http://66.225.205.104/LM20110610.mp3
This is the last day of school for kids at CMS. Students are saying good bye to each other for the summer break and teachers are packing up classrooms. Next year, there'll be the typical transitions. Eighth graders are moving on to high school and fifth graders to middle school. But with eleven schools closing next year, there will be some more unusual changes. Bishop Spaugh Community Academy is one of four middle schools closing. Many of the kids there next year will be going to schools that include kindergarten through eighth grades. The motto for this last week at Bishop Spaugh is one borrowed from Dr. Seuss: "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." Every student is receiving a copy of Oh the Places You'll Go and on the back of each book is pasted a poem. Its author teacher Verna Rochon reads it to students over the morning announcement. "As you get prepared to leave, remember all the things we have said, and the goals you can achieve... " begins Rochon. There may be a few tears later, but this Wednesday was a day for celebration. It's the first day since mid May that no student is taking a standardized test. Thus, the EOG Block Party. Everyone wants a piece of Assistant Principal Christa Flood. She walks around with one hand clutching a walkie-talkie, trying to coordinate a couple hundred kids rotating between a snow cone cart, sports, and a slip and slide. Every few feet a kid comes up and hugs her. "Khalil, what school are you going to next year, man?" asks Flood. "Ashley Park," says Khalil. "Ooh, Ashley Park. Well you better do great things over there, I tell you that. I'm gonna come back and check on you." "I came from there last year," replies Khalil unexcitedly. Khalil is a sixth grader, so he's spent one year at Spaugh. For the most part, Flood says her sixth graders are all right. They haven't gotten too attached to the school. It's the eighth graders that need the pep talk. Several of them say they want their brothers and sisters to go to Spaugh just like them and many like Victoria Carter say they had wanted to come back to visit teachers who've helped them. "They're like our family, you know, and they're leaving and we might not get to see them like ever again. That's kind of sad," says Carter. The sixth grade boys play football, while the girls walk around the track and talk it up. Sixth grader Treshonda Sanders is thinking about her first and last year here. "I feel like things went well this year," says Sanders. "It was kind of bumpy about the news we heard that our school's going to be closing down. So we just had to buckle down and just show them who we are even though we're closing." CMS officials say they're closing schools to save money and Spaugh and several other schools were targets because of low test scores. Although there have been gains at Spaugh in recent years. Guidance counselor Raukell Robinson says she had a lot of upset kids in her office when CMS announced it was closing Spaugh. But it wasn't just the kids dealing with uncertainty. The teachers were too. They knew even if they didn't lose their jobs through looming budget cuts, they didn't know where they'd be. "You're used to the kids coming in and being in tears. But I think the uncertainty in life, even for adults, is difficult. So I think in the process the adults have shown resiliency," says Robinson. The seventh-graders finish up their lunch in the cafeteria. Some dread going to school with little kids. K'shune Jackson isn't sure where he'll go next year, but one possibility is Ashley Park which will be a k-8 school. "There's a lot of little kids there and I ain't got nobody to talk to," worries Jackson. "Like it's really fifth graders and stuff and I don't really think I'd be comfortable talking to 5th graders. They're like three years younger than me and I don't really have no friends like three years younger than me. Bishop Spaugh will close today after 55 years.