Letter to Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Concerning Education Funding

Dear Kodiak Island Borough Assembly,

Any cuts to the KIB contribution to KIBSD budget, if they absolutely must be made, should be minimal; any tax increase should be modest.

Granted, I’m new to this local conversation, having recently returned to the island after a 9-month furlough in Texas, which you may be aware, is experiencing education cuts of apocalyptic proportions (how’s that for overstatement?).  My research and deliberation on this is thin as a result, so apologies all around.

First, I’ll oblige myself to remind the Assembly of the inartistic logic that goes along with education funding, and then I’ll argue how the increasing epidemic of poverty in Kodiak obliges the Assembly to reassess any discussions of decreasing the borough’s contribution to KIBSD.

• ·         Education is KIB’s #1 priority.  It’s listed first in our Strategic Plan, holding a prominent position above all other responsibilities.  We need not be reminded ad nauseum of the ROI in education—in terms of local economics, academics, arts, and posterity.

• ·         While Superintendent McDonald’s fiscal assessment of the effects of a dramatic reduction in KIB contribution (only $4.5 million?) may be overstated in terms of personnel layoffs (i.e., not looking at other districts’/industries’ creative solutions to budget cutbacks will take the sting out: furloughs, salary reductions, burden-sharing with other like-institutions [Kodiak College, for instance, in the form of an extended Early College high school for KHS juniors and seniors]), there is certainly a logic behind the overstatements. The numbers indicate a delicate web of interdependence among Borough responsibilities and anxieties. Slash one, and they all become slashed in delayed aftershocks. Are these particular aftershocks (of proposed education cuts) we are willing to bear and defer to future Assemblies and Boards?  The earthquake would be bad enough, I’m afraid.  Surely, if the Borough is indeed facing such a dramatic shortfall, other, less prioritized responsibilities with more bearable aftershocks should face the ax.  No, not education.

• ·         If we are having such a difficult time organizing ourselves around common priorities, developing creative solutions, and predicting and responding to our fiscal outlook now, I think it behooves us to maintain and increase investments in systems and institutions, such as local education, that will help us avoid these problems and then face them with assurance and reason when they do come up. Setting precedents like what has been proposed by KIB will only guarantee that we’ll be facing the same conversations in perpetuity.  And these conversations are tiring.

• ·         Few people envy you and the decisions you have to make for us.

One last plea to maintain funding, and this concerns our students directly and the poverty epidemic.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Dept. of Ed)

·         KIBSD students are increasingly affected by poverty.  As an indicator of local poverty rates, the free/reduced lunch program allows children from families with incomes at or below 130% of the poverty level to qualify for the program.

o   In 2010

§   37% of KHS students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  45% of KMS students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  60% of Main Elementary students were eligible for free/reduced lunch

§  District-wide, we had nearly 45% eligibility 

o   In other words, nearly half of KIBSD students live in poverty

o   While Alaska ranks lower than the national average, if Kodiak Island Borough were a state, we would feature a per capita .075 eligibility, which ties Oklahoma for #4, below Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico.

I know, I have a PhD in English and an M.Ed, not a degree in socioeconomics, but these numbers concern me.  And if you look at the 10-year trend, these numbers are not going down.

In  The Working Poor by David Shipler (of which I’ve attached the relevant chapter and strongly encourage you to read), he explores how interconnected poverty is with local public education systems, and how children living in poverty are much more vulnerable to cuts in education and other social services than middle-class children.  When I look at the Borough Assembly, the City Council, the School Board, and school administration, I don’t see groups that can feel the great impact that even the slightest change in funding can have on this delicate half of our students.  I see groups that can bear the hit.  My family and I can certainly bear that hit, too.

However, nearly half of the kids in our school district are not like us.  Please remember that.

Any cut in a school program (be it personnel, admin support, technology, facilities, etc.) echoes magnanimously in the lives of these kids and their families.  Their families are already on thin ice, every day, every paycheck.

It’s not like us in the other half, who can spend that extra time with our kids helping them with schoolwork, who can take them to paid extracurricular activities, hire tutors, etc.  The invisible kids in our district don’t have that support anywhere else but in our schools.  And if we chip away at that support, we are chipping away at the lives of nearly half of our future borough.

To paraphrase Shipler, we may have the skill to support these kids, and help break this increasingly dangerous cycle of local poverty, but we just don’t have the will.

Or do we?

Maintaining significant funding of our education system will show that we have both.

Regards,

Dr. Jared Griffin

Where I See Sue

This is where I see Sue:

There are times in the New Mexico desert
when the sun peers over the horizon,
and if you didn't know west from east,
you could never tell if the sun was rising or setting
because the golden light that colors the sparse landscape
is the same in the morning as it is in evening.

And in this golden light
Sue sits, I see,
gray, green, and pale,
in a wicker chair, on a wooden porch,
before an adobe cottage,
quilting by herself, but not alone.

And if you know Sue
and the maternal credibility she carries in her small, soft eyes,
she will pull, with gravitational authority,
the sun's golden light to her skin,
so she's no longer gray, green, and pale,
but a fiery bronze
like the bonfire of cosmetic scarves beside her.
Her slender fingers,
now like brazen needles,
patchworking a legacy from the ashen threads of those scarves,
quilted echoes that I can't wait to see.

This is not heaven, mind you,
for we are not promised a heaven immediate;
rather, I think,
this is sleep,
what the rabbis call "Sheol"--
peace and rest and silence,
a passing, like the New Mexican sun,
that is not night,
that is not morning,
but merely waiting.

