As Robrt Pela reflects on his high school struggles, he says kids today have bigger hurdles

Contributor Robrt Pela looks back on a particular anniversary in his life and considers how things have changed.

ROBRT PELA: Fifty years ago today, I started high school.

I didn’t want to go. The day before — Aug. 27, 1976 — I’d gotten on the phone with my best friend, to say goodbye, forever. We both knew this was it. We’d heard all the stories about high school ruffians who lived to torment freshmen. We knew we’d never live beyond our first day of high school because school bullies always started with the little gay kids, which my best friend and I most decidedly were.

We’d gone all through grade school with the same 200 kids, and while they hadn’t liked us much, they’d gotten used to our sweater vests and our campy asides and our obsession with Petula Clark. But now we were going to a school with four times as many kids, most of whom we didn’t know. I was supposed to go to a school closer to my home, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from the only other pansy I’d ever met before, I convinced my parents to get special permission for me to go to Apollo High. I told them it was because the school I was supposed to go to had a lot more kids who took drugs. To which my father replied, “Did you take a poll?”

My parents finally relented. It was something of a compromise. I’d tried to get them to let me stay home and get my high school diploma by way of a correspondence course. I could focus on my studies, I told them, maybe even graduate early. I left out the part about how scared I was of the mean-spirited teenaged tyrants who were going to murder me because I was a homosexual.

They weren’t having any of it — in large part because correspondence courses were expensive, and why waste money when your kid could do what every other kid was doing, and go to public school for free?

My husband and I talk a lot about how we were both bullied in high school, and how we learned to cope. In his case, by grabbing one of his bullies, slamming him against a locker and threatening to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t knock it off. And in my case, by joining the school newspaper and writing acerbic commentaries on why homecoming dances were an embarrassment to both our school and to all of mankind.

Usually I’m willing to admit that, even though I got pushed around by what felt like a lot of demon-possessed monsters, I also made a lot of friends and eventually made peace with the idea that we live in a world where most people will hate you just for being who you are. That was a lesson they weren’t teaching us in civics class.

Today, I might have had a better chance of getting my folks to agree to distance learning. Especially since, today, they wouldn’t have had to pay for my home-schooling. As a 14-year-old who was just trying to stay alive, it wouldn’t have mattered to me that I might have been contributing to a larger problem that was harming public schools everywhere.

We’ve all heard about how Arizona school districts are bracing for massive budget shortfalls this year — millions of dollars gone from operating budgets that were already stretched pretty thin. The result is fewer teachers hired, more programs being cut and more schools closing. That’s because distance learning is sharing the same local funding earmarked for public schools, thanks to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, which lets parents pay for homeschooling with a voucher.

My husband’s a schoolteacher, and we talk a lot about the newish no-bullying policies at most schools, and how those are making schools safer for “different” kids. He recently mentioned that programs like the ones that promote zero tolerance for bullying are usually the first to get cut when school budgets are trimmed.

If you’d told me 50 years ago that my absence on campus might have led to my school closing, I’d have applauded. Today, a half-century later, I see the larger implications for students with bigger hurdles to leap over. And I don’t feel much like clapping about it.