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

In my compact book, Just Another Day at the Office, I have chronicled the remarkable academic rise of children from a family living on one of the most gang-ridden, violence-prone streets of Minneapolis--- 6th Street North, enveloped by 26th Avenue North to the north, West Broadway to the south, Lyndale Avenue North to the west, and I-94 to the east. These students demonstrate another promise inherent in the tenet of enduring commitment and permanency of relationship. Their family has known me so long, and these young people have been participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative for so many years, that they will have the academic weight and ballast, and the sense of life ethic, to succeed brilliantly in anything that they do. With students who have been enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative for five years or more as K-12 students, life prospects are especially favorable. Some members of the family of reference are now in their eighth year of participation. On Saturday mornings we move together as if extensions of a common body.

This group consists of Belinda (data privacy names here and to follow), Grade 8; Darnel (Grade 6); Robin (Grade 3), and Walter (Grade 1). Belinda has been a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade 1; Darnell began when he was in Grade 3; Darnel’s brother Walter began in Grade K (kindergarten); Robin also began in Grade K.

Belinda had not had a good kindergarten experience and was perceived as being academically below the average prevailing in her class at the beginning of the 2005-2006 academic year, when she first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. But she was so eager to advance her skills, that in her group of four she completed tasks quickly and a tear would be forming in her eyes before I could get back to her, so eager was she for the next assignment. Once, after Belinda hurt her right leg, she spurned my offer to carry her to the car for transport to our weekly academic session at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, instead hopping on her left leg down more than a dozen steps to the car, declaring: “Okay, let’s go learn some stuff!”

Darnel defies any claptrap from the “developmentally appropriate” crowd in the education establishment and those that would make generalizations about the ability of Grade 4 boys to sit quietly and focus on academic tasks. Darnel has always taken on tasks far above his “developmentally appropriate” stage, and he has magnificent powers of seated concentration. There were mystifying junctures in Darnel’s early years in school when teachers would tell his mother (I’ll call her Bonnie) that Darnel was behind in either reading or math. I just smiled at the errant evaluations often dispensed by K-12 teachers in the public schools, reassuring Bonnie that Darnel was not only not behind, he was moving rapidly to the status of a near-genius in observable academic production. In Grade 5 he read King Lear (as did Belinda) with me in full and traveled during summer 2012 to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona to see a production of Shakespeare’s great work. This spring 2013, in Grade 6, Darnel (and Belinda) will read both King Henry V and Twelfth Night with me. Meanwhile, Darnel is soaring three grades above school enrollment in math.

Robin is now, in her Grade 3 academic year, doing Grade 4 and Grade 5 math; she masters college preparatory words such as “malapropism,” ‘truculent,” and “quintessential.” Walter, now in Grade 1, can perform any task in mental addition and subtraction that I give him and is well on his way to mastering his multiplication tables (typically a Grade 3 skill). Similarly, he reads with the fluency of a Grade 3 student.

Belinda, Darnel, Robin, and Walter; together with fabulous Sunday evening participant Monique (sister to Robin and cousin to the others); represent the full power and potential of the New Salem Educational Initiative. These students know what I am going to say before I say it. They anticipate my every move. Belinda, Walter, and Monique can easily slide into teaching roles if I call upon them. They flash multiplication cards like I do. They show their younger family members how to compile vocabulary lists from reading material, as they have done so many times for me. They demonstrate tenacity in sticking to a task, even as they exercise unflagging patience in explaining a concept until it is mastered; they are following a model that in the cases of Belinda and Monique they have witnessed for eight years.

These young people are my family in the fullest sense of the term. They are close to me in the manner of the lights of my life--- precious son Ryan Davison-Reed and treasured wife Barbara Reed. They know that I would do anything for them, and I know that when I ask them they will do anything for me.

This is the full power and potential of the enduring commitment and permanence of relationship that undergirds the programmatic dedication of the New Salem Educational Initiative.