For South Florida’s toughest teens, schoolwork continues in jail
The Palm Beach Post
Friday, February 17, 2006

By ANDREW MARRA

Elizabeth Slater, 63 and silver-haired, stands in a roomful of inmates in red jumpsuits and asks for a volunteer.

The teacher scans the faces around her, the ultimate captive audience. They are sleepy and sullen and sometimes grim, the faces of teens in the worst of trouble.

A boy raises his hand and begins to read. Textbooks are open to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary . . . ”

The teen spits out the opening lines with a vague hip-hop cadence, his words echoing across the cellblock.

At the Palm Beach County Jail, everything echoes. The clang of metal doors, the shuffling of sandals, the buzz of fluorescent lights.

But on the 12th floor there are other echoes, too. Grinding pencil-sharpeners and algebra explanations and muttered verses of poetry.

With flip-flops and smatterings of facial hair, the teens that gather in cellblock 12D each school day sit accused of rape, robbery, car theft or murder. Today they are listening as Slater speaks of Shakespeare and standardized tests.

Slater and her four co-workers staff one of the Palm Beach County School District’s gloomiest outposts, teaching teens who, in the eyes of the criminal justice system, have been dubbed the worst of the worst.

While most youths who are arrested go to the juvenile detention center, several dozen of the most serious cases sit at the county jail because they are being prosecuted as adults - the result of the severity or frequency of their alleged crimes.

Among the students are teens charged with some of the county’s most chilling violence.

Milagro Cunningham, accused of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old Lake Worth girl and leaving her half-dead under a pile of rocks, attends classes here. So does Timothy Underwood, one of three teens who allegedly sank one bullet each into a 42-year-old man’s bloodied body after beating and dumping him in the woods.

Years ago, Slater counted among her students Nathaniel Brazill, the teen who shot and killed Lake Worth Middle School teacher Barry Grunow.

“Our students come here with so much baggage that it’s heart-wrenching,” says Denise Franklin-Smith, who has worked as a guidance counselor for the jail’s students for five years.

Teens often hostile at first

Wherever their minds may be, today their bodies are in Slater’s class.

She teaches them at circular tables in the cellblock’s common area, the same place they eat, watch television and socialize. The only sunlight trickles in from the 3-inch-high slits that serve as windows. Otherwise, the room is lit by buzzing florescent lights.

It’s a Monday, one day before the writing portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which nearly all fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders across Florida are required to take.

The students in jail are no exception, but the typical pre-test preparations and anxieties are absent here.

As inmates take turns reading passages from The Raven, the class is perfectly quiet. A female deputy glowers at the students from behind a desk.

When Slater passes out paper for vocabulary exercises, someone asks when the FCAT test will be.

Tomorrow, she says.

“We gonna study?”

“Oh yes. We’re studying now,” Slater says.

The boy looks down for a moment.

“Ain’t no way we can cheat on the FCAT?”

She laughs.

At the jail, the juveniles’ ages range from 13 to 17, and they are generally all taught in one class setting.

About half of the teens have learning disabilities. Some speak little or no English.

One of the five teachers, a specialist in alternative education, pulls out some learning-disabled students for one-on-one sessions. By law, the jail must offer the same educational services available at a traditional school.

But this is no traditional school. At the jail, teens are brought and taken away in cuffs with little notice. Some stay for days or weeks. Others have been known to stay as long as two years.

Many know that they are likely to face decades of hard time at a state prison for their crimes.

“We never know who’s coming or who’s going,” says Marilyn Mellone, the jail’s alternative-education teacher. “We do what we can while we’ve got them.”

In this environment it is difficult to chart student progress. The inmates are assessed at the beginning of their stay and then every 45 days afterward. One supervisor said roughly half of the students will show some substantial improvements; the other half with show little or none.

The jail’s teachers work throughout the year with shortened holiday breaks. There are no summer vacations here, and their salaries are increased accordingly.

Slater says the inmates are often hostile when they first arrive. But after a few days of jail’s harsh realities, they generally treat her and the other teachers with respect, even fondness. In her roughly four years here, she says she has never been attacked or physically harassed.

The discipline problems that plague public-school classrooms are largely absent here.

The students wear uniforms and are separated from the opposite sex. Most importantly, teachers say, the students are under the constant watch of a sheriff’s deputy, who takes it upon herself to enforce order.

One misstep and a teenager can be sent to his cell for a 24-hour stint.

The teachers here say many perceive their jobs as dangerous and undesirable. But they say, only partly in jest, that they have the best teaching gigs in Palm Beach County.

“If they had a deputy in every classroom, the kids could learn,” Slater says, referring to the rest of the county’s public school system.

Attitude and success

Today, while Slater is attending to students at one table, a student across the room stands up. No one seems to notice at first, but then the deputy spots him and pierces the calm.

“Is there a reason why you’re standing?” the deputy bellows.

“I can’t stretch?” the kid says with a tinge of attitude.

He does not sit down.

“Get in your room,” the deputy says.

The inmate throws down his pencil.

“I wanted to stay in my room anyway,” he mutters, walking off.

In the past five years, two students have earned a high school diploma at the county jail. This spring, teachers hope, another one will graduate before he turns 18.

But in the end, the teachers acknowledge there is only so much they can do for most of the students. Some pick up some reading or math skills while they are there, only to be released and continue their youths as high-school dropouts.

Others will leave jail for decades-long prison sentences, negating much of their opportunity to apply their skills in the real world.

Howard Boyd, who with five years here is the jail’s longest-serving teacher, tries to impress upon his students the importance of learning a trade or craft.

Not everyone will go to college, he tells them, but they can make good money repairing air-conditioners or fixing cars.

Sometimes, while he’s out shopping or eating on a weekend, Boyd will come across former inmates milling about.

He never approaches them, but sometimes they will see him and greet him by name.

They smile and laugh. Some will tell him they are doing well “on the outs” - back in the free world.

Boyd smiles back and tells them he is glad to hear it. He says he has only one piece of advice:

“I tell them don’t ever come back,” he says.