The Passion of Lori Thomas
By Diana Martin
Early Christmas morning, while it was still dark outside, a Dodge Caravan slid by the city school district’s office in Rochester. A woman emerged with a 20-foot ladder, a climbing harness, and an oversized sign. Assisted by two friends, she neatly stood the ladder on top of her vehicle and began to scale the concrete office building. She secured herself to the jutting second-story ledge, her sign reading in protest, “Suffer Not the Little Children.” Six hours later, the fire department arrived on the scene. They beseeched her not to jump. They subjected her to a mental hygiene arrest. But they were the only ones that came. No media, no protesters, no one to hear her message about education reform. While most of the country was celebrating the birth of a child, Lori Thomas was killing her career.
Thomas agreed to meet me in the basement of the Rundel Library in Rochester next to a colorfully marked section reserved for teens. It had been six weeks since the protest and Thomas’s removal from her position as a fifth-grade teacher at John Williams, also known as School 5. I knew little about her, but I easily singled her out of the scattered mix of people by the way she cautiously scanned the room. She dressed practically, in jeans and an olive-colored North Face jacket. When she stood to greet me, I noticed a worn expression across her face. But her eyes peered like closed-circuit cameras, filming as I took a seat. When I pulled out my recorder, she drew her own. Lori Thomas, on one of many suspensions from the Rochester City School District, was familiar with conflict, and she came steeled to put up a fight.
Thomas says her path toward teaching, like her protest, was fueled by a message from God. She grew up attending Catholic school, but says she couldn’t afford private
high school. Public school came as a shock; it was a place full of hate and discontent fueled by race issues. Thomas dropped out in 10th grade. She received her high school diploma by earning two credits at Monroe Community College and then swore off education for good. She took a job in the city’s refuse department, collecting garbage for 18 years. When her arthritis became too painful to make the daily pick-ups, at age 36, she decided to go back to college to pursue a career in teaching. “God made me,” she says. “I was led there to do more.”
Since becoming an employee of the school district, Thomas has radically expressed her belief that the nation’s schools are failing children. She hammers out her laundry list of issues—education becoming “big business,” over-tested students, unaccountable administrators, poorly-placed tax dollars—and as she does, I remember another famous teacher. Her passion and sheer relentlessness brings to mind Jaime Escalante, the real-life inspiration for the film, Stand and Deliver. He transformed schools in 1974 by teaching calculus to lower-class students in East Los Angeles.
But unlike Escalante, no one is lauding Thomas for her dedication to our nation’s youth; rather, she has been removed from the classroom since her December protest. “They’re children,” she continues. “They’re not data streams. They’re not funding streams.” Thomas punches out every phrase slowly and deliberately, experienced from years in front of a blackboard. She was initially assigned to an “alternative work location,” an adults-only building for teachers under some type of investigation. After her arrest, a local newspaper reported Rochester Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard as saying, “We have to keep them away from the children.” She now works from home.
Thomas remembers her first teaching position at the Lincoln School, School 22, as a creative and interactive experience. She taught her second-graders to read at the nearby Seneca Park Zoo. She’d walk the students there and ask them to return to the classroom with a favorite animal in mind. Back at school, she instructed the students to make that animal part of the class by reading up on its traits, including diet and habitat. “If it’s a polar bear, you can’t have a sunny environment,” she says. “So they became junior curators, junior zoo curators. And it ended up taking up the entire classroom. It just grew and grew and grew. But it was all them. At one point they said, ‘Ms. Thomas, we have to have an information booth!’ So they brought in dolls to man the ‘booth’.” Next, the kids wanted a restaurant. “It just kept growing. At the end of the second marking period the whole classroom was a zoo.”
Thomas says her approach to learning was inspired by Ms. Frizzle, the flame-haired teacher from The Magic School Bus. “I’m crazy,” she says, a self-assessment she makes several times during the interview. “I love to stay connected to my inner child. And there’s nothing more boring to me than going in, sitting down, and listening to wah wah wah.” Thomas actually attempted to buy a bus for her classroom, but the district stalled the idea. “So, I had to think of another way to do the same thing without a bus. That’s what I did.”
Despite her “inner-child” approach to learning, Thomas, by her own admission, ran her class like a boot camp. When asked to draft a set of classroom rules with her students, she says she refused, stating it was not a democracy. Thomas’s classroom was an autocracy, with her in charge. When the children walked the hallways to gym class and recess, there was never a “line leader.” She was the line leader. “I’m not going to ask you your opinion because I’m the adult, and you’re the child,” she says. “I’m not going to lead you astray. So, they had to follow the school rules.” However, school administrators felt Thomas was intimidating students. And in 2004, an act of discipline led to her first suspension.
