Not that I can be bullied (Ms Diva) :) but I’m actually tired of talking about Coach. I do have a couple of things to share but I will save them for a later post. I forgot to fill you all in on my baby’s 8th grade graduation.

Oooh Lawd, where do I begin? Well how about the beginning. My mom lives across the street from the Ghetto Institute of Lower Learning (lets just call it GILL) that my godbrother (my baby) graduated from. My brother and I both attended GILL for pre-K only! It was ghetto 25 years ago and it is ghetto now. But we loved living across the street because we were usually guaranteed to see at least one good ghetto fight or at the very least a ghetto fashion show. And we certainly weren’t disappointed on graduation day. We have seen everything from limos to prom dresses for the 8th grade graduation. Sadly enough, this will be the only graduation for many of these kids (not my baby, he knows that college is an EXPECTATION not an option). This year there were no prom dresses or limos but Lawd if the ‘fits were not HIGH-LARIOUS! Everything from full combat outfits with orange and red koolaid colored hair to zoot suits to the purple and red gators! Tell me that we are not country-licious in the Chi!

Oh but my darlings it gets worse! So they didn’t let anyone into the auditorium until 2 minutes before the ceremony so that the folks wouldn’t be fighting over the seat. But you know that didn’t give the special folk enough time to hoop and holler and clown before the festivities. My baby was the salutatorian and he was TRYING to give the welcome but you couldn’t hear him over the nigras hollering “that’s my baby” and “you go Tarantulaniqualiqua”. Not to mention I was getting a headache from the contact high and yes I said contact high from the WOMEN in front of me! I had my cell phone out text messaging Coach the whole time cause I just couldn’t believe it!

So as they tried to get the people to settle down so you could hear the ceremony, the principal gets on the mic. She has been the principal of GILL for at least 30 yrs and she has been an ignorant broad for as long as I can remember. She steps to the mic and says “There is all this extra noise because we have 19 extra children on stage today. I didn’t have to let these children participate in the ceremony since they have to go to summer school but I thought I would and that’s why we have all of this poor behavior in the audience”. Now how would she know which of the families were cutting up! And nobody needed to know that there were children on stage who weren’t graduating. That was just unnecessary. What was just as sad was the fact that there were 50 children on stage and 19 (yes, 40%) of them weren’t qualified graduates.

Then the guest speaker got up and berated the parents for their behavior and told them all about their behinds. He subsequently gave a wonderful speech but you know he had lost many of the ghetto but not fabulous in the first 10 minutes when he told them that it was no wonder their kids weren’t doing well, they have irresponsible parents. Interesting thing is that some of the children’s parents are my age so they never really grew up. Lots of babies trying to raise babies in the hood.

My mother was outdone by the whole event. She just couldn’t wait for the festivities to be over. But my baby was cute even if he did have on some ghetto silver shoes. Now we get ready for high school. He’s going to a magnet program that isn’t too far from his house. Because yes, although he moved out of the neighborhood 2 or 3 yrs ago, his mom let him stay in the old school even though it was on probation. Lawd that’s a whole nother topic! I have mixed feelings about “special schools” even though I attended magnet or gifted programs from 1st grade through high school. On one hand it is great to have high achieving students able to be challenged by their teachers and peers but on the other, it sucks the talent out of the neighborhood schools and often leaves those schools without incentive to excel. I believe in public education. I went to school for free even though I could have easily gotten scholarships to private schools because we’s po!