An hour later, a tech guy shows up with a Google Fiber line. “It’s the most bandwidth you can get,” he says.
Mr. Kalman, who’s thinner than a ten-year-old’s wallet, says, “Do I look like I need a lot of bandwidth?”
While the tech guy gets to work, we gather around Mr. Kalman. I don’t think he’s had this many people in his house since his gin rummy friends were alive. He sits in his TV chair with a yellow legal pad in his lap and asks us to tell him, one by one, why we’re fed up with homework. “I want to hear from all of you,” he says.
There’s a long, unrushed silence as we think about this.
“It’s like a punishment,” Alistair says. “Cruel and unusual punishment. Isn’t that against the law?”
“Grownups get a break at the end of their workday,” I say. “Why don’t we?”
“Whenever my grandpa comes to LA,” Jaesang says, “we like to go to the Lakers games together. Sometimes I have to skip because of homework.”
Catalina, who rides the bus to school from her apartment near downtown, says there’s no one at home to help. “The math is easy,” she says, “but the language arts packets can get hard. My abuelita, she only speaks Spanish. And my parents come home too tired to help.”
“Some of it’s just a waste of time,” Alistair says. “My little sister was pounding the table last night. She had to find the word school twenty-five times in a word search. She could only find twenty-two. Those backwards diagonals are killers.
“Plus,” he adds, “they make us do Delta Math online. If you get one problem wrong, you have to go back to the start and do it all over again. Last night I got all the way to thirteen out of fifteen, made one carrying error, and got sent back to number one.”
The high school kids are getting slammed even worse. “I haven’t been to soccer practice in a month,” Sean says.
“I’m putting in four hours a night,” Sadie says.
Sean tells us he sleeps only on the weekends. “Something’s got to give,” he says. “For me it’s sleep.”
Sadie looks at him for a second like they’re the only ones in the room. “For me it’s you,” she says.
Now it’s Mr. Kalman’s turn to talk. He tells us that a lawsuit is like a war. We’re David and the school board is Goliath. “Only,” he says, “we can’t even afford the slingshot. So we’re going to have to raise some money.”
“You’re going to charge your own neighbor?” I say, thinking maybe I ought to trade him.
“The money’s not for me, Sam,” he says. “It’s for the case. What we’re filing here is a class action lawsuit. That means you’re going to court to represent all the kids who have the same complaint.”
“I am?”
Sadie explains. “It’s like in Prisoner, Sam. When your whole team is out and you’re the only one still in, you can yell ‘Jailbreak!’ And if you win that point, the rest of the team is set free. The same is true in a class action lawsuit. You’re one person, but you can set everyone else free.”
That’s a whole lot of responsibility on the back of one sixth-grade boy.
“But we’re kids, Mr. Kalman,” Jaesang says. “Who says we even have rights?”
“The Supreme Court, that’s who.”
He tells us about this fifteen-year-old kid named Jerry Gault who was home one day with a friend, and they thought it would be funny to prank call the lady next door. “This was in Arizona in the mid-1960s,” Mr. Kalman explains. “There were some pretty tough laws against obscene telephone calls. The lady was offended by what the boy said, so she called the police, who got the phone company to trace the call. They came and arrested both boys but didn’t notify their parents, just took them to Juvy. The judge set the hearing for the next day, but by the time the parents found out, it was too late to get a lawyer. So the court assigned a truant officer to represent the teens. The judge ruled that Jerry Gault was guilty. He sentenced him to six years in a home for delinquent kids.”
“Six years!” Alistair says. “That’s harsh.”
“Not Hammurabi harsh,” I say, thinking of Jerry Gault’s tongue.
We ask Mr. Kalman what the kid said on the phone.
“It was never proved that he’d said anything. I told you, his friend was on the line too. Mrs. Cook thought it was Jerry Gault who’d done the talking, but she offered no evidence. The family tried to appeal, but in those days, a minor had no right to an appeal. So the parents asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. By the time they did, their son was eighteen years old and halfway through his sentence.”
“And?”
“The Supreme Court ruled: Jerry Gault had been denied due process—written notice of his hearing, the right to an unbiased attorney, and the right to confront any witnesses against him. ‘Under our Constitution,’ Justice Fortas wrote, ‘the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court.’ The moment those words were written, children were guaranteed constitutional rights under the law.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Awesome,” Catalina says.
“So we do have rights,” Jaesang says.
“Yes. But suing for them can cost a pretty penny. And the first thing a judge is going to want to know is whether we have enough resources to take care of the class of plaintiffs. To see the case all the way through, no matter how hard or expensive it gets.”
“We could have a bake sale,” Alistair suggests.
“You’d have to sell a whole lot of brownies.”
Then Sean snaps his fingers with an idea.
“Website.”
Sadie looks at him and nods. “We’ll build a site that takes online donations. We’ll crowdsource the funding.”
“That’ll never work,” Alistair says. “You need PayPal or a credit card to pay for stuff online. Once,
