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Perched on a stool at the front of the room, Rochester teacher Michael Pugliese, 30, looks down on a clamorous gaggle of third-graders sitting cross- legged on the floor. After quieting them, he begins reading Joey, a book about a Puerto Rican boy whose family moves to New York City. The book's hero has just found needles on the street. Pugliese asks his listeners if they know what kinds of needles the story means. Many of the children do. One boy says he saw two drug addicts in front of his apartment building just the day before. "You all know about aids," Pugliese says. They nod in agreement. "Well, that's one way you can get aids. So if you see a needle on the street, don't even pick it up."
Pugliese is not shocked at the students' familiarity with drugs. In fact, their experiences seem innocent compared with those of the emotionally troubled kids he used to teach in special-education classes. One boy was left alone for days at a time while his mother disappeared into crack houses. A ten-year-old girl had been sexually abused by both her natural and foster parents.
The prim, bespectacled schoolmarm, standing at the head of a well-scrubbed, disciplined class, is a stereotype from a bygone era. Today most high school students have had more experience with alcohol, drugs and sex than she ever could have imagined. Pregnant girls are seen in school corridors; others deposit their babies in school day-care centers. Violence is a regular visitor to the schoolyard. Last year in New York City there were more than 300 instances in which students punched, stabbed or otherwise assaulted public school teachers. Against such corrosive influences, it is increasingly teachers -- not parents -- who are called upon to function as society's first line of defense. Says Carolee Bogue, dean of students at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles: "Most kids today look to the teachers for the support that they don't get at home."
In urban schools the outcroppings of neglect and despair abound. When Chicago's Kathy Daniels asked her students to write an essay about something that made them angry, one boy described the time his brother was gunned down and died on the front steps of his house. Soon afterward, the boy himself was fatally shot. In poor rural areas, the deprivation can be even more elemental. "I've got kids that have never held a pencil before," says a Mississippi kindergarten teacher. "And last year I had one that had never held silverware." Trying to convey the majesty of Shakespeare or even basic | addition and subtraction to such children can be a near impossibility.
Nor is lack of parental involvement limited to inner-city tenements or rural tar-paper shacks.
Kathlynn Jacobs, a 24-year veteran of the Baltimore public schools, vividly remembers one gangly, precocious first-grader, who had been in day care since she was a baby. Both her parents worked, and her life had been rigidly scheduled to accommodate them. "She was the smartest one in the class," says Jacobs, "and she was having a hard day." Jacobs asked her what was wrong. "I'm tired of school," replied the world-weary seven-year-old. "I've been to school all my life."