A male student used foul language toward a girl in her Lincoln School third-grade classroom. Thomas believed the kid was begging to be suspended. But instead of reporting the incident, Thomas washed his
mouth out with soap. “I put a drop of Dial soap on his tongue and told him to spit it out, and I explained to him that I never wanted to hear those nasty words come out of his mouth,” she says, like a defense lawyer arguing her case. “Then I showed him how successful he had been since coming to my classroom, how he was doing his homework now, how he could be proud of himself now because he was getting good grades. That he didn’t need to resort to being foul, that it was beneath him. But I was marched out of school for that. I was put on leave for that. [The administration] called it child abuse.”
A child of the 60s, Thomas took her suspension to the streets. While on paid leave, Thomas used her normal teaching hours to picket 50 feet away from the doors she was banned from entering. She set up a card table in a local park with a sign reading, “If I can’t teach from the classroom, I’ll teach from the street.” CNN caught wind of the mouth-washing incident and Thomas received an outpouring of support, criticism, and even job offers from as far away as Australia. Thomas collected petitions and explained her stance to passers-by for the majority of the school year. “People understood what I did,” she says. “And they knew that I wasn’t being a vicious and nasty person. They knew that I was genuinely concerned for the health and well-being, not only of the student whose mouth I washed out, but for the other students in my classroom.”
The district reinstated her the next school year, but she didn’t come back quietly. “I love protesting,” she says. Last summer, Thomas spent the month of July stationed outside the White House with signs of protest strapped on her front, back, and above her head. Thomas even attended a Tea Party rally to protest. She’s gone off on just about everyone in Rochester, including the mayor, superintendent, and school board. During her time as a building substitute at the Mary McLeod Bethune School, School 45, she spent two hours a day pacing in front of the district offices. She runs her own watch-dog newsletter, Café Talks, chastising school district policy and procedure. “God brings these things to me. I believe that I have to be a good steward. I have to,” she says, before pausing. “This is not what I wanted to do, but this is what I was given to do.”
In many ways, Thomas’s radical methods have alienated her from society. She admits she doesn’t have many adult friends, explaining her isolation by saying, “I don’t play well with others.” She claims her pursuit of education reform is for the good of the students, “in spite of the grownups.” She struggles to relate to her peers, while latched onto the fragility and innocence of childhood. “It’s always been important to me that children stay children for as long as possible because you’re old for so long,” she says. “And as a child you should be able to enjoy life. It shouldn’t be a hassle. It shouldn’t be no one believes in you. It shouldn’t be people taking advantage of you. It shouldn’t be a horrible situation. You know? We are born to individuals who should love us. And it’s not our fault if they don’t.”
Thomas’s own childhood lacked such whimsical, happily-ever-after lore. She was born in Batavia, a city in western New York’s Rust Belt that has lost many of its industrial jobs to foreign countries. When she was young, her parents separated, leaving her mother to care for her and her two sisters in an era when being a single parent was taboo. Thomas, the youngest, remembers being instituted into the real world like a hazing. “I didn’t feel valued as a child,” she says. “Life for me as a child wasn’t child-like.”
The School District of Rochester faces the difficult realities of all urban schools. Eighty-four percent of the district’s students are eligible for free or reduced lunches, 89 percent of students are minorities, and 10 percent have limited English proficiency. The city has the highest poverty rate of New York’s “Big 5” districts—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers, and New York City. Less than half of the district’s students graduated in 2008.
Thomas tries to combat these depressing statistics with her “no-boundaries” approach when fighting for the good of students. Her belief seems extreme, particularly to the many people attempting education reform quietly behind the scenes. But people in the city of Rochester, and the district, have taken notice. Her stances on increasing accountability for all stakeholders, and improving student mastery of curriculum were included in the recently unveiled strategy for improving schools in the district. And she’s not alone in her distrust in the district: 94.6 percent of teachers voted “no confidence” in Superintendant Brizard. Armed guards arrived at a recent school board meeting when more than 300 people came to protest school closings.
As Thomas awaits her trial on trespassing charges for her Christmas Day stunt, she also awaits a more important decision: if she will ever be allowed back in the classroom. While her methods are unorthodox, Thomas instills a fire for learning in the students she teaches. When she marched her students to the cafeteria each day, she would say, “Do the right thing,” and her class would echo, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Sitting across from me in the library, Thomas recalls an episode from Star Trek, in which Spock says the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one. In reality, society will not allow a figure surrounded in controversy to continue to be paid from taxpayer dollars, and someday Lori Thomas will have to choose between being an advocate and being an educator. Regardless, her passion for education reform will continue. “I’m crazy,” she says, “but I’m not insane. There’s a difference.”