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I know how my father operated because he trained me in the family business. I was a senior in high school when the Philadelphia Academy Charter School opened its door, and he put me to work, so I learned the politics and power structure of PACS from the ground up. Now, looking back, every memory is a clue, and every gesture is a sign to interpret.
PACS opened to great fanfare. The Philadelphia Daily News ran an article titled “Top of the Charter” that hailed PACS as a “shining example for other public schools.” It had small class sizes (capped at 22 students), state-of-the-art computer labs, and a culture of order and discipline. The article reported that every student, parent, and teacher had to sign a 16-page code of conduct, prohibiting “everything from absenteeism to stink bombs to thefts and violence—and [promoting] the self-control and respectful attitude that permeates the classrooms and hallways.” But there was something amiss just below this orderly surface. By law, students were admitted to PACS by a lottery system, but I’ve learned through my research that the system was rigged. Multiple sources have reported that children of policemen and firefighters were allowed to skip the lottery and cut the line. The article goes on to report that there were “129 mostly mainstreamed, fully supported special-needs” students and “3,000 families on the waiting list.” This number sounds like a lie to me. There may have been a waitlist that first semester, but I don’t think there were 3,000 names on that list. I think my father was a good storyteller who understood the law of supply and demand and wanted to project an illusion of scarcity.
The article describes my father as a “visionary principal” and concludes, “He is applying to open a second K-8 charter school and a high school next fall. If public education has a future, Gardiner is it.”
My father was getting good press. He had a new school and a new consulting company. He was in a new era of life. Maybe that’s why he traded us in for a new family. The same year the charter was granted, my father left my mother—his wife of more than twenty years—for a woman twenty years younger than he was.
His departure was abrupt and unceremonious. One night after supper he told us he was leaving, and one day when I came home from school all his clothes were gone from his closet. He didn’t introduce us to Darlene or tell us where he was going. I didn’t know where he lived for over a year, but he still had a key and he let himself in and out of the house to collect the business mail that piled up on the sideboard. Sometimes he stayed for dinner when he stopped by to pick up a check. My mother took this as a sign of hope. She couldn’t face facts and kept wearing her ring. She forbade us to tell our friends that the marriage was over, and when we had guests, she turned on the television in the empty bedroom to make it seem like he was resting upstairs.
His absence did not diminish his sense of authority in the household. He was still the boss. My mother still followed orders, and it was an unspoken rule that I was expected to do the same.
Just before I started my senior year in high school, my father informed me that my role at PACS would be to run the after-care program, Monday through Friday from 3:00-5:30 pm. This meant I would have to quit lacrosse, theater, yearbook, and all my other extracurricular activities. I didn’t want to do it, but Dad insisted it was a good opportunity, and I knew better than to say no.
The aftercare program ran out of a windowless cafeteria with fluorescent lights and folding tables. I worked with one other member of the support staff—a nineteen-year-old community college student—and on any given day, there could be twenty kids in our care, ranging in age from five to thirteen. Several of the children had physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities (including Brittle Bone Disease, Cerebral Palsy, Williams Syndrome, and Autism). It was hard work, and I was in over my head. There was no training, no container, no leadership. For the first hour, we distributed snacks (soda, cheese puffs, and pretzels), helped the kids do their homework, and tried to initiate arts and crafts projects that usually failed. Then we watched movies, went to the playground, or took the kids to the gym, where they ran wild. I showed up and did the job, but we were just making it up as we went along, and something about it always felt wrong.
I can still see all the children’s faces and remember most of their names, but the girl I think about most was called Rebecca. She was in the second or third grade, and I remember her with chapped lips, poker straight hair, and brown eyes. Nice girl. Quiet. Always sat on the edges and did her homework without being prompted. Her father Jon worked at the school as a bookkeeper and financial officer. I liked Jon. He was a gentle, timid man with a ring of dark hair that framed his bald head and a small, dark mustache. He wore round glasses and always looked surprised. Each day around four o’clock, Jon would come to the cafeteria and wave to Rebecca from the doorway, and I would watch as she slid off her chair and disappeared down the hall.
I worked at the Philadelphia Academy Charter School five days a week for a full academic year, so I got to know the whole organization. I knew administrative staff, the maintenance team, the special education coordinator, the school psychologist, the librarian, and many members of the faculty and board of directors. Rosemary DiLacqua was the board president, and her son attended the aftercare program. She worked as a Philadelphia police detective and was very good friends with Kevin O’Shea, who would ultimately turn out to be my father’s accomplice. Kevin had also worked as a detective, though it was always unclear why he was no longer on the force. He had three daughters enrolled in the school, and, at the time, I didn’t pay much attention to him. All I knew was that he taught students to make top-heavy pine bookshelves in shop class and that he gave my father a black labrador retriever puppy to bring home to Darlene.
