Roberto Clemente Middle

I was a student from 93-96. I transitioned from a private school into a war zone with police officers and teachers stationed at the corners of the center of the school with spray bottles and other non-lethal devices for the daily fights that broke out between gangs. Sixth graders were housed almost completely in broken down portables. I didn’t realize how lucky I was in sixth grade until I moved into 7th and into the school’s primary structure. The situation was so bad that none of the girl’s bathrooms had doors on the stalls to prevent students from doing drugs or having sex. The only saving grace I had was joining band, which thank god was in its own area and had one bathroom that we all used that did have a door on it. I remember taking home economics, the extent of which was learning how to make pizzas in a toaster oven. We had DOS-based computers donated from Disney where the extent of our computer education was drawing a picture on a grid and transferring it over. No typing classes of any sort or coding. The one distinct memory I still have to this day was hearing our math teacher in seventh grade tell us about this new thing that would change our lives called AOL, but since students at this time were not provided access to technology that could access the internet we just worked on our times tables. The curriculum was a joke and in our 8th grade social studies class we watched the movie “Newsies” to learn about the working class during the industrial revolution. We watched a fictionalized movie with choreographed dance numbers... but I guess a young Christian Bale is more important in history than studying the actual backgrounds of Pulitzer and William Randolph Hurst.