Part II: The Power of Enduring Commitment as Revealed in the Lives of Students in the New Salem Educatiional Initiative

In late December 2012 I got a call from a student I’ll call Magdalena, asking me if I would work with her son (to whom I’ll give the data privacy name of Mario). I get calls and requests to work with the offspring of economically impoverished families every day, so as far as that went, there was nothing new in Magdalena’s entreaty. But in many details, Magdalena’s case was very special, indeed.

Magdalena is the only student of mine who has ever gotten pregnant. I tell my female students with great frankness and regularity not to do that at any time in their high school and (I go so far to say) their college years. Magdalena was just a few months into the program when the precipitating event and the conception occurred. The precipitating event apparently happened at a party that Magdalena’s mother (Penelope) and I had gone to great lengths to dissuade her from attending, inasmuch as she would miss her regularly scheduled weekly academic session with me. But she went, and several months later she found out that human life was unfolding in her uterus. She was just 14 years old, a Grade 8 student.

Magdalena continued in the New Salem Education Initiative, becoming one of my most enthusiastic students, building a solid skill and knowledge base. She lived in North Minneapolis but rode the bus first to Edison High School in Northeast Minneapolis and later (in Grade 10) to Southwest High School in the area suggested by the latter school’s name. She eventually graduated from Southwest, but during her Grade 12 (senior) year, Magdalena and her family moved to West St. Paul, so that our communication and contact became more difficult. I did not have the opportunity to work with Magdalena in the run-up to her graduation in spring 2011.

Magdalena started attendance at Augsburg College, but she found the multiple roles as mother, student, and employee difficult. Mario’s father had always stayed on the periphery and has never been much help. Magdalena soon dropped out, something that I found out through one of her friends who continued weekly attendance with me. I felt terrible. My vow is to always stay close even when students move far away (some call after moving to cities far removed from Minneapolis, even in other states). I thought about her frequently and very much wanted to provide what instruction and mentorship I could to get her back on the promising academic track that she had traversed in her heyday of participation in weekly academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative.

Then came that call. She went long on how much she regretted losing close contact. She wanted so much better for Mario. She knew, she said, that I was the one who could make the most difference in his life. He was doing okay in school, but she wanted the higher level of challenge that she knew I provided, in a way that had been absent in her own life since she had been my fulltime student. At a juncture when I really had no space, I made some. Furthermore, the logistics seemed to work better if I traveled to the apartment that Magdalena shares in West St. Paul with Mario, Penelope, her sister (Gloria, Grade 8) and brother (Felipe, high school graduate as of spring 2012).

In going to this apartment on a weekly basis, I have thus recently added four students to my weekly schedule. I’ll be working in spring 2013 most intensely with Mario, but I am also leaving assignments with Magdalena, Gloria, and Felipe, as well. Magdalena is working on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry skills that have atrophied during her time out of school. Felipe has resumed the promising college preparatory track that he was on as a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative--- but from which he wandered when the family moved to West St. Paul, so that he graduated from one of those degree mills known as alternative schools. Gloria is a different case. She mercifully stayed focused on her education and is now doing writing and reading assignments with aplomb, preparing for her Grade 9 Writing Test and her Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), both needed for graduation. 

Gloria’s academic talent, scholarly seriousness, and participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a young child position her to gain the academic weight and ballast that will predict a successful and rewarding experience in postsecondary study. Felipe and Magdalena now have a chance that they would not otherwise have. Mario’s future is hugely promising.

The power of the enduring commitment and the permanency of the relationships forged in the New Salem Educational Initiative are illustrated in these four cases of a family that left for awhile but has now returned in force. Penelope thanks me profusely every week for coming all the way to West St. Paul and coming back into the lives of her children.

But I consider myself the fortunate one. The permanency of the relationships that I build with my students is among my greatest blessings, an opportunity to help the United States become the democracy that our nation has the potential to be.