The Math of Heartbreak in Levittown

 

Levittown, Pa.

IMPERILED  A school budget meeting in Levittown, Pa., was full of sadness, not anger. More Photos »

SOUR NOTE  Kevin McCann, a Truman High senior, feels the courses weren't rigorous enough. More Photos »

WHEN he first introduced cuts at a public meeting last month, Samuel Lee, the superintendent of the Bristol Township School District, was plainspoken and direct. He did not say that everyone would pull together and the children would get the same great education, but, rather, that worthy programs would be dismantled and young teachers would lose jobs. “Everything that is going to be presented tonight is not good for our kids,” he said as about 300 teachers, parents and students looked on. “We are heartbroken.”

I grew up in blue-collar Levittown, and have written about it several times for this newspaper as a window into national sentiment. The community was deeply skeptical of Barack Obama early in 2008, then voted for him in huge numbers in the fall. In 2010, the local Democratic congressman was turned out of office amid a wave of national anger over the economy.

Over the past several weeks, I have watched as local officials and community residents confronted a budget shortfall that threatens to reverse hard-won gains in schools that once performed poorly. But I did not hear much of the polarization, argumentation and point-scoring that the cable news universe reflects as the totality of our civic discourse. In Levittown, this time around, the mood is one of sadness, loss and resignation.  “We’re all struggling in this community,” W. Earl Bruck, an electrician, and chairman of the board’s budget committee, told those at the meeting. “I can tell you that I’ve been out of work for 56 weeks.”

Levittown was once ringed by industrial giants: United States Steel, 3M, Vulcanized Rubber and Plastics. Its language is relentlessly concrete. It is about the job. The hourly wage. What it takes to get ahead — or fall behind. Mr. Bruck said he found it “wrenching” to cast a vote that would lead to layoffs.

The Bristol Township School District, one of three that educates Levittown children, draws students from the lower end of town. It has never been quite the educational wasteland that some of its neighbors in mostly prosperous Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia, might imagine. Although few of the district’s students qualify for or can afford the nation’s most prestigious colleges, about 70 percent of its graduates in recent years have continued their educations, many of them in community college or in Pennsylvania’s web of state colleges.

And there are pockets of excellence. For the past year, I have been working on a book about one of them: the drama program at Harry S. Truman High School, one that against all odds is perhaps the best in the nation. (The high school and its longtime drama director, Lou Volpe, were chosen to stage the first high school production of “Rent,” to see if it would work at that level; several years before, when Truman piloted “Les Misérables,” the Broadway and West End producer Cameron Mackintosh arrived in Levittown by limousine to see the production.)

One thing I noticed right away while following this vaunted program: Sometimes a student, even one of the leads in a production, will walk offstage in the middle of rehearsal, pull on his uniform for Chick-fil-A or some other local business, and leave. No objections are ever raised. Here, where the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, well above the national average, a paycheck is paramount. People may not be surprised or angry that the school district is in dire straits because, well, that’s where they are too.

“Our youngsters used to work so they could drive a car and pay their insurance,” said Palmer Toto, who began teaching English at Truman High in 1969 and is now director of its guidance department. “Now we have some who are working 30 hours a week, and they’re contributing it to the household income.”

Bristol Township faces a nearly $10 million shortfall for next year in a total school budget of $123 million, figures that place the community in circumstances common to hundreds of school districts across the nation. They are facing steep cuts in state education financing and depressed local tax revenue, in part from home foreclosures.

Fifty-one percent of Bristol Township’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch. When schools were first measured under the No Child Left Behind act, the district scored near the bottom of state rankings. Through smaller class sizes and more intense attention given to lagging students, it is now near the middle. “The knock on our schools was you couldn’t get a good education here,”  James Moore, the principal at Truman High, told me one recent afternoon. “Nobody can say that anymore.”