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‘North Putnam’ film holds up mirror to public schools
As a film “North Putnam,” the new documentary that depicts a year in the life of the school and community that share its name, functions as a mirror.
The film simply aims to reflect life at North Putnam Community Schools and the surrounding community over the course of a school year.
In a deeper sense, though, the documentary reflects whatever a viewer brings to it.
Is the state of public education on your mind? The film addresses that.
What about poverty? That’s in there too.
There’s also mental health, drugs, law enforcement, small-town revitalization, urban sprawl and political devisiveness.
This was not done by accident, according to director Joel Fendelman.
“Ideally, anyone can use this to talk about anything they want to talk about,” Fendelman said Tuesday evening. “There’s so many avenues to talk about.”
Alongside producer Beth Benedix and producer/head of sound and music Anthony Mullis, the award-winning director was addressing a group of stakeholders and supporters of the film following a private preview screening at North Putnam High School.
The hope is that the film shines a light on the issues facing rural schools and communities and can be screened and discussed in educational, community and policy-making circles.
For their part, members of the creative team made the choice to stay out of the way of the story being told — culling a 90-minute documentary from an estimated 150 hours of footage, all while offering no narration, captions or scripted moments.
Through this observational approach, the film doesn’t set out to say anything of its own accord, instead spurring viewers on to have their own conversations.
In an era when opinion masquerades as news, this fly-on-the-wall approach is refreshing.
What emerges, instead, is an interwoven narrative of school and community, one that’s occasionally disorienting but maybe that’s part of the point as well.
How do we educate kids who wonder where their next meal is coming from? How do we revitalize a sense of community once it’s been lost? How can educators work in a political environment that villifies them? And how does any of it get done without sufficient funding?
Education and community building in the modern world can be disorienting.
Through it all, though, a sense of hope emerges in the form of the educators themselves. People like Bucky Kramer, Dan McMurtry, Jason Chew and former Supt. Nicole Allee are among our protagonists, the people fighting for the children of the community.
We see middle school Principal Kramer solving a Rubik’s Cube in the middle of a faculty meeting while challenging his teachers to learn to speak the language of their students. There’s McMurtry, the guidance counselor at Roachdale Elementary, painstakingly working through a behavior problem with a youngster. Chew’s meeting with Alan Zerkel, the man who preceded him as North Putnam High School principal, stands out as a powerful example of putting students and their well-being first. With Allee there’s a lasting image of the school’s highest official — a PhD — spending what must have been hours quietly cutting lengths of ribbon for a project with elementary students.
Of course, as a local audience, we know that some of these pursuits don’t have a tidy ending. At least three of the educators shown in the film are no longer employed by North Putnam Community Schools — Allee the most prominent among them, as she is now the superintendent of Covington Community Schools.
But there’s a cyclical nature to the movie, just like life itself. There’s a sense of movement throughout the film. While not progressing in a 100-percent linear pattern, we move from the first day of school, through harvest and into winter, eventually making our way to the celebration of graduation and finally the return of summer in Roachdale.
So what does it all mean?
“The whole point is to strengthen public schools in our country because they’re the backbone of our democracy,” Benedix said.
To that end, the film isn’t simply going to make the festival circuit — though it has been submitted to Sundance and South by Southwest with others on the horizon. Instead, there will be screenings in educational settings in Indiana, the Midwest and beyond.
“I’m hoping we can show the film in the Midwest,” Fendelman said, “but also in the coastal cities, and people can say ‘Oh, wow. How beautiful this is, how people care — a school system with limited resources doing so much.’ You don’t always need lots of money, just people who care.”
“But we would take more,” an audience member interjected.
After a round of laughter, Benedix made an important point.
“Honestly, that’s part of the hope of the film too, is to get people to understand how vital our public schools are and start flooding them with resources.”
It’s not a process that will happen overnight, but those involved in the movie are pleased to be starting the conversation.
In the meantime, perhaps the most lasting metaphor is a scene from an evening in which the film crew followed a high school student home from school. We see her younger brother building a pyramid out of plastic cups on top of the kitchen table.
With the help of an older brother, he builds it until it almost touches the ceiling, only to see it all come crashing down. They are only plastic cups, after all.
What kind of future are we building if we aren’t giving our kids anything more sturdy than the support public schools have received in recent years?
While the film is not yet publicly available, for now a sneak preview is available on the crowdfunding page at https://tinyurl.com/4h8n8hjd.
In addition to the private preview screening at North Putnam, additional previews have taken place this week in Bloomington, West Lafayette and a preview and roundtable discussion Thursday at DePauw University.