Principal John Pannell radios the school nurse with Dennis Lipscomb (By Eli Reed/Magnum) From the Magazine The Challenge Index Charts showing area high school rankings The Standards Bearer Page 1 Page 3

“Good morning, Malcolm X!”

“Good mor-ning, Mis-ter Pan-nell,” answer 800 singsong voices.

“GOOD MORNING, MALCOLM X!” Pannell’s voice booms twice as loud from the speakers.

“GOOD MOR-NING, MIS-TER PAN-NELL!” comes the response, rising nearly to a scream.

“Now THAT sounds like my students!” Pannell exults. “You look good! You look ready! Did you have a good summer? . . . Did you study? . . . Did you read? . . . Did you play? . . . Are you READY for school?”

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes, come the shouted answers. The cafeteria, packed with students and parents, buzzes with whispers and muffled giggles.

Pannell’s right arm shoots up, his fingers thrust into a V. It is his sign for silence. A hush falls quickly as his opening-day welcome turns from jubilant to cold sober. His face hardens. His eyes narrow behind his lightly tinted glasses. His slender frame, in crisp blue suit, white shirt and bright red alphabet tie, towers over the audience from the stage.

“We have 859 students. You are the largest elementary school in the District,” he says. Parent and students will notice that certain teachers have “moved along” to other jobs, but he is excited to have “new things . . . new classes . . . new agendas . . . and new teachers.”

“Let’s understand something, my young boys and girls, my young students, my young geniuses-in-the-making: Boys, if you do not have your uniforms, you don’t go to school. Girls, the same for you . . . And only students with Malcolm X colors will be allowed on our playground.”

His tone turns harsher: “This past Friday, we had graffiti.” Somebody tagged the school building again. The brick walls have been sandblasted so many times that they cannot easily be cleaned anymore. “You saw who did it, and you still wouldn’t tell,” he says, scolding them collectively for failing to turn in the vandals. “Whose school is this?”

“Our school,” some kids answer.

“And if somebody does something to it, who suffers? You do!”

Pannell furrows his brow and sternly reminds the scores of parents of the new policy that will stop “social promotions.” To the students he says, “Those of you who don’t carry your notebooks home; those who don’t carry your books home; those of you who don’t carry homework – you need to Tell your parents right now!”

More warnings to parents: Children who are late for free breakfast do not get fed. Children two minutes late for class are late, and those who are chronically late or absent will fail. Parents will be held responsible for truancy and will be prosecuted and fined $100.

And to the children: “You are not here to misbehave. And if you do, you will be gone. I am going to make it clear. Misbehavior will not be tolerated. Misbehavior will not be tolerated. In this school we demonstrate what? Malcolm what?”

“Malcolm X-cellence,” many kids shout.

“Malcolm what?”

“Malcolm X-cellence!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“MALCOLM X-CELLENCE!”

His final warning is about weapons in school, a simple admonition that any violator will be automatically expelled. “Because Malcolm X is a school of what?” he asks. He repeats with the students, “Malcolm X is a school of love.”

No sooner has Pannell finished preaching his gospel than clusters of students, parents and grandparents converge on him as he leaves the cafeteria. The girls wear their black plaid Malcolm X jumpers, the boys white shirts, black or red ties, black pants. First, a little girl hugs Pannell. Another joins her, and then another, and then a little boy, and soon a huddle of first- and second-graders are clamoring and smothering him with hugs as he laughs, welcomes them back and says they better get moving to class.

A mother approaches hesitantly and tells Pannell she could not find a white shirt at Kmart for her first-grade son. “I’m sorry, darlin’, then he can’t stay here. He has to go home,” Pannell says with a pained expression. He bends down to give the little boy a hug, but shakes his head sadly at the mother. “I sent you the letter, darlin’.” The one explaining the uniform policy.

“Base to One. Base to One.” Pannell’s hand-held two-way radio crackles as one of his secretaries reports “overload in the office.” Fourteen mothers and grandmothers are crammed into a waiting room with 19 children they want to transfer into Malcolm X.

All of this happens to John Pannell between 10 a.m.
and 2 p.m. on a single December day:

A young mother breaks down in tears in his office after he tells her that her 7-year-old son is, in all likelihood, mentally retarded.

A grandfather brings his lawyer with him for a lengthy conference, determined to make his case that it would be best for his third-grade grandson if he were left back.

An 8-year-old boy has a seizure, leaving him temporarily blinded and panicking. The school nurse calls his mother, but she says she can’t come pick him up. Pannell grabs the phone and nearly shouts, “You have to come here or have someone pick him up, or I have to call the police!”

A malfunction shuts down the school’s only elevator, and he has to radio the building staff to fix it.

A sixth-grader is brought to the principal’s office for misbehaving, and after sitting silently and sullenly, he bursts into tears and tells Pannell he cannot control his anger because the other kids are teasing him about the fact that his mother is a prostitute.

A new janitor leaves a dangerous wet spot outside a bathroom. “Do you want to work here?” Pannell asks him. The janitor nods yes. “Then don’t let this happen again, or you walk.”

A baby-faced first-grader is brought to the principal’s office because he has passed a note to a girl in his class. “I love you we are going to have sex and its going to fill good,” it reads. Pannell investigates and learns that the note was actually written by two of the boy’s older sisters, supposedly as a joke. He decides to visit all the parents tonight.

On this troubling yet typical day at Malcolm X, Pannell’s right foot is in a cast because an angry first-grader turned over a desk and broke his big toe. On this day, Pannell will run late for various appointments because he has taken a little extra time to deal with each of the day’s problems.

To the young mother of the retarded child, Pannell outlined the measures the school would take to give him therapy and special education, and then counseled her: “Please don’t pressure this boy. Give him continual praise . ... You have to know your baby is doing the best that your baby can.”

