First in a series
An ineradicable scene from last night’s City Council meeting after students from the golden award-winning Academy of Visual and Performing Arts at Culver City High School and their teacher had been properly commended:
Dozens of ardent parent and teen admirers of the teacher Sheila Silver patiently lined up against the back wall of Council Chambers. If words existed, they were inaudible. In turn, each person snugly hugged her and pledged much needed, fiercely felt fealty to her in a lurching time of sudden, unexpected need.
By the time the charmingly forthright 32-year education veteran had turned two more City Hall corners, for interview privacy, her auburn hair seemed to be growing wetter instead of the opposite.
A good portion of her silver dress was matted. So was Ms. Silver herself, which is how a body gets when trumpet-blaring emotions take charge, especially in public.
A Strange Time to Celebrate
Her red-rimmed eyes didn’t escape, not that they could have. So often have they been in this condition during the fortnight since she was told to keep walking even when the plank ends, that she was scarcely aware they were damply drenched again.
All about Culver City, Ms. Silver and her archly loyal drama students are being feted for their every-year ultimate championship attainments except on campus where the second-year teacher recently was declared A Non-Person — Until We Can Replace You.
When Mayor Chris Armenta summoned Ms. Silver and about 20 students to the front of Chambers to accept a certificate for winning the quintessential prize last month for the second straight year at the California Theatre Educational Festival, the f-word, diplomatically, went unmentioned.
Until a moment later.
Kevin Mitchell, a senior who has organized campus protests, stepped out from his classmates to thank the City Council for affirming “what we do and why we do it, especially with the recent firing of our teacher, which we are very sad about.”
Can They Be Convincing?
In neighborhoods where drama students and friends of the high school live, families are mobilizing, organizing, hoping to persuade the ultimate decision-maker, the School Board, to reverse its ruling that Ms. Silver must go away. Anywhere but Culver City.
Surely a reversal is a gaping longshot. Or maybe Ms. Silver could take heart in the still unfolding case of Interim Supt. Patti Jaffe. The faith of Ms. Jaffe’s backers’ in the concept of reversal presently is being rewarded.
On a fairly traditional campus where the athletes, naturally, are the monopolistic royalty of the student body, the administration — perhaps without realizing they would set off a popular explosion — fired a star.
This was no scramble-haired, crooked-glasses, mumbling, shiftlessly dressed, obscure, back-of-the-building math teacher Culver City High School canned.
Members of the AVPA may form between 1/23 and 2/23 of the student body. Small but muscular. They have risen up to resist her firing. But the campus will not go declare academic bankruptcy tomorrow because the five-person AVPA faculty was lightened by a single member.
Possibly Ms. Silver’s supervisors they did not bargain for the notion that the family of drama students and their parents seems tighter than the locks at San Quentin.
(To be continued)
