Chapter 39

12 p.m. Tuesday

Anita Lopez watched Jennifer Simmons' departure without emotion. She knew she was in dangerous territory – not only with the middle school but with the entire district.

The Eisenhower School District was the problem child of the entire county. For close to 20 years, no one paid it much attention because it comprised mostly low-income (and thus low-expectation) students. That changed in 2001 when school administrations suddenly became responsible for under-performing institutions – and Eisenhower was nothing if not under-performing.

The county had seen the same demographic changes as the rest of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. Downtown businesses had closed and people with means to leave the inner city had left in droves. By the time 1990 rolled around, the Eisenhower District (or County District 7 by its proper name) was one of the most poorly funded school districts in the state.

The state board of education had forced the county to redistrict its schools to move some of the money away from the well-funded suburban districts to the poorer schools in the city limits. The only way to do that was to shift some more affluent neighborhoods into lower-income school districts. The first efforts were relatively benign. A few of the poorer Asian neighborhoods changed districts with a couple of mostly white suburban areas. The funding disparity was diminished if only marginally.

Those district lines lasted only until the first court challenge was decided, however. The inner-city schools, which included four middle schools and three high schools at the time, were still receiving only pennies on the dollar in comparison to their counterparts in the outer-lying regions. The majority of that money was spent on repairing the deteriorating buildings, many of which had been built in the 1950s.

A judge stepped into the fray at that point and ordered the county to consolidate the three high schools into two and to close the old buildings because they were deemed unsafe for occupancy. It took almost three years and millions of dollars in attorney fees before the state superior court upheld the ruling.

Eisenhower High School – and its cross-city counterpart, Truman High School – opened in 1998, along with their feeder middle schools, Thurmond and Mason. Each high school in the county had its own board of directors – and thus its own district – and the consolidation forced some elected officials out of office and some onto boards where their opinions held little or no sway. That created a bureaucratic nightmare as each and every idea was debated and analyzed for months or years before any decision was reached.

The bigger problem was with the way the schools were divided. The neighborhoods had shifted again as the case dragged through court – something anyone with common sense (which obviously excluded the academicians and politicians who crafted the plan) would have predicted.

Again, those with the means to keep their children out of the inner city districts did so. The suburbs became more predominately white and the inner city became more predominantly minority – and, again, the funding disparity became too great to ignore. Some families went as far as to keep their home in the Eisenhower district but rent property in a better area to establish a residency for their child to attend school there. Eisenhower had recently started to fight these unauthorized transfers because some of its money came from the state on a per-student basis and they were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by permitting the dual residency.

The district boundaries were shifted again in the middle 2000s, creating an almost 200 square mile district for Eisenhower Senior High School and one almost as large for Truman Senior High School. The Eisenhower district spanned almost 20 miles across, ranging from the farmlands in the north where Andy's grandparents had lived to the suburban area south of the inner city where Elizabeth Pena called home. It dipped to the west to pick up Chris Grant's neighborhood and then swung back east to pick up the area that stopped just short of the neighborhood where the Rileys resided. There was no way a judge was going to force the affluent families of that area to send their children to Eisenhower. It was bad enough that it bordered such a poor area.

Although Andy didn't know it, Non-Hispanic Whites were the fourth most represented ethnic group in his school district. African-Americans had the highest percentage – 25.8 percent of the population. Latinos of varying nationality were a close second at 24.6 percent. Asians from the traditional nations (Japan, Korea, The Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China) – as well as a large neighborhood of Pacific Islanders – were third with 16.1 percent. Whites comprised only 14.9 percent, barely ahead of a burgeoning Native American population which made up 13.3 percent of the district. The demographics mattered only from a financial standpoint (because, like it or not, white families tend to make more money).

It was the latest redistricting that brought Anita Lopez to the school board. It was this shift that brought Chris into Eisenhower from Roosevelt Middle School. His family lived in a fairly well-off neighborhood and, like everyone else they knew, they considered moving farther out. But most of Chris' middle school friends were set to attend Eisenhower so they relented. It didn't make a difference to Chris. Until Andy Drayton sat down at his table a few days earlier, he was simply marking time in high school until he could leave for Julliard. Now he enjoyed life at Eisenhower – and wished he had one more year there to have fun.

Anita was not having fun. She lived on the border of one of the neighborhoods brought into Eisenhower – and neither she nor her husband was pleased about it. But they owed too much on a recently purchased home – which saw its value drop dramatically when it was removed from the Roosevelt district (where Regan's family lived) to Eisenhower – to move. Instead, she ran for school board – and was elected in a municipal election that saw a meager 14 percent turnout on a rain-soaked Tuesday.

She had fought against the suburban parents who made the majority of the 11-person board. When Anita was elected, no one on the board had a child in the school system higher than fourth grade. The board's priorities were focused almost entirely upon ensuring their child's elementary school got everything it needed (and most of what it wanted). Five of the 11 neighborhood elementary schools that fed into middle school would be considered in suburban areas – and every member of the school board had a child in one of those five schools.

