Rich Taylor is a guidance counselor at Homewood-Flossmoor High, one of the top schools in the state, with an enrollment of 2,040 students, 77 percent white, 15 percent black.
He has responsibility for 274 freshmen. He`ll stay with them throughout their four years. He`ll help pull them through algebra, geometry and trig. He`ll fill out the forms when they want to drop Poli Sci and add Contemporary Living. He`ll make sure they sign up in time for the PSATs, the SATs and the ACTs. He`ll watch over them while they fill out their college applications. He`ll write recommendations when they need jobs. He`s been doing it for 24 years. When he started, he was called an adjustment officer, and the adjustments were minor compared to what he sees today.
He deals with personal problems, academic problems, family problems, career planning. Everything but discipline. ”The deans do that,” says Taylor. ”They wear the black hats. I wear the white hat.”
The first report cards have just gone out to his freshmen and he`s calling them all in, just to see how things are going, just to make sure they`re making the transition from grammar school, with toilet recess and
”put your head down on your desk” discipline to high school, where the girl at the next locker might be pregnant.
”I had a senior girl last year, what a cutie,” says Taylor. ”God bless her, she walked across that stage to pick up her diploma eight months pregnant.”
And the boy on the fourth row in Spanish could have just come out of drug rehab.
”Those things are a fact of life today,” says Taylor, 56.
On this rainy fall day, a trickle of freshmen, small and still a little shell-shocked, file through his cinderblock office. Above his desk is a Snoopy cartoon: ”Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. It gives you a warm feeling, but nobody notices.” There`s a map of colleges and universities on the wall. Pamphlets are available: ”What Teens Should Know About Divorce in the Family,” ”About Suicide,” ”Making Responsible Choices About Sex” and ”Stress Management.”
Right next to the desk is a file cabinet. It actually contains the dreaded ”permanent records,” these dating from 1974. Every test score, every grade, every infraction, every sleazy act ever committed is recorded here for posterity.
”I keep thinking I should throw them out,” says Taylor. ”But then I had the FBI call me. They were doing a check on a kid before they hired him, and they wanted to see his record. I`m glad I kept it.”
A girl shows up for her appointment.
”How did you do this quarter?” Taylor asks her.
She shrugs. ”Not very good.”
”Can I take a peek?”
He flips through 274 report cards and finds her grades.
”Not good is right. This F in biology, is it a high F or a low F?”
It`s a middle F. The girl is also having trouble in math.
”My math teacher gets really mad if I ask him a question,” she says. Taylor has heard this one before, a couple of million times. He explains to her the concept of homework: ”You have to do it, kiddo. You really do. I`ll give you Friday night and all day Saturday off, if you give me Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.”
”I`m going to start,” she says.
”I need an honest effort from you. Let`s keep in touch. Feel free to come in as often as you like. There`s an open-door policy. And I`ll start bugging you in another three or four weeks, especially as progress reports start coming in.”
The girl has a final question: How many classes can she fail before she becomes a second-year freshman?
”If you fail two, you`re reclassified,” says Taylor. ”But you don`t want that to happen.”
”Actually,” Taylor says later, after the girl has gone back to class,
”we do have five-year people. The kids call them `super seniors.` But there`s no stigma attached to it. They`re not called dummies and they`re not embarrassed. Some stay till they`re 21. I sometimes think they just don`t want to face the real world. This is a nice, warm place and we have a 95-cent lunch.”
House call
A freshman boy comes in. Taylor warns him that ”the years will fly by,” a hard sell to a kid who sits in English class and swears the clock isn`t moving. ”We`re going to have to start talking about interests and vocations soon.”
Another girl comes in. She`s in honors classes and getting A`s and B`s.
”I`ve heard that colleges look at your freshman year,” she says.
”They look at all of them,” says Taylor. He asks her if she`s involved in any after-school activities. Colleges look at that too.
”I have to get home to watch my brother and sister.”
One of Taylor`s former counselees waves hello. He`s here to see the guidance counselor assigned to his son, a senior at H-F. That`s what happens when you`ve been at the same school all those years.
The phone rings. It`s the mother of a boy who has bounced back and forth between his parents, his mother in Homewood-Flossmoor in the southern suburbs and his father in a northwest suburb. The boy got all F`s and an incomplete for the first quarter. He was gone for part of the time, in an adolescent psychiatric hospital. The police had to remove him from his home because he was beating his mother.
Now he`s gone to live with his father. The mother is calling to withdraw the boy from school. But she`s missed so much work dealing with him that she can`t take any more time off. Taylor says he`ll bring the forms to her house. ”It doesn`t bother me. I`m still dedicated to kids and education, even after all these years,” he says. ”I don`t mind going the extra mile.”
