The Not So Secret (But Still Widely Unknown) Lives of TK-12 Public School Teachers

This Week: Laura Anonymous

by Brian Lees

Laura Anonymous (real full name withheld as requested) was a teacher in our district for 24 years.  She was one of only a handful of African American teachers in our district, which has been hammered before for lack of diversity in hiring (especially at the time of her hiring), but in addition to the challenges she faced due to her race, she is also a recovering alcoholic, which is the reason for her request for anonymity.  The daughter of a former New York City librarian, she spent most of her career as a high school English teacher in Poway, after a decade following in her father’s footsteps in the Pittsburgh city library system upon graduation from Duquesne University and prior to her divorce and movement to California in the mid ‘90s.  Her story is a little more raw than some of the others in this series.

What was your biggest challenge in your teaching career?

From a very young age, I felt I was made to be a teacher, but I don’t think teaching was made for me.  As a child growing up in Brooklyn, I would spend hours setting up my room as a classroom and teaching to my dolls and any stuffed animals I managed to collect.  I loved books; they were my escape.  My father was an avid reader of all kinds of literature and became a librarian to be around them constantly.  This meant I always had a large collection of books at my disposal, both bought and borrowed.  Unfortunately, he also drank, a lot, and was incredibly strict, not hesitating to use his belt frequently to keep me in line, especially if I was too noisy or wild in my play.  Reading became my safe place.  The only time I got a whipping for reading was if it was past my bedtime or I hadn’t done my chores.

I met my first husband at the end of my third year in college in Pittsburgh, where I studied literature (my father would not send me to college unless I agreed to study what he wanted me to study).  He was also an escape, but very bad for me.  I got pregnant a month before graduation, and married him that summer.  Within three years he was cheating on me.  I tolerated it for a while, as I was scared of what I was going to do working in a library with two young children now and returning to New York was not an option.  I started to remember my passion as a child for teaching.  So many of those books I read were about schools and teachers.  I wanted to be a part of that in real life.  I went back to school to get my certificate to become a teacher.  I went out after class a lot with the other students in my program, and even though I swore that I would never drink like my dad, I discovered that drinking with my classmates felt good, even if just for a while.  Shortly after I finished my program, my husband left me for another woman he had been fucking on the side.  Despite my efforts to get him to stay for his children, I never saw him again until many years later in the airport on a trip back east, where he was with a completely different woman.  One of my best friends from my program, Brenda, was moving to California and encouraged me to do the same to get a fresh start.  The state of California was in the process of developing a program called “Class Size Reduction” in elementary school, where all kinds of new teachers were going to be needed.  I took a job in San Diego City Schools at first while I worked on my California teaching certification.  I decided to also get credentialed as a single subject English teacher while I was at it, as there was talk of also reducing class sizes at the high school level in these areas.  A job opened up at a high school in Poway, which was at that time noted as the best school district in the area.  I took it so that my kids could also get a chance to go to better schools.

I remember everyone in the room when I interviewed was white.  While San Diego District wasn’t actually that diverse either, there were at least a few people of color in the room.  I also remember the Poway folks scrutinizing me, looking like they were almost ready to pounce on me for any mistake.  They arched their eyebrows when they heard me speak with my vocabulary.  They said things like, I was “articulate for a Black person,” and the principal on the panel who eventually hired me for his school said I was “clearly a credit to my race.”  At the time, I tried not to mind.  I really wanted the job and what I thought was a better chance for my kids.  Some of their classmates at their schools in San Diego had not been the best influence on them.  I had to get them away from that, the chance of them getting into drugs and gangs, no father figure in their life.

I had worked hard to try to keep my drinking to a minimum.  The staff at my school liked to party.  They had frequent happy hours for Margaritas in Old Town San Diego. I had developed quite a taste for them, so I indulged, often, probably more often than I should have.  It also helped me to forget about my struggles in the classroom.  The pressure was enormous.  The community, some staff members, and the administration did not seem to be completely comfortable with a Black woman teaching their kids English.  I overheard a student say point blank one day, “I didn’t know they let [racial epithet] teach at this school. I thought this was a GOOD school that didn’t allow that sort of thing.”  Horrible things were said about students of color on a daily basis.  This wasn’t the South 30 years ago.  This was San Diego.  In some ways it was worse.