Anita had been one of the lone members to look at the big picture from the outset. It wasn't until their children started matriculating to Thurmond that the others sat up and took notice at anything past the primary school level. By then it was too late to do much about the middle and high school. So one by one, the board members had resigned their seats and moved out of the district when their children hit sixth or seventh grade.

Anita's daughter would be at Thurmond Middle School in two years – and the thought she might be subjected to the same treatment as Lupe Fuentes bothered her. She was further angered by the apparent lack of interest on the part of the supposed professionals whose job it was to ensure the students' safety.

The school district still didn't have enough funds to hire armed security guards to patrol the grounds – and it never would. She understood that reality better than most. The households that made up her district had a median income of less than $50,000 per year – and that number was skewed dramatically by the few middle-class neighborhoods in the district, in which almost 33 percent had attained a master's degree or higher (and whose income was well above the county's median of $79,000 and who tended to find ways to send their children elsewhere).

When the blocks that were considered "low-income" were removed from the county's statistics, the number shot upwards of $95,000.

In the neighborhood that Andy and Lupe called home, it was rare for anyone to make more than $25,000 a year – and a large percentage had no taxable income at all, with the entirety of their money coming via subsistence programs or child support.

Anita had spent months pondering these numbers because it was almost time to make a decision. Her daughter's elementary school was one of the best in the county. It was the same one Elizabeth Pena had attended. But Thurmond was not a good school and it was unlikely ever to be one. Eisenhower also would never be on par with the Roosevelt and Kennedy districts that bordered it.

Surprisingly, Truman was doing well. The inner city shift had left most of its students coming from Asiatic neighborhoods and from Latino and African-American neighborhoods that would be considered lower middle class. The school was aided by a large computer firm in the district that pumped in much-needed cash in the form of taxes – and much needed knowledge in the form of after-school programs and symposiums for students.

Eisenhower had nothing of the sort. Its corporate tax base was nonexistent and that was unlikely to change. The downtown was blighted, with few businesses still operating and none looking to fill the empty storefronts.

She and her husband had discussed looking at private school or moving to a different district and taking a loss on their home. She had decided as she listened to Andy and Elizabeth's stories that if what Lupe Fuentes said sounded remotely plausible, she would resign from the board as soon as the investigation concluded and her family would do as so many others had – get the hell out of town.

Regan frowned as she put her phone down. She had tried to call Andy but her call had gone to voicemail. It was while she was staring at the phone that she saw it was flashing with a message of her own.

She hit the button and listened.

"Hey, I'm sorry I missed you – again," Andy's voice said. "Elizabeth and I are stuck in a meeting with the school administrators. Don't worry, it's nothing bad. We'll be here through lunch, it looks. I just wanted to say hello and tell you I miss you. I'll call you on my way to work but don't change your plans. If I miss you, I'll catch you on my way home. I have a lot to tell you – so you can change your plans tonight if you have them."

He laughed.

"Anyway, I wanted you to know that I would rather be talking to you. Miss you. Bye."

Regan's smile was involuntarily. She replayed the message again while Joy and Ruth joined her at the table.

"How's Andy?" Ruth asked. She knew the smile could only have been caused by a conversation with Andy.

"He's stuck in a meeting with the school administration," Regan said. "It was odd. He left me a message at 11:30. He doesn't say why but that it isn't anything bad. I hate not being able to talk to him when I want to!"

Joy plopped down and gave a grin.

"So, Mom's meeting was at one," she said. "She dropped off the dress a little while ago. What do you say we skip out of German and try them on?"

"I can go without a day of reading my civics textbook," Ruth said.

"Ich spreche gut Deutsch," Regan said with a laugh. Ruth, whose foreign language was Spanish, looked for an explanation.

"I speak German well," Joy translated.

"Yo no hablo Aleman," Ruth said. "I don't speak German."

"I barely speak English," Joy stated. "So, are we game?"

"Sure," Regan said. "It'll give me some time to find something if it doesn't work."

The trio gobbled their lunch down and went laughing back to their dorm. They stopped in the basement storage area and went to Joy's room.

"Renee skips computer science all the time so we better go to your room," Joy said. "She'll strip down to her panties the moment she walks in the door whether you're here or not."

"Should we invite her to the graduation party?" Regan asked.

"God, no," Joy said as she passed a green dress over to Regan in a clear dry cleaning bag. "She's getting to be a pain in the ass. I invited her home last summer because her parents were going to Nairobi or somewhere equally as shitty. Even my mother got sick of her shit."

"Have you thought of anyone else?" Regan asked as they walked down the hallway.

"I think you've gotten everyone that I give a crap about," Ruth said. "Did you talk to Andy about finding a stunt cock for Joy to ride?"

"Ruth!" Joy said.

"Like you don't plan to bang any unattached guy who shows up," Ruth shot back as she poked Joy in the ribs.

"I was just going to steal your guy," Joy said as she danced away. "Can you imagine if Regan's mom walked in on us tag-teaming Chris?"

"She would freak!" Ruth said as she unlocked the door.

"My dad would probably stand there and watch," Regan said, rolling her eyes. "When he saw that picture of Ruth dancing, he just stared at her tits as if willing them to pop out of the phone."