What “Class” You In?
How Public Education is All About the Money
Story by G.Melesaine
Art by Thuy Ngo

I attend Evergreen College where it seems students just have money coming out their asses. Students drive luxury cars with their nose in the air drinking their six dollar coffees. It's not really staggering to me though, because I've faced classism all through my schooling experience.

Throughout my life I've attended school in five different districts. Each district being a different economic class. They were either “upper,” “middle,” or “lower” class, but I've always thought that those names were demoralizing and full of shit so I refer to it as the “Have Mores,” the “Haves,” and the “Have Nots.” As for me, I consider myself as a Have Not. . . for now.

My early years education was spent in Los Gatos. Los Gatos is said to be one of the highest public educations you can receive. Everyday, I would get dropped off by my father in his old Datsun waiting along the bus circle with the Mercedes and Jaguars. I would go to school with only fifteen or sixteen students in my class and had this intensity to learn. The atmosphere that the teachers made was great. We were given everything we needed; school materials, extra one on one tutoring after school, everyone in class received books for free, and we had raffles for computers. I was exposed to alot at that school. They had classes for international foods, speech development, and international music. There were field trips with all expenses paid. We were like little rich tourists navigating through the bay every week. It never really dawned on me that I was probably the poorest student in class until the day we had to bring in family photos.

That day, when the assignment was due, I remember being in awe when I seen the photos of families taken in front of their mansions. I was going to school with children whose family income was beyond my dreams.

Later, I started attending high school in Milpitas, which was also a “Have More” school. My first day I was given a tour and realized that the school was huge. It just killed your youthful vitality, and this was supposed to be where our maturity for college was to be built. All the students who were old enough to drive already owned a car, and the school even had elevators. The school just spent money whenever possible. They even spent money on a "Columbine" training day, just in case a school massacre were to occur. When I say training day, I mean the whole nine. They paid for the SWAT team, the police, ambulances, helicopters, even victim actors with make up. They even had sound effects of guns being shot, they really wanted us to have the real "near death" scare.

After getting kicked out of Milpitas, I headed towards the East Side of San Jose. I started attending school at James Lick. The school building was average, but comparing the education to the other districts it was extremely poor. I was being taught things that were covered in middle school. In my math class we didn't even have books or a real teacher. We had a computer and were to take digital standardized tests to improve our knowledge. We would take the scantron test, put it through the machine and see if we passed. If we made any mistakes the "classroom helper" would solve the problem for us then we would move on to the next test. There were no books for the whole class, sometimes we were forced to share. But besides all the bullshit teachings at that school, I met an English teacher there who really motivated me to push forward my education. He exposed me to Howard Zinn, Pablo Neruda, and other geniuses and I'm grateful for that. Though I was strongly motivated, I didn't finish high school there.

I started attending school on the outskirts of downtown San Francisco at John Adams. A John Adams education has no potential at all to go anywhere. I was taught nothing, except the extra text I read in the library.   That's where I hustled or you can say made my deals with the teachers so I could graduate. On every subject we were to take there was only one room filled with 40 students that they called "the lab". We were to read and remember boring text and pass the test on the text. There were 30 tests for each subject so if you passed all tests you've passed the subject. The text was so boring and out of date that I started making deals with the "lab" instructors. Most of them were liberals, wanting us to vote, so if I brought in a voting receipt it would count as one test. Since they always took a peak at what book I was reading, I asked them if I could summarize the literature and that would count as a passing test. They agreed and I finished graduation requirements early.

Now that I attend a “Have More” college, I see classism all around me. I used to wish to be one of those people who just spit on people while driving a Mercedes, but then I thought, why the hell did I want to become the person that I've created disdain for while they're spitting on me? There's no evolution for the poor in that type of thinking.

I'm happy with parking my bucket in the FREE parking lot. I will remain proud that if I do become a "Have More" (2 Give) I know that I went through more struggles than the next "Have More" and I ended up in the same place as the guy or gal who had it easy.

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