The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away
I said, “Ask for your own child’s records, the whole file, with the change log. I can’t see yours, and you can’t see mine. But if every one of us says the same thing, with the same name and the same date, nobody can say it’s one angry mother.”
On Sunday after church the grandmother brought her granddaughter’s file out to our porch in a grocery sack, still in the school’s envelope, unopened. “I can’t read the small print without my other glasses,” she said. We opened it together at the kitchen table. It said what the others said. By Monday morning, five of the six families had a request in writing, and each had a copy of the log lines for their own child.
The school board meets in the high school library on the third Monday of the month, and that Monday was the eighteenth, ten days after Cantrell slid the page across the table. The library had set out thirty folding chairs and fourteen of them were taken. I had not called the town. I had told six families, and the six families had told two or three people each, and that was the whole crowd: the Bakers, the Anderses, the grandmother with her sack, a couple of mothers I knew from the Co-op, and Maddie in a plain blue dress with her hands folded.
I signed up for the patron comment period. You get three minutes. I had timed mine at the kitchen table with the egg timer.
Greg Hale sat in the middle chair with the gavel, and next to him Nell Hutchins, the vice president, a retired nurse of sixty-six. Dr. Cantrell sat at the end with his folder. Marsha Hobbs sat in the back, alone, in her good cardigan, with her purse in her lap, looking at the floor.
I went to the microphone at 7:25.
“My name is Anne Kessler. I’m not here to ask the board for anything. I just want to put some dates into your minutes.”
I read them. I read them slowly, off one page, in the voice I use for reading back a balance.
“April fourteenth, the counselor ran the class rank. Madeline Kessler, first. April fifteenth, the gown company’s honor cord order went out with that list. May sixth, at 7:48 in the morning, the extra weight was removed from the college composition grades of six students, ours among them, with the reason entered that the credit posting was incomplete. The college’s own record shows both grades posted on time. On May eighth, my daughter was moved from first to second, by three hundredths of a point, and she was told it was a calculation.”
I put a sheet in front of each member. “It’s one page. It has the dates and where to find each one. I’m not going to say anything about anyone’s motives. I’d just like the board to compare the dates.”
It was very quiet in the library.