Last year he visited one of his counselees who was also in a psychiatric hospital. She was a straight-A student who, as Taylor puts it, ”popped.”
”I know when a kid is going to pop. I`d call her in and she`d sit there like this”-he crosses his hands across his chest and stares straight ahead, his face expressionless-”no emotion.”
Too tired to be parents
It`s a whole different ball game, being a guidance counselor in 1990, from what it was in 1966, when Taylor started. Kids still have problems with their parents and their peers, but the problems themselves are so different.
Taylor is counseling one girl who has no father, not just no father at home, but no father in her record. Her mother drinks and takes drugs occasionally. When her mother`s boyfriend stays over, the girl sleeps on the couch.
”I asked my wife if we have any clean blouses for her. Sometimes she looks like she needs a bath. The kid has three strikes against her. I asked her when was the last time she had a meal with her mother. She said never. She`s on her own.
”That`s the biggest change I`ve seen-the family structure. Single parents, two working parents. We have kids who eat their breakfast and lunch here and then go home and make themselves dinner. The parents are just too busy, they`re too job-oriented. Some are over their heads financially. They live in these big, beautiful houses and they need to work around the clock to make it. What`s happening is that the parents want the schools to raise their children. They don`t have time to do it anymore. They`re too tired.”
The school tries to take up the slack. Taylor is one of eight guidance counselors. There are also five deans. Two social workers were added in 1967, a psychologist in 1980 and a substance-abuse counselor in 1988.
”The problems today are so much more intense than they ever were. Twenty years ago, only a few kids smoked a little pot and drank beer on Friday nights. What goes on today, it`s unreal. If you don`t drink, you`re not cool. And kids are much more into sex than they were 20 years ago. Girls and guys go out on Friday night, have a few beers, and around 11:30, they go have sex. It`s kind of common these days. My freshmen are still a little naive, but I see them trying to be cool.”
When the parties get out of hand, houses occasionally get ”trashed.”
”It happened to a house in Homewood to the tune of $10,000,” says Taylor. ”There`s such a lack of respect. They`ll drink half a beer and throw the rest on the carpet, smash an aquarium and start eating the fish. They`ll say, `I`ll bet you $5 you can`t put your fist through that wall.` Goofy things.”
Failure to respect
Teen pregnancy is nothing new. What is new, is the lack of stigma attached to it. The school encourages the girls to attend classes, right up until they give birth.
”It`s so much better than when they used to be shipped off somewhere. And the other kids accept them beautifully.”
Five years ago, one of Taylor`s counselees got pregnant, a bright girl in the top 10 percent of her class.
Taylor talked often with the girl and her mother. ”We couldn`t get the father to come in,” Taylor says. ”He wanted to put the girl through a wall.”
Taylor started counseling the father of the girl`s child, another H-F student.
At first the boy wanted to quit school and get a job. But he and the girl were encouraged to stay in school and look for other options. They both finished their education and recently got married.
”They were two super kids who just made a mistake on homecoming night,” says Taylor. ”I get Christmas cards from them.”
That girl`s mother was interested and involved, but in general, Taylor finds today`s parents less responsive than they used to be. ”Twenty years ago, if you called a mother and said your kid is acting out, she`d be here in a minute. The parents supported you. Now they say, `Not my kid` and they`re ready to sue the school.”
Part of the reason is a lack of respect he finds for teachers. ”Way back when, the teacher was way up here. Now we`re at the bottom of the barrel. It`s the guy with the big convertible who`s got all the status.”
Divorce is something most kids didn`t have to cope with 20 years ago. Taylor finds it especially hard on adolescents.
Holiday rifts
”They`re changing physically, emotionally, and then this happens and it just blows their minds. They want to know what it will mean for them. `Who`s going to get me?` Do they have to move, leave their home, leave their school? You see their grades start dropping and the behavior changing.
”And they hate the holidays. On the Wednesday through Friday before Christmas we have all kinds of crises in here. They`re anticipating rough times. They get shipped off here or there. Fridays are tough around here, too. One girl told me that her father is three sheets to the wind all weekend. She dreads it.”
There`s a lot written these days about burned-out teachers. Rich Taylor isn`t one of them. After 34 years in education, 24 in counseling, he says,
”Kids-I love `em. All they need is a little guidance.”
issues for teens
The concerns of teenagers today don`t sound very different from those of 35 years ago, when James Dean`s brooding portrayal in ”Rebel Without a Cause”
became the paradigm.
Yet school officials say the intensity of the problems is greater today, along with kids` candor.
The top problems:
1. Getting along with parents
2. Boy-girl relationships
3. Self-knowledge
4. Future plans: college, career and vocational decisions
5. Academics
