"I Don't Care":
Outreach for At-Risk Students

A lot of kids my age don't have any self-esteem and they don't know who they are yet. They're still trying to fit in with everyone else. The only ones I've ever met who know who they are have parents who are more into tuning into themselves instead of everyone else.

They make it seem in school that if you don't have money, you're not going anywhere. If you're lower-class, you're considered stupid in school, so they stick you in Special Ed. Or if you use food stamps, you're dumb, because you're considered a moocher, mooching off their taxes, and they're supporting you, therefore you're not smart enough to support yourself. They need to teach kids that anyone can be poor at any time. Even if you're the richest person in the world, you can be robbed, or you can go bankrupt, or your house can burn down, and you can forget to pay insurance. Poverty is not a choice at all.

I think in Boulder, too many people care about how much money they have and what they look like. If you don't wear Calvin Klein, you're not really important in Boulder, unless you're a hippie. For example, I was walking down the hall and overheard a conversation with a girl who had just run away from home, because her mother only gave her $50, instead of $75. Only in Boulder would you see something like that. Here, it just seems like if you're not pretty and plastic and look like a mannequin, then they really don't care about you, if you're not "pretty" on the outside. In high school, your "image" is everything. If you're blonde, blue-eyed and skinny and you're not a cheerleader, then you're considered a freak. Even when it comes to people of color, there are assumptions about appearances. I don't speak Spanish; I wear baggy clothes; I have my tongue and eyebrow pierced, so they think I'm white-washed, which I'm not. I'm just my own self.

The teachers of color don't take pride in their race or their cultural heritages; it's like they're white-washed or something. What I mean by that is they talk down to the kids of color and, if a kid of color gets in trouble, whether they did it or not, the teacher of color will take the White kid's side. If not, they're putting their job at risk, because our whole school board is white, and they think people of color are dangerous and out of control. It seems like the teachers of color are there to teach the kids how to fit in with the status quo.

I notice that if you're a student of color, in order to get help, you have to act stupid, and get into special ed. I'm in Special Ed. I haven't been in school since I was in 6th grade, because my mom kicked me out of the house. When I try to go back to school, they stuck me in 10th grade, and I'd never been to any other grade, so I didn't know what was going on. They thought I was stupid, just because I didn't know what all the other kids my age knew. I knew a lot of other things, but not school stuff.

In the ESL program, they have one White teacher, teaching people from all over the country, who don't speak English, and the teacher doesn't know their languages. The teacher doesn't teach what the word means in the student's language. If you don't understand what it means in your own language, you're not going to understand it in somebody else's.

When we have History, they just teach us about how white people came in and made black people slave and kicked people out, and put Japanese people in concentration camps; that's not very diverse.

The Boulder Valley school board doesn't care about at-risk kids. There are seven school board members, and there are only two out of all the members who are good, who stick up for kids who are at-risk. The rest of them will get a proposal for a good school to help at-risk kids, and they don't even want to acknowledge that there are at-risk kids in Boulder, so they'll shoot it down, because they think there's no point. They should all have their asses kicked because they don't give a shit about the kids. All they care about is their egos and having power over the kids. They should get past their egos and their power-trips and realize that the whole reason that they're even on this Board is to help us kids. If they did that, they'd be afraid, because they'd realize how many at-risk kids there are, and therefore they'd realize how big of fuck-ups they are. But it would be good for the kids.

There's not enough diversity, especially at Boulder High. Throughout all of Boulder, that's true. Like, if there's a Black person or Latino person walking down the street, White people gawk at them like they've never seen a person of color in their whole lives. In Denver, White people aren't afraid to go up and talk to a Black person or a Spanish person; the same with Black people and Spanish people -- in Denver, they're not afraid to talk to White people.

I hate kids my age, in Boulder at least. They're superficial and they're real quick to judge people by what they look like. I think they get it because Boulder's so upper-class and rich, so they think that life is about who has the best car and how much money their parents will give them.

One of the reasons school sucks is because I dont think the ways the books are written. They're boring. They're like a big run-on sentence. What you read in the beginning is what you end up with, in the end. More illustrations, more color, and if they weren't written to fit the language of upper-class students would help. I'd like to read a textbook that was more like a mystery, was short (less than 300 pages), and spoke my language. That'd be nice.

I think life's about getting to know who you really are, and not who people think you are; getting to know people because of them, not because of how much money they have or what they look like or because they're retarded or they don't seem smart.

The kids are the ones who are supposed to fix all the problems that are here facing us now, even though we didn't start them. We're supposed to be the ones who stop drug use and we're supposed to say no, but we're not the ones who started the crack; we didn't make any of it up. Adults did. Adults need to get in tune with who they really are, instead of being whoever everybody else wants them to be. They need to fix themselves first. Then kids would see that, if adults can do it, they can do it.

What would make school better would be letting kids learn at their own pace, instead of pushing all kinds of work on them at once. It's kind of difficult to have 8 classes and to have from each class homework assignments that take about an hour and a half, unless you're really really smart. I don't think this works for most kids. They think we all think the same way. We do not, at all. We're all different.

