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It just isn't fair....

A story of East St. Louis High School

East St. Louis High is located in a run down area of St. Louis. For the most part many of the students in the school come from low-income homes and live with just one parent, usually the mother and many times the father has been killed or they have no idea who their father is. Teachers in the school work with children who have had some of the worst lives and sometimes have been through more than 40 year old adults. The children come to school to escape the harsh world they live in. At East St. Louis the school is almost beyond repair, the weight room smells of sweat and water-rot. The ceiling is in danger of collapsing and the heat does not work. In the winter students are forced to lift weights with their jackets on. In another part of the school holds vocational rooms and many are not used. The halls in this wing smell. The school has both a machineshop and working woodshop but because of lack of staff the shops are not vacant. The only shop that is used is the auto-body class. Not much can be done in the room due to the fact that the equipment in the class is very out dated. The instructor says, "But we need most is new equipment but,it's far beyond the school's budget.It looks like a very old gas station in a rural town." The Chemistry labs in the building is not much better many of the materials in the lab are at least 30 years out dated. The room does not have lab tables, students sit at regular desks. They need dissecting kits and the one's they do have are inccomplete. The school also need microscopes and other chemistry supplies. The building has one lab that is properly equipped. There are eight tables with gas jets and water. The instrutor says he rarely bring the students in the lab because he can not supervise 30 students safely. Chemicals labs are unsafe with more than 20 students with just one teacher. He goes on to say if he had lab assistants he could make use of the lab but until then the students study from textbooks. Ths school even has a problem with having enough text books a class set. The school was short books for four months one semester, and when the books did come in they were a different copy than what they had already had.The school does not have the funds to buy VCR players for classes, teachers must pay for any tools they choose to use to aid in teaching their students. Funding issues are so bad for this school that one teacher said, "I have done without so much so long that, if I were assigned to a suburban school, I'm not sure I'd recognize what they were doing. We are utterly cut off." Four girls who are seniors a pregnant or have just had babies. Many say they got pregnant because, "There is no reason not to have a baby. There's not much for in public school." A dipoloma from a ghetto high school doesn't count for much in the United States.

The above story is the truths and the funding problems that students in East St. Louis face. The sad part is, this school is one of the better one's in the district. Until something is done about the unfairness children who live in the city are going to continue to go without. The education they recieve will not be adequate and no wonder the students can not do well on college entrance exam. How can a student be properly taught if the instructor does not have the tools to properly teach their students. Until the government takes action and makes all education equal nothing is going to be done.

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