Chapter 111: Project Management

Saturday, June 19, 1982

Angie and I arrived at Troy’s house at 1pm for the Project Graduation planning meeting. We wanted to get everything in order for our appointment with Principal Riggs on Monday.

As we were walking in, another land yacht pulled up and parked. Calvin climbed out, then went around and helped Megan out. I figured their holding hands answered the question about whether they were dating.

“Hey!” Calvin called.

“Hi, Calvin. Hi, Megan,” I called back.

“Hi, Steve,” Megan said, smiling. No hint of a blush or anything else. Good. There wasn’t all that much to blush about.

“Hi!” Angie called.

Calvin nodded back to his car. “I see we have the same taste in rides!”

I chuckled. “Yeah. It’s called cheap.”

He laughed. “People think I should be in a Corvette or something. They’re pretty cool, but they’re just too dang small!”

“What does your dad drive?” I said, shaking hands with him. His left, since he hadn’t dropped Megan’s.

He laughed a bit harder. “Dad said he drove one his rookie season for two weeks. Then his back started hurting! He got a big old Cadillac and that’s been his pick ever since. Nothing flashy. No pimp-mobile! He says all the new kids buy something flashy at first, but most of them get over themselves before long, at least about cars. Not always about other things.”

Another car pulled up, this one producing Amit and Sheila. They held hands, too. Angie tossed a wink my direction. Two for two on the matchmaking front.

As we were all saying hi, Lizzie appeared, and while she was hugging everyone — which appeared to surprise Calvin a bit, at least — Mikayla arrived. She hugged everyone, too.

We all headed in, finding that Cammie was already there. No Mel, but then not everyone here was aware of that. I think, anyway. Cammie hugged everyone, and Troy shook hands with the guys and got hugs from the girls. Tony appeared in the middle of that, and we went through all the greetings again.

One nice part of all this was that, so far, we all got along and liked each other. That can be hard to do with a bunch of high-performers with egos and agendas.

Tony cleared his throat. “Tom’s not coming today. He wants us to run things ourselves as much as possible so he can officially be somewhat neutral. That’s especially true in this case, where ... well. Where school politics might get involved.”

School politics meant, I think, that Miss Cuthbert might not be alone in her skewed view of girls’ abilities, and might retaliate. That wouldn’t surprise me. It also didn’t dissuade me, it made me more focused.

We all gathered in the Hills’ living room which, while nowhere near the size of Mike’s, was fine for this group. Neither of Tony’s parents appeared. Maybe they were out. A bunch of us settled on either of the two couches or the couple of end chairs, and several sat on the floor.

“Okay, y’all. I’m handing this over to Sheila Adcock — y’all know Sheila, right?” Heads nodded. “She’ll take it from here.”

“Hey, everyone!” Sheila said. “These guys voted me chair, so I guess I’m the one who gets to talk.”

“It’s hard to get Sheila to talk,” I said, getting a round of laughter.

“Shut up, Marshall!” she grinned, sticking her tongue out at me. I stuck mine out and wiggled it, drawing another round of laughter.

“Okay! Shush! Anyway, I’m chairing this thing. My committee is comprised of Calvin Bryant, Cammie Clarke, Troy Dane, and Megan Early. Apparently we were destined to be together.”

Several people looked confused. I got it; I could see that Angie did, too.

“Our last names start with the letters A through E. A is, of course, in charge.”

Another round of laughter, even louder than before.

Amit grinned. “She reminds me she’s in charge all the time, too.”

“And don’t you forget it! Anyway, so. This whole thing is Steve’s idea...”

I rose and took a theatrical bow. Several people beaned me with crumpled-up sheets of paper.

“Now that he’s done patting himself on the back, here’s what we’ve figured out, so far. Our goal ... officially ... is to document how great Memorial students are and how well we’re meeting our potential, with the help of the great teachers and faculty at Memorial. Rah, rah, go Memorial!”

Everyone chuckled.

“I do mean that. None of this, except ... well, you know, one little bit ... should sound cynical or anything. It’s a feel-good project, or it should be. I’m damn glad I’m going to Memorial and not some other school.”

Lots of us nodded at that. We were all pretty much big in extracurriculars and we knew, from experience, that there were only a handful of local schools that were as good, and none were ‘better’ to any meaningful extent. At some things? Sure. We got our asses handed to us in sports much more often than we did the same to other schools. But as a good high school that got you well-positioned for college and life? We were pretty hard to beat there.

“So, it’s broken down into a few phases. The obvious are just names and post-graduation plans. Mostly colleges, but we have the people who are going into the military or whatever. That says nothing about potential, though. If you skim down the list and Joe Blow is off to Sam Houston State, is that because Joe Blow is a lousy student with mediocre grades in the lower tier of classes, or is that because Joe Blow is a slacker who could’ve gone anywhere but wants to sleep through college? Unless you know Joe Blow, who knows?”

Everyone nodded again. That was pretty much true. I wouldn’t know the kids in the lower class tier, really, and even some in my own tier were just faces and names. I wouldn’t know if they were straight-A or barely-C.