We don't learn enough because there's too many kids in each classroom. There should be 15 kids in each classroom; 20 at the most. If there's more than that, there should be more teachers. There's always one kid in the classroom who likes to talk a lot and won't shut up, or there's another kid who doesn't understand, and keeps raising his hand, so the teacher has to stop and help that one kid. With more teachers, they could focus more on the students; we'd have names instead being just numbers. We have the right to learn.

Letting the kids get to know each other more is important because there'd less fights. They'd realize that other kids feel the same way they do about parents, and school, and just about everything. You have this 55 minute class where the teacher just goes on and on and doesn't shut up, and you have 5 minutes to get to your next class; that's it. They make you just focus on the work, and not each other at all. We don't interact with each other. I think the teachers should make assignments where the kids have to work together and get to know each other. They should work it in with their curriculum.

If the kids don't all know each other, and there's a clique, and someone from the clique keeps whispering and looking at someone, that person might think they're talking about them, even if they're not. So that person gets mad and wants to fight them, because they think they're being disrespected and not giving them credit for being their own person. Kids think that they don't get respect from their teachers and their parents, so they think that kids their own age should at least give them that respect, since no one else is going to give it to them. Other kids know that the labels that people put on us, like we're all thieves and gang members and thugs, other kids know that's not true.

I'm beyond that point. I don't give a shit what people say about me anymore. If you don't like me, you can kiss my ass. I was homeless. That taught me that everyone's different, and you can't do anything to change it, and if somebody's not going to respect me, I can't change them. If they talk shit about me, I ignore it. If they go on and on, I'll confront them, and I'll be very hostile. I'll tell them that they have the option to quit talking shit, or I'll take 'em outside, and I'm gonna kick them in the head. I'm very good at intimidating people, so usually they shut up. I've never had anyone keep talking shit to me. And if they did, I have friends who are bigger than them, so I'm not really worried about it. I don't like to fight. I won't start a fight with anyone at all. It takes a lot to piss me off. I can blow off name-calling, or when they point at me, or when they laugh. It's only when they try to hit me that I'll kick their ass.

I don't think anyone should hit. Words are just words. They can't hurt you unless you let them hurt you. But when you get punched, that hurts you no matter what. It took me being beat up by my mother and my uncles and all that; being raped; being stabbed; trying to kill myself, to come to that conclusion. Most kids have sheltered lives. At-risk kids don't have time to worry about little things, petty shit like someone calling them stupid.

The only good class at Boulder High is the Multicultural Class. John Davis is the best teacher in the world, just because he upsets White people enough to listen. If it wasn't for that class, a lot of White kids in Boulder High would never, ever get to know a person of color. They'd keep the false assumptions people make about us in their heads forever, and they'd think it was true. There need to be more classes like that. Boulder High only has one, for 30 students a semester. It's just one class. John doesn't teach more than one class a day. It's just not enough at all. It's the only class where you can walk in and see a Latino, a Black and a White kid all sitting on the same couch or in the same row. The other classes aren't like that because kids of color don't feel comfortable being the only kid of color in a class full of 28 White people. It makes you feel alone and different from everyone.

When you think of different, you think of an alien, or a monster, or the boogy man. It's not good, 'cause we're human and we're less colored than white people are: when I'm cold, I'm brown; when they're cold, they're blue. When I'm sick, I'm brown; when they're sick, they're green. I would consider than more different than anything. The Multiculural Class taught a lot of us colored students that not all White people are rednecks, and they don't all fuck their cousins.We're not a risk to the adults.

I think my racism comes from White people constantly contradicting themselves. Like when I was on the street, the only way I could get money was to fuck some old white guy. Yet, I'd hear them on TV talking about how teenage prostitution was wrong, but nobody's going to hire a 14 year old Latina, except some old white pervert. It comes from my experience. I'd like to think that not all old white men are trying to fuck me. It's just that a lot of them talk about how gay people are gross, but yet most of these old white Catholic priests are fucking the altar boys. If not all of them. If it changed, I think at first there would be a lot of fighting among everyone. White people would be afraid to have their egos and their money taken away by people of color. Their ego is their power; money is part of their ego. They'd feel like they had no control over everyone else's lives. I don't know any rich people of color.

I've only met rich White people. I know rich people of color exist, like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, and Sinbad, but Michael Jordan for instance supports slave labor, by supporting Nike, a company that likes to beat its workers, and pays them only $40 a month. Oprah Winfrey talks like she has no culture at all. Sinbad's cool. It seems like rich people of color forget where they come from and what they're really about, like standing up for the rights of other people of color. Once you're rich, you've got your own class; you can forget about your own, the one you came from.

At-risk kids come from everywhere. The ghetto; rich families; families of color; no families. Their parents put them at risk by either verbally, physically, or sexually abusing them; by putting too much pressure on them all the time; by giving them no respect for the fact that the kids are human. The fact of having no family puts kids at risk; they feel left out, that nobody wants them. They get teased in school because they don't have parents; they live in a foster home or a group home. There's a lot of stereotypes about people of color; about them being stupid; that they can't know as much as white people; that we all speak a different language than "proper" English. Adults need to stop stereotyping at-risk kids. Just because we're at-risk doesn't mean we're going to break into your house and steal your radio or something. And we're at risk of walking down the street and having a cop pick us up, just because we're colored. We're at risk of never getting an education, because they'll never teach it to us the way we'd understand it. We're not a risk to the adults. We're at risk of becoming nobodies.