A student walks down a Harding High hallway wearing headphones, chanting along to violent rap lyrics. Teacher Erik Brandt taps him on the shoulder. Turn it down, he gestures.
The kid stares at Brandt with chilling intensity. He points at the older man, fingers bent in the shape of a gun, and shoots. Then moves on.
Within Harding’s corridors is a turbulent clutter of students who push and cuss and bully their way from one end of the building to another. Brandt, a finalist for Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year and a 20-year veteran of the English department, doubles as a hall monitor. It is his job to somehow tame them.
When the bell rings, the majority trickle into classrooms. But 50 or so roamers remain. They come to school for breakfast and lunch and to wander the halls with their friends. He commands them to get to class, but his authority is empty.
Brandt, a bespectacled Shakespeare devotee who leads Harding’s International Baccalaureate program, doesn’t know the majority of kids in this school of 2,000 on St. Paul’s East Side. Calling the principal on dozens of kids each day is impractical. Written requests for disciplinary action are a toothless paper trail of unenforceable consequence.
Harding isn’t much different than most big city schools. It squats in St. Paul’s most economically depressed zip code, where 83 percent of kids receive free or reduced-price lunch. This is a multi-ethnic, multi-national place, the majority the sons and daughters of Asian immigrants.