“So, our plan is to hit the school up for GPA. Their class tier will be reflected with the different grade points from different classes as much as we can. I don’t think they’ll give us the raw data. Maybe, but, you know, privacy. I’m not sure I want them handing out my GPA all that easily. That’s fine, though. I’m hoping they’ll break it out beyond quartile and maybe give us, say, 10 bands, from top 10% to bottom 10%.”

This was new, and made sense to me. Class ranking isn’t all that private, but GPAs are, mostly. No one wants their peers heckling them about underperforming, or to be singled out as the one blowing the curve. Not that there was just one blowing the curve in any of my classes.

“So, that’s step one. If Riggs won’t play ball we’ll have to get that information another way. How, I’m not sure. But I think he will. Step two is where they’re going. The school tracks what people tell them and updates it regularly. We need that data. Again, there are privacy issues, but here we actually can show a need to know, and it’ll be public at graduation, anyway.

“Step three is where the counselors suggest they should go. We have two angles on that. One is that we’ve put together a form that we want the counselors to fill out. On it is the student’s name and target schools. If we get shot down, the second-best is our alternate form, with class rank band, demographic data — male/female, ethnicity, all that — and target schools. If that gets shot down, so we can’t get useful data from the counselors, we go to Plan B.

“Plan B is just ask all the students. And ask again. And again. And again. And keep asking. It’ll be really hard to get responses, and people will drop through the cracks, and we won’t be able to prove that a student who says some counselor pointed them to Bovine Technical College instead of Harvard is telling the truth.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah, and we want that documented if we can. Still, anything’s better than nothing. But the whole thing will be cooler if we know what’s going on.”

Sheila nodded. “We’re pretty optimistic that Riggs will agree. Now, the thing is, we’ll be doing Plan B anyway. We’re just not mentioning it to Riggs unless it’s clear the school won’t play ball. But, well. Maybe some student heard Hereford U when the counselor said Harvard U.”

That got another round of laughter.

“Plan B is a ton of work. We’re hoping to get teachers to play ball and hand out the forms, but, again, we’ll spring that on them around November or so, if we’re getting counselor feedback.

“Anyway, once we have all that data, we’ll do another ton of work and make a big master list with students, suggested destinations, final destination, and some kind of score. We’re thinking maybe we can use college rankings from one of those guidebooks to score the colleges. If the student’s average suggested destination is, say, 50, and they’re going to 25, hey, look how we’re overachieving. On the other hand, if their suggested destination is 25 and they’re going to 50, maybe we ask the student if there’s some reason. Family legacy, money, town they want to live in, saving money for graduate school, whatever. We note that, so it doesn’t look like ‘Gee, our students are slackers.’ And, that’s pretty much the plan. All the inputs get tossed in, we do a lot of work, and out comes a nice shiny report.”

Tony smiled. “This is really awesome. Good work, Sheila.”

We all clapped. Sheila blushed, just a bit, and took her own bow. “If Steve gets to, I do, too.”

“You’re both showoffs,” Angie said.

“Takes one to know one,” Sheila said right back, grinning.

“We have a meeting set up for 2pm on Monday with Principal Riggs,” Tony said. “We can’t take everyone, and we’re trying to keep it lower profile. I was thinking me, Steve, and Sheila. I can speak for the incoming council, Steve thought it up, and it’s Sheila’s baby.”

Everyone agreed that was a good lineup, and that low-profile was best. It looked like we had a plan. Now, to get past the next hurdle. I was nearly certain Principal Riggs would love the idea. Anything that said ‘Memorial is great’ would be good for him, and he knew perfectly well that we had great kids going to great schools. However, would he see this as sneaky oversight of the counselors?

And, if so, would he agree anyway? Miss Cuthbert’s awful suggestions were objectively bad for students and bad for Memorial, after all. If he was aware of them, perhaps it would be better if we brought the pressure before he had to take any action.

We’d find out Monday, most likely.

Sunday, June 20, 1982

Not quite like we had with Mom, but we planned a surprise for Dad for Father’s Day. This one was much smaller. We cooked some nice steaks, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and chocolate mousse. More precisely, I grilled the steaks, being really careful about time and temperature and regretting the lack of a sous vide setup, while Angie did most of the rest. Totally stereotypical ‘guy with grill’, but the division of labor worked for both of us.

Dad was impressed with the effort we’d put in and loved the meal. At least this time we could do something more personal.

We hung out and played games for a few hours before taking off for our planned meeting, allegedly at Mike’s house but actually with Jane.

Jane greeted us both with hugs. “How are my favorite time travelers?”

“Good,” Angie said.

“Good, too,” I said.

“That’s good to hear. Anything noteworthy?”

I jumped in. “Angie is still trying to steal my girlfriend.”

“Am not! Besides, you’ve got someone else falling for you!” Angie was giggling as she said that.

“This is ... news. What’s up?”

I explained the situation with Jessica, going over our last couple of meetings. She knew about the ‘near miss,’ of course, but not the fallout, including Jessica’s admission that she was falling for me.

“Kid gloves, Steve. She’s tough, but sometimes the toughest people have weak points, and people with broken hearts can be unpredictable.”

“I’m doing my best. I really don’t want to hurt her. I love her, too, but as a friend, nothing more. And I mean that, though, admittedly, some of it is that I’m good at focusing on how disastrous it’d be if I let things get out of control.”