One day in late September, there were two new little boys in my charge. They were sweet kids—aged six and seven, named Christian and Nathaniel. After snack and homework time, the kids settled in to watch a movie, and a kindergartener named Anthony crawled into my lap and whispered in my ear, “Miss Christine, your brothers are here.”
I laughed a little. Anthony was sassy and had the face of a little old man. “What are you talking about?”
“Your brothers are here.”
“No, Sweetie,” I said. “I only have one brother, and he’s not here.”
“But, Miss Christine,” he said urgently. “Christian and Nathaniel are Mr. Gardiner’s sons.” He gestured to the two little boys. I looked over at them on the other side of the room. “That means they are your brothers.”
There was no other introduction. That’s how I met my stepbrothers. One day, they were just dropped in my charge, and it was my job to look after them. I wanted to hate them, but I knew it wasn’t their fault. Still, sometimes I choked inwardly on my rage and my pity like that Friday afternoon in February when my father showed up with a cake and balloons, and the staff and children sang “Happy Birthday” to me. My birthday wasn’t until the following day, but that day was Nathaniel’s actual seventh birthday. I saw the glazed look on his face as everyone sang first to me—then to him, as an afterthought.
Most days, my father drove Christian and Nathaniel home from school, but sometimes Darlene came to pick them up. I remember the first day she walked into the cafeteria wearing her police uniform. It had been seven months since my father had left my mother, but we had never been introduced, and this was the first time I’d laid eyes on her.
Darlene was very, very pretty. I studied her makeup and her hair, tucked up in a bun. I examined the gun on her hip. She took the boys by the hand and led them out of the room.
She never once spoke to me or looked me in the eye that whole school year.
To be fair, I never spoke to her either. The difference was that she was a grown woman and I was a teenager. I was taking care of her children, and she had a gun.
It was exhausting working for Dad, playing my part, acting the Boss’s daughter. By the time I got home from school and work, I didn’t have any bandwidth left. My days were long, and I was taking too many accelerated classes—AP Physics, AP Economics, AP Calculus, and AP European History. I often fell asleep in class and started falling behind.
One day, my history teacher paused our lessons to discuss an article published in TIME Magazine that referenced my father and his enterprise.
The article explored the notion that “for-profit schooling is inching toward the mainstream” and suggested that charter schools might be the future of public education. It’s a fascinating document because the clues are all there; you can clearly read the writing on the wall. The article was not interested in charter schools as educational alternatives for children falling through the cracks in the system. The allure was the possibility of profit. It explains, “Once dismissed as the loony notion of free-market zealots, for-profit schools are fast winning support and jolting the $360 billion public school market, the last major sector of the US economy to feel the lash of competition. The very notion seems heretical: public schools run by private companies that charge no tuition but operate classrooms for local school boards or chartering organizations using taxpayer money—some of which will go to shareholders as (gasp!) profit.” The article was focused primarily on two educational businesses: Edison Schools and Nobel Learning Company. These organizations intended to educate students using government funds and carve out a profit by slashing administrative costs.
The article showcased the Philadelphia Academy Charter School as an example of a “school for profit” done right. PACS was described as a school of the future, where computer literacy was key, and kids studied Mandarin. My father was quoted as saying that Chinese would be “the cash language of the 21st Century.” There was a glossy photograph of well-behaved first graders lined up in their PACS uniforms. My step-brother Nathaniel is the only child looking at the camera. You can see the distrust in his eyes.
I turned noisily red and sank low in my chair as my teacher read the whole article out loud. After that, I stopped eating, smoked lots of cigarettes, and got very thin. For the first time in my life, I was struggling in school, but that didn’t matter because nobody noticed, and I had already been accepted to Brown University. I started cutting classes. I copied the valedictorian’s physics homework and slid from third to sixth place in the class ranking. In the Senior Issue of the yearbook, my classmates voted me runner-up for “Most Intelligent” but definitively “Most Changed” and “Most Affected by Senioritis.” I was also awarded the school’s highest honor: a $10,000 scholarship. My hands shook with shame when I accepted my prize.
When I walked across the stage in my cap and gown, my hair hung thick and red to my waist. I was thin almost beyond recognition, and I wanted to burn the world.
The summer after I graduated high school and before I left for college, I worked for my father again, this time as an administrative assistant, helping him gather documentation as he consulted on the new Franklin Towne Charter High School, which would be housed at the old arsenal near the Tacony-Palmira Bridge. My job was to collect the necessary paperwork (proof of address, vaccination records, biographical data) from families, enter their information into a homegrown database, and organize the documents alphabetically in binders that would be sent to the state. While my father and his team interviewed potential teachers, I responded to parent inquiries and maintained the calendar. I worked between forty and fifty hours a week in a cold, windowless room, answering phones and keeping the files.
It was a family business. Despite the divorce, which was in its final stages, he also recruited my mother to work at the new school. She wanted so badly for him to come home that she gave everything to the project—until he decided she was expendable and forced her out. My responsibilities that summer included working as my parents’ go-between.
