By Bobby Hawthorne
Academic Director

Chris Smith teaches history, economics and assorted other courses at S&S High School, a few miles north of Gainesville. He also coaches the school’s current issues and events team, and he’s good at it. His teams have advanced to the State Meet the past eight years and have won an unprecedented seven straight state team titles. If he were coaching soccer or tennis, he’d be all over USA Today.

As it is, Chris and his students have instead made the Weekly World News. You’ve seen it on the racks near the checkout stands at the supermarket, blaring headlines like “Is two-headed space alien baby an omen of doom? Horrified mother says ‘YES!’ ”

Chris’ students love the Weekly World News. They show up at State each year, wearing WWN T-shirts. And the bulletin boards in Chris’ room are layered with choice WWN stories like “Spider girls saved from mob - by Siamese twins’ ghosts.” In the corner, Chris has a life-size cardboard poster of Sarah Michelle Gellar, the hot babe who plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s there each day as he attempts to explain life in the Middle Ages to sophomores, and while he puts his CI&E squad through the rigors of his flash-card grilling. It’s a warm and inviting billet in a safe and nurturing school.

Chris is fortunate. His students come from solid, middle class families that believe in hard work and know that nothing good comes easy, except perhaps for the glorious late-winter sunsets.

Of course, the Sadler community is lucky as well. Chris could probably triple or quadruple his salary in the private sector at the drop of a hat if he were so inclined. His administrators provide him with the tools necessary to compete, support his program and count among their blessings having on their faculty Chris, one of this year’s winners of the UIL/Southwestern Bell Sponsor Excellence Award. Walk into the front doors of the high school and you’ll see almost as many trophies and newspaper clippings for academic competitions as you will for sports, music or 4-H. Chris’ kids won a bunch of them.

Texas has a lot of schools like S&S, lots of teachers like Chris Smith. It needs more.

Who knows what will come of all the swirling political rhetoric about education. President Bush says it’s at the top of his agenda and has challenged Americans to improve their schools before “ignorance and apathy claim move lives.” Gov. Perry has placed education first on his plate, too. And poll after poll of Americans taken before and after the presidential election claim education and health care are their primary concerns.

What all this means is as fuzzy as a Stonewall County peach. As an inveterate newspaper clipper, I’ve saved a stack of articles related to education, the overwhelming majority of which focus on the lowest performing schools and students. Even articles regarding acute teacher shortages and/or proposals to change teacher accreditation ultimately boil down to statewide standardized testing and its concomitant political fallout.

I’m the first to agree that all students need to possess basic skills: the ability to read and understand an editorial, to be able to respond to it intelligently, to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide, and to know a little about this country’s history and freedoms, particularly compared to the rest of the world’s. They need to appreciate the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address and know the fundamental difference between the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Relativity.

For some students, this may be asking a lot. But for many others, it barely scratches the surface of their potential, and today’s obsession with minimum standards risks shortchanging gifted and talented students. Too often, parents and teachers assume that because these students are bright and self-motivated, they need no help navigating their way through high school, even though teen culture is unrepentantly anti-intellectual and anti-elitist. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

And given today’s political realities, passing TAAS and earning one of those recognized or exemplary banners to hang in front of the school may be as high as the bar will go in a lot of schools. Meanwhile, bright kids are bored stiff. They live in an age of high-tech instant gratification that abuts a culture of idiocy and social pathology. Witness: the XFL and Temptation Island. They listen to the worst vulgarities from Eminem and his ilk on their way to school, then encounter well-intended adults who have pulled The Diary of Anne Frank off the library shelves because a concerned parent complained that the book is about sex. No wonder N’Sync doesn’t seem all that weird to them.

Of course, it’s equally strange to be a teacher. They’re idealistic, compassionate, committed. They’re prepared to work for less money than they deserve. But most feel put upon and scapegoated. In a recent trip to East Texas, I stood in line at a Dairy Queen behind a yokel who blamed Texas’ education problems on the “powerful teacher unions.” Jeez.

Teachers want to teach, not drill and kill. They want to work with students who are eager to learn. They want to develop close relationships through profound experiences. This is where the UIL comes in.