The Comic God 1.0

I picked this book up from a Half Price bookstore last week, recognizing on the spine Gene Luen Yang's name from his wonderfulfantastic autobiographical graphic novel, American-Born Chinese (2007). I'm not familiar with Derek Kirk Kim's work, but, I promise, I will soon seek it out.

In American-Born Chinese, I liked how Yang approached spiritual and fantasy metaphors for creating identity in a world in which much of our identity is created for us, and I was looking to see how he extended this theme in The Eternal Smile, a collection of three short comic stories, published last year by First Second (which is quickly becoming my favorite graphic novel publisher).

So what is the eternal smile?

Before I read the book, I thought the title referred to God.  Words like "eternal" most often evoke that sort of transcendent-theme-feeling in me.  Plus, the artwork on the front suggest a happy, yellow, sunshiney deity, worshipped adoringly by a cosmopolitan group.

But the eternal smile in the book is a joke.

Not to suggest that the book argues that God is a joke.  I don't think the book argues that at all--perhaps, in an implicit way, the book argues the opposite.  If anything, the joke is us and the realities we create for ourselves and, oppresively, for others.

These aren't some solipsistic adventures that Yang and Kim throw their characters into in order to justify a new (but cliched) relativism.  They do, instead, emphasize the arbitrariness of our "mind-forged manacles".  (Like how I threw in some William Blake?)  In these stories, there is always an ultimate reality, a really real (to invoke some worldview jargon)--these aren't realities that are self-delusional.  I want to say that in these stories is a call for readers to look for what's really real, but I think Yang and Kim assert that we already know, somewhere deep inside us, what's really real.  But, around the really real, we've unfortunately built up layers and layers of fantasy, delusion, sin, bad habits, and, most of all, a deeply wounding shame.

In "Duncan's Kingdom", the first story, Duncan is a young man whose stepfather sends into a coma for protecting his mother against his violent whims.  Duncan is ashamed of his mother for failing to protect herself and him from this monster, even at one point saying she deserves this treatment because of her lack of self-will.  But, most of all, Duncan is ashamed of himself, failing as a son and as a man in his defeat.

While in his coma, Duncan weaves together this dream-world in which he is a brave young knave in a medieval kingdom, whose king has just been murdered by the Frog King.  The now-fatherless princess implores him to slay the Frog King in revenge, and will receive her hand in marriage and keys to kingdom upon his success.

Through his quest, Duncan realizes (I won't reveal in exactly what manner the ephipany arrives) that this kingdom-reality is a false reality.  In fact, signs from the really real (his real mother appearing in dreams, an errant soda bottle) invade this fantasy.  These signs act as echoes, or remnants, from a reality that is not ideal, but it is real.

The ultimate question for Duncan, then, is why does he give up this perfectly laid-out world, in which he is sovreign, in which he is a hero, in which he is unashamed, in which he is sinless, in which he is loved by all?  And why does he give it up for this dark, sad, violent, disgraceful, ungraceful, shameful world we live in?

It's because we can't help it.  It's our tragic flaw--or our comic flaw: we must know truth.  We must.

And when there's a truth we don't like, we create a separate reality for ourselves--not a new philosophy.

                (There's some perfect lines about this in Emery's song "After the Devil Beats His Wife":
                        "People want the truth, but never want the scars.../
                        This is the pain of believing.")



The solipsistic philosophies of our time, and times past, have certainly created a severe moral relativism that we don't really know how to navigate, but navigating truth is painful, too.  Yang and Kim, however, seem to be saying that the realities we create for ourselves are:

        1. created out of shame and guilt

        2. paradoxically moral

We conquer our shame by embracing truth.  We find truth, a redemptive truth, by confronting our guilt.

Failing to do that, at least in Duncan's kingdom, separates us from people and creates a self divided against itself.  Relying on yourself for salvation, then, is quixotic.  Salvation lies outside of ourselves . . .

On the surface Duncan's kingdom seems perfect for him: he defeats the king's enemy, marries the princess, inherits a kingdom, and his subjects adore him.  But something from the outside lingers--this bottle of Snappy Cola, a remnant or echo of what is true and real, has infiltrated this fantastic dimension.  There's no mistake in this story that the very first frame is of a giant castle, colored purple in the night, and the last frame is of the hospital where Duncan is recovering, drawn with the same scale, perspective, and color as the castle in the first frame.  The story emphasizes a healing that can only be accomplished by searching the stone fantasies for those more ephemeral signs, lurking and waiting to take us home, back to truth.

The bottle of Snappy Cola functions like that, like a miracle--unexplained phenomena in a solipsistic universe.

As readers, then, maybe we are asked: what are the aberrations in your reality, in your world?  The lie is that these are merely aberrations--those things (people, events, experiences, objects, words, songs, etc.) are actually signs of truth, the ultimate reality, the really real.  Because when you come face-to-face with the truth, you'll find that you are the one who is lying to you.

I like how this story emphasizes signs--signs are placed in our reality to remind us, to compel us to remember, that this is not what's really real.  Not to chase some kind of platonist rabbit because I think this problem of dualism is answered in later stories, but there is something to be said about how, if we look for signs of truth and salvation, we'll find them.

Free will is exercising the choice to pursue them.

I'll pursue the titular eternal smile in the next post about the second story: "The Eternal Smile."  (Sadly, more frogs die in that one, too.)