still unclear. The report exposed unpaid bills, outdated software and no long-term financial plans.

Jane doesn’t have any children of her own, but if she did she said she would only send them to DPS if they could attend certain schools. “I would send them to a DPS if it was Bates Academy or Cass Tech,” she said. “I would never send my child to Vetal. Some of these schools like Vetal are forgotten. The reason I say it’s forgotten is because I would go to work and think: what am I going to do about certain things like the toilet paper issue? The security issue? These are things that teachers should not be worrying about, but the district seems to have forgotten us so we have to.”

Jane said now that Vetal is being reconstituted she has to find a job at another school or reapply at Vetal if she wants to keep her job at DPS. But it’s going to be tough to get her teaching job back.

“Nobody really wants you when you come from a failing school,” She said. “A lot of the teachers from Vetal are talented, but DPS will think you had something to do with the school’s decline.”

Even with her negative experiences, Jane hasn’t given up on DPS: “I’m trying to stick around if they don’t lay me off. I believe there’s hope. I became a teacher to make a difference in the lives of children.”