For many schools, the UIL academic program is their talented and gifted program. Many other schools compete in UIL as well as spelling bees, citizen bees, science fairs, history fairs and other sundry activities. And then, of course, there are those schools that participate in academic contests with all the enthusiasm of a well-educated ticket-taker at a tractor pull.

They either believe that academic competition is unhealthy, that losing might damage their students’ fragile egos, or they’re cool with it philosophically. They just can’t scrape together the cash for academic contests, a claim that strains the limits of believability. At last July’s Capital Conference, we surveyed teachers regarding their stipends. Sixty-four of 90 said they were paid a stipend to serve as campus academic coordinator. One received as little as \$150 per year. One coordinator said she received an additional 10 days to her contract and an hour-and-a-half conference period every other day.

The average stipend for a 3A campus coordinator was \$1,095. The average for a 5A coordinator was \$1,470. The average stipend paid to coach a UIL event in Conference 2A? \$341 per event. In 4A? $477. Put in 70 hours at KFC and you’ll earn that much or more.

One or two said coaching UIL freed them from cafeteria, hall or bathroom duties. Another said she receives a favorable class schedule so that her UIL math students were together one period per day, every day. But 15 said they received no stipend or other consideration.

Let’s face it: few of these educators are driving new Ford 150s based on the money they earned coaching or coordinating UIL academics. I have a good friend who a few years back made more money coaching sub-varsity softball than for coaching four UIL academic contests and advising the yearbook and the student newspaper combined. She wasn’t bitter. She loved teaching, coaching and advising. But the irony is hard to miss.

It’s a cliche to say that teachers consider education a calling, that they want to contribute to the commonwealth. I’ve found it to be almost universally true among UIL academic coaches. Sure, we have plenty of those who take their \$200 stipend and hope three of their best students show up on the Saturday of the district meet. But they’re the exception. In Texas, schools almost always get far more than they paid for.

“The joy of working with truly bright and gifted students is still my reward,” one teacher wrote.

She added, “I know I’m a sap.”

Another stated, “I am fully aware that good teachers cannot be compensated adequately. However, I do feel that the hours after school and on weekends should be compensated in some ways.”

Absolutely, they should. I realize funds are scarce, that schools are under tremendous pressure to raise test scores and jump through all kinds of legal and political hoops. These efforts should not come at the expense of the best and brightest students, who stand to benefit from participation in extracurricular activities every bit as much as athletes and musicians. According to a long-term study of more than 1,000 Michigan sixth graders, students who compete in academic contests do better in high school and beyond than students who don’t.

Perhaps they might have anyway, but it’s dangerous to assume that the bright students will survive, even thrive, without additional inspiration or motivation, that the “leave no child behind” dictum doesn’t apply to smart kids because they’ll get along just fine. They’ll learn to compute, analyze, organize, interpret, think critically, solve problems and persevere. They’ll learn to acquire information and form new opinions and judgments independently. They’ll learn composure both in their writing and speaking. They’ll learn to win with humility, lose with grace. They’ll acquire intellectual curiosity that leads to a lifetime of learning. Somehow, they will find a place in the world, perhaps in the theatre, in a science lab or on a daily newspaper staff.

They might. But is it worth taking that risk? This I do know: These bright young men and women need teachers like Chris Smith, Pam McWilliams of Longview and the other UIL/Southwestern Bell sponsor excellence award recipients. They need outstanding educators like Roy Murrell of Stafford and Jeanell Cole of Bridgeport to inspire them to participate fully and deeply in academic contests, to encourage them to invest their free time between classes and after school honing their writing skills, researching federal policy on weapons of mass destruction and crunching geometric problems that would stump many university engineering students.

Because it is our best investment. Students who participate in UIL and other academic activities lay a foundation for a lifetime of success. Teachers who are given the time, resources and encouragement to work with these students, to help them grow and mature, are more likely to be career educators. As another sponsor excellence award recipient, Roxanna Calley of Sugar Land Dulles, noted, “Although winning is a goal, it is not the ultimate goal. Their journey in studying for and participating in the competition has provided these young people with a foundation for success that will remain with them the rest of their lives.”

Why every school administrator and board member in the state doesn’t appreciate this, I’ll never understand.