Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [45]
Jane Trogdon is head of the guidance department at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs. Harrison has the reputation of being a “rough” school, a “gang” school. The rap is not entirely deserved; it may have stuck because Harrison is where many of the city’s poorest teenagers go to school. Harrison is where you will find an abundance of fast food workers. About 60 percent of the students come from low-income families. In a town with a relatively low minority population, only 40 percent of the students at Harrison are white. The school occupies a clean, modern building on the south side of town, right next to 1–25. From some of the classroom windows, you can see the cars zooming past. On the other side of the interstate, a new multiplex theater with twenty-four screens beckons students to cut class.
Teachers often don’t want to teach at Harrison, and some don’t last there for long. Jane Trogdon has worked at the school since the day it opened in 1967. Over the past three decades, Trogdon has observed tremendous changes in the student body. Harrison was always the school on the wrong side of the tracks, but the kids today seem poorer than ever. It used to be, even in many low-income families, that the father worked and the mother stayed home to raise the children. Now it seems that no one’s home and that both parents work just to make ends meet, often holding down two or three jobs. Many of the kids at Harrison are on their own from an early age. Parents increasingly turn to the school for help, asking teachers to supply discipline and direction. The teachers do their best, despite a lot of disrespect from students and the occasional threat of violence. Trogdon worries about the number of kids at Harrison who leave school in the afternoon and go straight to work, mainly at fast food restaurants. She also worries about the number of hours they’re working.
Although some students at Harrison work at fast food restaurants to help their families, most of the kids take jobs after school in order to have a car. In the suburban sprawl of Colorado Springs, having your own car seems like a necessity. Car payments and insurance easily come to $300 a month. As more and more kids work to get their own wheels, fewer participate in after-school sports and activities. They stay at their jobs late into the night, neglect their homework, and come to school exhausted. In Colorado, kids can drop out of school at the age of sixteen. Dropping out often seems tempting to sophomores who are working in the “real world,” earning money, being eagerly recruited by local fast food chains, retail chains, and telemarketers. Thirty years ago, businesses didn’t pursue teenage workers so aggressively. Harrison usually has about four hundred students in its freshman class. About half of them eventually graduate; perhaps fifty go to college.
When Trogdon first came to work at Harrison, the Vietnam war was at its peak, and angry battles raged between long-haired students and kids whose fathers were in the military. Today she senses a profound apathy at the school. The turmoil of an earlier era has been replaced by a sad and rootless anomie. “I have lots and lots of kids who are terribly depressed,” Trogdon says. “I’ve never seen so many, so young, feel this way.”
Trogdon’s insights about teenagers and after-school jobs are supported by Protecting Youth at Work, a report on child labor published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. It concluded that the long hours many American teenagers now spend on the job pose a great risk to their future educational and financial success.