I started drinking more.  Not just at staff get-togethers, but at home as well.  Some of the staff members who had become my friends were getting concerned when we would go out and they had to drive me home because I was having too much to drink.  I missed some days of school entirely to stay home and recover.  I remember waking up next to my own vomit and a cactus plant behind a low wall in Old Town one night after I had passed out, dirt all over my new dress, no idea how I’d gotten there, if anyone had tried to help me, if my kids were safe at home or at a friend’s house.  One of our site union reps who had seen me many times at these gatherings came to see me in my classroom one afternoon, closed the door and asked me if everything was all right.  She suggested I get help and gave me a bunch of resources, which I looked at and gave a lot of thought to, but I ignored.  I had just met a man at one of my nights out who worked for Bell Helicopter in Carlsbad and had been in the British Air Force and didn’t want to spoil what we had started.

Unfortunately, one of the assistant principals had also seen me at these gatherings and was my evaluator that year.  My evaluations, which had started out great, took a sudden dip.  He was all over my ass for the slightest thing, like writing too low on the board or blocking a small portion of the screen with the overhead projector.  The tiniest fucking things when I was teaching.  He also would make comments that weren’t directly racist, but would insinuate that I was not a quality teacher due to my race.  I was originally due to be tenured at the end of that year, but was instead kept at probationary status for an additional year to see if my performance improved.  The following year, I had a different evaluator and kept a much lower profile, finally achieving tenure status.  But shortly after the start of my fourth year of teaching, the man I had met and been dating broke it off with me and went back to England.  I started drinking even more than ever before.  I was self-medicating.  Numbing the pain, so to speak.  I missed more school until I was out of sick days and my pay was getting docked.  I came to school and some of the staff members I was closest to would notice that I reeked of alcohol.  They staged an intervention for me when they heard the news that the principal who had hired me had also noticed the odor of alcohol on me and had begun asking questions.

Again, that same site union rep was there to help start the process.  I sought help through our Kaiser insurance plan for counseling and other resources.  I began going to AA meetings and got a sponsor.  Other than two temporary relapses–one in ‘03 and one in ‘07–I have been mostly sober ever since.

What role did our union (Poway Federation of Teachers) play in supporting you, and if a new teacher came to you and asked you if they should join the union and if it is worth it, what experiences would you share with them to help them decide?

They were incredible.  My site rep was behind me every step of the way, getting resources for me, keeping things confidential, listening to me when I shared my concerns over my evaluations with her and making sure I had the ear of the union leadership at my disposal when I was not immediately tenured.  It was also helpful that she had shared her own stories of family members who were in recovery.  Her honesty and integrity gave me the hope and courage to get help and work hard to stay sober.

Most importantly, they stood by me when one day I was unfairly accused by the principal who hired me of bringing alcohol to school during the day in my Thermos, even though I had been sober for six months.  He attacked me and tried to bring me down.  He wanted me to be fired.  He was facing some of his own heat for less than admirable marks on the teacher’s union survey they put together to get feedback on administrator performance–another great thing our union does that is not done in many districts.  He knew I was close with the site rep who had helped me and was one of his biggest critics.  He was also facing pressure for not handling incidents of racist graffiti in the boys’ restrooms and an angry parent that had threatened to go to the media about it.  The union fought hard for me to be exonerated of these false accusations and have any mention of them stricken from my evaluations.  They also pressured the District Office to have the principal reassigned to a different high school, something the District initially balked at, but then went along with due to mounting parent pressure and issues with other staff members.

What was one of your greatest successes as a teacher?

I know I influenced many students in my career to read and write better and contributed to their success as college students and in life.  But my proudest achievement was to continually year after year get entire rooms full of mostly white and Asian students to develop an appreciation for Langston Hughes and to apply what they learned about him and his work to their future lives.  And even though I am now retired, I ended my career on a high note and have not had a single drink in 17 years, which is maybe not a teaching success as much as a life success, but still a success all the same and nonetheless.  One day at a time, one day at a time.

Brian Lees is a 28-year veteran public elementary school teacher currently teaching 5th grade at a school in the Sabre Springs neighborhood of the Poway Unified School District.  During his time as an educator, he has spent 25 of those years as a school site union representative, the last five years as a delegate from his union to the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, many months as a key organizer of frequent food distributions in conjunction with the Labor Council and Palomar College during the height of the COVID pandemic (June 2020 to November 2021), and most recently was appointed as the Secretary of the COPE Committee for his union, the Poway Federation of Teachers (AFT Local 2357).  The son of two retired teachers who also volunteered their time as union leaders, one as a site rep in San Bernardino City Schools and the other as an executive director in Associated Teachers of Metropolitan Riverside, he comes from a long line of educators and active pro-labor advocates.  He lives in northeast Escondido with his two dogs and 8-year-old daughter, and his hobbies include reading, writing, composing music, and photography, the last of which he hopes to share in future issues of The Jumping-Off Place, in a photo essay series called “My Esco.”