Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I’m forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.

I went to my old school on tuesday. I’ll never be the same and the changes I saw are not just at my school. I went to Lake Clifton/Eastern High. The school that they joked was sinking because it was built on a lake. The one they also joked (though it wasn’t funny) that 80% of the students had A.I.D.S. I would have never told you that my school was a very good school. As a matter of fact I had tried to go to The School for the Arts and gotten rejected. If I had known that would happen, I probably would have tried to go to City College (the high school). I used to think I went to a pretty suck-ass school. After going back 10 (o.k. 11) years later, I’m glad I’m not a teenager. Mind you, I had to go to a few schools this week and all of them sucked. It was just going to a school that I had known and having an understanding of just how much has changed that cuts so deep. The first thing is: School just ain’t school no more. When I went it was a school. I knew people at other schools. Now most of the high schools are broken down into at least two schools, my school will soon host a third. The things that I took for granted have been swept away. I know when school money gets tight the arts are the first thing to go, but it worse than that. I majored in business at that school, a dept. with about 10 - 15 teachers. Now, my former Homeroom/major teacher is the business dept…literally. There used to be the Academy of Finance who were kind of our rivals. No More. But it’s beyond anything that might seem grand as these. We used to have a printing class at our school (like a print shop)…gone. There isn’t even Auto-Repair anymore. That was a class that people in “gen. pop.” would take…gone. All of the things that my stupid friends would take aren’t even options anymore…much less the ones the kids with “drive” would get into. There’s something else. The kids. There wasn’t much light in there eyes. I mean when I went to school there were thugs and they weren’t just in gen. pop. The difference is the ratios. It used to be: 5% student who don’t care, 80% students who want to graduate and 15% students who really want to become something. Now it’s probably more like this: 3% students who really want to become something, 44% who want to graduate and 53% are like “meh”. People have gotten poorer and as a result more kids just don’t see the point of…trying. What’s worse is that schools aren’t really giving them much to get excited about. I realized yesterday that the school system is helping me keep a job and that’s sad. This city should be striving to make sure I have to find a new career. When one of the two schools at Lake has a total enrollment equal to my freshman class things are bad. All of my class didn’t make it to graduation in 4 years. As a matter of fact a class that started with over a thousand kids only graduated 300 (on time). So if the whole school now has 1400…how many kids graduate? Walking those halls I understood further how kids could be apathetic. I didn’t like school as a whole, but there were always things going on that I could become interested in. At the least I knew that people would be there…now kids know that at 16 they can just stop going and get dropped from roll. I didn’t feel any energy in that place. My old teacher just keep saying, “These kids aren’t like you guys were.” She was one of the teachers that kept me on point…it seems like she’s losing the energy. When she goes the business program will go with her. When I was young I knew we weren’t given all that others had…now I know that these kids don’t even get what we had. I thought that was the point of life. To give the next generation a little more. Schools remind me of a company that’s slowly stripping away as much as it can, dumping employees and benefits, becoming automated where once there was vibrancy. To quote Souls of Mischief, “Tell me who profits?”