Student Profile: Marybeth

Student Academic and Social Circumstances

Marybeth has been a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative since the program’s inception in the 2003-2004 academic year. She was just in kindergarten during that first year. It immediately became apparent to me that she was a very special talent. Within two months Marybeth came to grasp concepts in math and reading descriptive of the typical first grader, and by the end of that first academic year she was performing mathematic functions at grade level 2 and easily mastering reading material at grade level 3.

Marybeth family has always faced serious economic challenges. Her father is only sporadically employed as an adept but unlicensed carpenter without union affiliation. Her mother works as a nurse’s assistant. The family’s children, five in all, qualify for free lunch in the Free and Reduced Price Lunch Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools. They have lived in three different apartments during the time that I have known them, all of them ramshackle affairs owned by landlords of questionable reputation. But the mother of the children, Martha, is a stalwart proponent of education and a huge backer of everything I offer to her children. And the four older children (in addition to Marybeth, Jason, Carla, and Preston) are to a person thoroughly engaged during our academic sessions and possessed of high motivation and tremendous will to succeed in school. Selma, the youngest, will be in kindergarten this coming academic year and will also be enrolling in the New Salem Educational Initiative.

During our time together, Marybeth has continued to soar far above grade level performance and to demonstrate more and more breathtaking feats of academic accomplishment with each passing year. This past year, Marybeth, as a Grade 5 student at Green Central K-8 School, was doing math typical of grades 7 and 8, while in reading she took on material that is usually challenging for high school students. Toward the end of this past (2008-2009) academic year, Marybeth recorded her most impressive academic accomplishment to date. After she had achieved a perfect score on her practice Grade 5 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment in Reading, and noting that she would regularly digest any reading material that I put before her, I decided to offer Ionia a chance to take the practice Grade 10 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment in Reading. She passed this test at 80%, five percentage points above the score needed for the typical Grade 10 student to demonstrate grade level competence.

Let me stress this last piece of information again: Marybeth, just a fifth grader, passed a test tied to the Adequate Yearly Progress (under No Child Left Behind requirements) of high schools that administer this test in Grade 10. Lamentably, only about 30% of African American Grade 10 students in the Minneapolis Public Schools pass this test. After she had accomplished this remarkable feat, I had an interesting conversation with Marybeth as I drove her home that went like this:

“Marybeth, have you ever heard of the Ivy League?”

“Nope.”

“Well, that’s a term given to a few universities in the Northeast, places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that have traditionally been considered the best. And, you know, there are some other really good schools, places like the University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and McGill University in Montreal, in Canada, where my son goes. Do you think that you would like to go to a really great, challenging university like one of these?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And you wouldn’t mind living someplace far away from Minnesota, say, like Boston?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, Marybeth, I know that you can go to such a place if you stay on the course that you’re on. And, you know, there is a test that you can take when you’re in the tenth or eleventh grade that can qualify you for something called the National Merit Scholarship. So, we’re going to keep challenging you, developing your vocabulary, having you read a wide variety of difficult material, get your math in a very advanced state--- and I think that you have a real chance to achieve at that level. You think so, too, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

For Marybeth to continue to achieve at a level that can give her a chance to become the National Merit Scholar that I know that she can be, it is imperative that she continue as a student under my guidance in the New Salem Educational Initiative. The kind of training that she gets in this academic program is the kind that children of upper middle class and upper class students now get as a matter of routine--- in the form of well-funded suburban schools, a variety of enrichment classes beyond school, and advanced training through SAT and ACT tutorials--- as a matter of course.

But Marybeth’s school, Green Central, has been for several years now on list of schools not making adequate progress and therefore qualifying for Supplemental Educational Services (SES) under No Child Left Behind regulations. It could now reach the restructuring stage, at which schools are often declared new schools after a staff overall and thereby ironically no longer qualified for SES funding. This has become a problem in the instance of several students who have thrived in the New Salem Educational Initiative for years but whose participation is now threatened for lack of funding. It is my policy as Director of the Initiative never to break the relationship that we have established with a student once she or he has enrolled in the program.

This need for alternative funding sources provides the impetus for the current drive to raise funds for students whose lives, whose ability to break the cycle of poverty that in many cases goes back four and five generations, depends on their maintaining their enrollment in a program that is uniquely structured to give them the academic boost that they need.

For reasons implicit in her remarkable rise above the circumstances of her birth through her participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, securing funding for Marybeth is one of my chief goals as academic year 2009-2010 approaches.