Kevin O’Shea’s wife was also involved in the project. I remember that she had neat, manicured nails and seemed competent. We organized open house meetings for potential students and their families in the PACS cafeteria. Looking back, I can see the codependent dysfunction and the emerging conflicts of interest, but at the time it all seemed natural. My father was using PACS as a staging ground for this new venture because starting a school is an incredible labor, and when you are doing the impossible, you use all the resources at your disposal.
In retrospect, I can also see that my primary function was public relations. I was statuesque and well-spoken. My writing had been recognized on the state and national levels. I was genuinely well-meaning and bound for an Ivy League school. Who better to represent my father as an educator and family man?
Dad paid me $10 per hour through his consulting business Charter School Development Associates. I spent some of the money I earned at the Jersey shore and a few hundred dollars on new clothes for school, but mostly I saved my earnings and gave it all back to him at the end of the summer to defray the cost of my tuition.
Before I left for school, my father gave me a cell phone. “You earned it, Neine.”
I didn’t realize it was a company phone until my new friends at Brown told me that my name appeared as Charter School Development Associates on their caller ID.
My father called every day to check up on me. Our exchange was always brief, scripted, three to four minutes.
“How are you doing, Neine?”
“I’m fine. What’s up, Daddeo?”
“I’m just checking up on you.”
He would give a quick report on the charter that had just been ratified or what new building he was renovating.
He never talked about anything substantive or personal. In fact, it was his secretary Joanne who called halfway through my first semester to tell me that my father and Darlene had been married in a small ceremony at City Hall. It was also Joanne who told me when Dad and Darlene bought a new house on a cul-de-sac just over the Philadelphia line.
My father did not mention these developments in our daily check-ins. He never told me the truth, but he always offered me money.
“Do you need anything, Neine?”
When I was growing up, Dad knew how to make a little go a long way. He used coupons and club points and was practiced at the art of the deal. Now his attitude towards money had changed. Since founding the school and adopting the new family, he had been making a show of his spending. There were shopping sprees at Brooks Brothers, Bloomingdales, and Tiffany’s. He seemed to be making more money—a lot more money—but my context had also changed. I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb, but among my classmates at Brown, I encountered levels of wealth I had never even imagined. More often than not, I accepted whatever he offered me.
“Alright, love you, Neine.“
“Love you too, Dad.”
“Keep the faith.” Since founding PACS, he ended every conversation this way, and it was hard to understand what he meant. Growing up, I knew him to be anti-religious. He never stepped foot in a church except for weddings and funerals, which he considered work functions. “Keep the faith.” That directive—and our conversations in general—left me feeling empty and uneasy, but I kept answering the phone—until I didn’t.
My freshman year of college, I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed. I chain-smoked and ate one meal a day, dropping from a size 12 to a size 6 in six months. When I lay on my back, my stomach formed a hollow pink bowl between my ribs and the razor-sharp points of my hips. I was so thin I could form a circle with my fingers around my upper thigh.
At Brown there was no set curriculum. Registration was an exercise in choose-your-own-adventure, but no one had counseled me to make those kinds of decisions, and I did not know where to start, so I enrolled in classes in art, literature, and history. With my thick, coppery hair, I turned heads when I walked across campus, but I rarely made it to class. When I did, I was often late and rarely said much. Mostly I listened. I didn’t understand half of what was said; the other half seemed inane. I was confused by the material, which was so heavy on theory that the content felt divorced from real life. I was interested only in theories I could put into practice and had always understood reading and writing as means of survival, ways to make sense of a senseless world. Now it seemed that the only purpose of reading was to deconstruct meaning, and writing was a formal, argumentative experiment in which the signifier never came close to touching the signified. For the first time, I didn’t make the grade. I felt defeated and fraudulent. I got a lot of B’s and almost failed Intro to Critical Theory.
Soon I was studying what was happening on the streets surrounding the university. I hung around with the runaway kids who lived on Thayer Street and started waiting tables at a family diner.
After a while, I stopped answering the phone. Once, I let the battery run down and didn’t respond to my father for five days.
One morning, there was a knock on the door.
It was the police. Dad had called them and given them my address.
They were just there to check up on me—in their uniforms, with their guns.
“Call your father,” they advised, peering over my shoulder at an ashtray filled with dust and cigarette butts. “He loves you.”
I closed the door behind them and sank to the floor. I sat there, shaking and staring at my phone for a long time.
After that, I never again silenced his calls.
NOTE:
REFERENCES:
Geringer, Dan. “Top of the Charter.” Philadelphia Daily News. 02 Dec 1999. p. 5. Newspapers.com
CORRECTION:
Join me as I unravel my father’s crimes, examining the price of shame and the consequences of our lies.
Because “Poetry is what survives.”