To the angry son of the prostitute, Pannell talked gently about how the boy could not change his mother’s behavior, and then reviewed with him: “What did I tell you about controlling your anger? Deep breath. Count to 10. Freeze. Hold your head stiff. It’s easy, man. It’s easy, man.” But he warned him, “I’m going to be frank with you. If it happens again, I’m going to put you on the street for 10 days.”

To the grandfather who wanted his third-grader left back, Pannell made an extended pitch. And by the end of the discussion, Pannell convinced him that the child could pass, particularly since the grandfather agreed to become a volunteer reading assistant in his classroom.

The grandfather’s lawyer, Theresa Watson, who has witnessed only a few of the goings-on around Pannell’s office, asks how he puts up with all the stresses of his work. He laughs and says he is not sure. “I have many opportunities other than this,” he says, referring to this job, which pays him $70,000 a year. “I have many opportunities where I would not have to kill myself, but this is what I have chosen to do.”

At 2 o’clock Pannell, who usually misses lunch, decides to pop in on a sixth-grade math class and test the students. He quizzes them on exponents for a while, and to make it exciting, he fishes a dollar out of his pocket and offers it as a prize for answering a tough question: What is 549.1 times 10 squared? A girl wins it. Later, he tempts them with a $20 bill, but the kids are getting a bit rowdy, calling out answers and missing the misdirection in his question: What is a right triangle’s degrees times 7 squared? “I’m disappointed,” he says when nobody wins the $20 jackpot. “I’m leaving, because you are not serious. You just want to holler out answers and not listen.”

As the day wears on, the students and teachers long gone, Pannell surveys a mound of paperwork he has to complete – timecards, checks to be signed, forms to fill several teacher vacancies – and a number of other tasks he hasn’t gotten to. It will be another late night. His mood darkens. “I can’t work any more than I do. I can’t do any more. There is nothing that I am not doing,” he says. “You reach a point where you just say . . . whatever . . . whatever.”

He reflects on the hours he puts in, and on what they’ve cost him. “I missed my own daughter growing up,” he says. “I call her ‘Baby’ and she says, ‘Daddy, I’m no baby. I’m grown up.’ She’s in her second year of college.” Just a week earlier, Pannell and his wife, Sheila, visited his family in West Virginia for Thanksgiving “and my mother looked at me and said, ‘Wow, you have aged. It’s time for you to leave.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’‚”

Outside the school, in the darkness of evening, Pannell lights a cigarette and stands in the cold in front of Malcolm X, looking out over the old Jewish cemetery across Alabama Avenue. “I’ll have 25 years in at the end of this year,” he says. “I am thinking this year may be it for me.”

Later, though, he will laugh off the idea of leaving.

There is learning going on in Room 401.

Mr. Lumpkins is giving his fourth-graders a reading lesson unlike anything these kids have had before. Brian Lumpkins, a second-year teacher who is 28, is using a wireless modem to connect an IBM ThinkPad to the Internet. He is surfing the Web and taking his class to a Web site he found, AfroAmeric@KidZone.org.

Here, projected on a six-foot screen, digital technology brings an old African folk tale to life. With each click, a new color drawing comes into focus on the screen, along with several sentences of text about the adventures of a tiger, a spider and a firefly.

The 18 students are sitting on the floor, eyes riveted to the screen. “Me! Me!” a handful of them clamor to be called to read. They are competing hard because Mr. Lumpkins is allowing those who read and behave well to take turns operating the computer mouse.

“Make sure you read it just the way it is printed,” Lumpkins says firmly. “Make sure you observe all the punctuation.” The children’s reading is halting but competent, though they don’t recognize a few words, like “eventually,” “scheme” and “huge,” so Lumpkins stops to sound out and explain them.

Only one or two students are tuned out. One boy keeps making noise, and Lumpkins orders him to take a five-minute timeout. The rest of the class is buzzing with interest. As each screen brings up a few more sentences, Lumpkins asks the students what they think will happen next. Everyone has a theory.

The environment at Malcolm X can be quite distracting: During this lesson, police sirens wail three times down Alabama Avenue. The hallways outside 401 are particularly noisy because Malcolm X was built, in 1973, as an “open space” school – with classrooms separated by portable blackboards and bookcases instead of walls. Nonetheless, the Internet reading lesson is clearly a success. Children have not only practiced and enjoyed reading, but also have learned about Web sites and search engines.

“We have things here you would never expect in a school like this,” says Pannell proudly, regarding his concerted effort to bring technology to his classrooms.

The school operates five computer labs with 10 to 15 machines in each, and uses sophisticated software to allow students to progress through self-paced math and reading lessons under the guidance of teachers and computer aides. In addition, almost every classroom is outfitted with several computers, and the school recently had its wiring upgraded to provide Internet access to every class. Pannell says he is particularly excited about this, planning “virtual field trips” for kids who rarely even get out of their neighborhood.

According to the school system’s records, Malcolm X over the years has accumulated 60 computers. But Pannell actually has 156 working computers, thanks mostly to the partnerships he has developed with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Pepco and several other companies, churches and organizations. He has carted dozens of machines to the school in his pickup truck, and he’s learned to operate and install them. He has recruited volunteers to help maintain them. He secured a federal technology grant to buy 20 $600 wireless modems for use in the school library and classrooms.

So early in the school year, when Malcolm X got a fax from headquarters saying that the central office was coming out to take computer inventory, Pannell flew into a brief rage. Like most principals, he has endured years of scarce resources, uncertain supplies and difficulty getting machines fixed. “Do you think I’m going to let the computers become part of their inventory?” he asked. “Do they really think for a minute that any principal is going to give them to them?”

So when the time came, all school system property was properly inventoried. But somehow the other machines were not immediately available for inspection.