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Like many, she knows it as the title of a jarring documentary, and a label for the bad schools along South Carolina's poor Interstate 95 corridor. As a longtime middle school teacher in Hardeeville, she also knows it in real life.
She's smelled the urine in school corridors, and the mold in the closets. She's seen students well below grade level working at broken desks. One year her students finally got their math books on Valentine's Day, and only then because Sun City Hilton Head volunteers raised the money.
She knows what it's like to stop by her hometown Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Bluffton to get butcher paper to use as a blackboard because the one in her classroom was worn out. This was the classroom that came with no teacher's desk or filing cabinet, and where students only had the floor for their books and jackets. It had a television, but the volume knob didn't work, and was never fixed. A fan broke in her 16-year-old overhead projector and almost caught the place on fire.
She routinely spent $1,000 from her own pocket on school supplies each year.
Cleveland felt some cold shoulders after telling these details in a courtroom five years ago.
But she also got a warm response from a man she still has never met.
Ever since he read Cleveland's testimony in the newspaper, he sends her something at the start of each school year.
Boxes and boxes filled with carefully selected and packaged school supplies arrive for the children in Hardeeville.
"It's like Christmas stockings, almost," the teacher said.
She knows that the man and his wife are not people of great means. He read her testimony in The State newspaper in Columbia, where he was a civil service employee at Fort Jackson and his wife worked at Sears. She now works at Walmart.
"They don't have any more money than I do," Cleveland said.
Nor do they have children. And they no longer live in South Carolina. After moves to Virginia, and then to Texas, the UPS boxes still come.
Moving expenses kept them from sending supplies one year. But this year, supplies for 40 children arrived right on schedule. They sent 40 calculators. They filled a supply bag for each child with pens, pencils, highlighters, glue sticks, protractors, rulers, big erasers, scissors, hand sanitizer and more. They sent boxes of crayons, notebooks, binders filled with paper.
"I asked for four different colors of notebooks for each child, one for each subject," Cleveland said. "They sent another color, so the children would have one for their personal homework and special classes."
They communicate by e-mail. The donors want no attention, and no publicity.
"He says he gave some money to charity, and after reading that article he knew this was the greatest charity there is."
THE LAWSUIT
He read one of many stories about the famous trial that lasted more than 100 days.
It was a school funding case filed against the state of South Carolina on behalf of 36 school districts where poor, rural, mostly minority school children still await access to an equal and adequate education. The case, handled pro bono by the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough law firm based in Columbia, came half a century after another landmark South Carolina case was part of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that all children have a right to equal access to public education.
After mulling the state case for a year, Circuit Court Judge Thomas W. Cooper Jr. ruled on Dec. 29, 2005, that South Carolina did not provide a "minimally adequate education" in early childhood years, but the state's system of public education in grades K-12 did meet minimally adequate standards.
The plaintiff districts voted to appeal to the S.C. Supreme Court. Arguments were heard last June, but no decision has yet been rendered.
In her day and a half on the witness stand, Cleveland opened the door to a world too few people ever bother to enter.
"I remember opening the double doors and the first thing I -- the first thing I felt or smelled was urine," Cleveland testified about her first day at the old West Hardeeville Middle School in 1998.
"No matter where you went, you could smell urine and I learned to breathe through my mouth because if you breathe through your mouth you can't smell."
A NEW DAY?
This year, all Hardeeville and Ridgeland students are in brand new schools.
Cleveland said, "We have textbooks. The facilities are much, much better. We have a better sense of pride. And we have continuity because the high school students no longer have to leave to go to school in Ridgeland."
Sun City residents continue tohelp the struggling schools that are so close, yet so far away from the gated, manicured world of their retirement dreams.
Sun City residents "are still coming over," Jasper County School District spokesman Bob Huff told me. "We have a community-wide school supply collection at the beginning of the school year that is substantial ... we have a group of ladies who come and teach hand-chiming and the results are fantastic ... kids played at the Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport at Christmastime ...
"Another group gathers money and books and every student in the elementary school gets 'My Very Own Book' to take home ... another couple, also anonymous, is funding a trip to the Children's Museum in Columbia for a group of special education children ... bus, lunch and activity box ... and I could go on and on."
Cleveland said each little bit helps raise expectations that for generations have been too low.
Her voice cracks as she describes what school supplies from total strangers mean to her students.
"It's their lifeline to education," Cleveland said. "It's their umbilical cord."
