Article #2: Brothers Damon Preston and Javon Jakes

Article #2


Second in a Five-Article Series:     The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014

Human Relationships:   Enduring, Loving, Substantive


Brothers Damon Preston and Javon Jakes,





A block south of Glenwood Avenue, and therefore several blocks south of Olson Highway, on Newton Avenue North in Minneapolis stand apartment buildings that feature the cheapest rents for those desperately seeking Section 8 housing. From the early decades of the 20th century through the 1960s, this area of North Minneapolis was occupied by Finns and a smattering of others from Scandinavia, and from East Europe. The East Europeans included Jewish folks who, though, more typically resided along with African American neighbors on streets closer to Olson Highway to the south and in an expansive area extending northward from the highway.


Until the new thoroughfare was built with Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) funds in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Sixth Avenue famously occupied that land as the most important commercial hub of the Northside. The area through which Glenwood Avenue now runs is occupied mostly by African Americans, and by Hispanic, Somali, and Hmong immigrant families.


I first met Damon Preston (data privacy pseudonym, as with all names in this five-part series) in March 2010, when he was a Grade 1 student at Bryn Mawr K-5 School, located across the bridge to another world in the residential area that gave its name to Damon’s school. Mother Evelyn Patterson and de facto stepdad Marcel Gifford had brought Davon and then-infant brother Javon Jakes to Minneapolis looking for more promising economic and life prospects than they had found on the hunt in Southside Chicago.


The family had just moved to Minneapolis in that spring of 2014 when Damon became my student. He was making ones and twos in most subject areas on a Minneapolis Public Schools grading scale for Grade K-5 students of one to four (1-4), with four being the highest for extended accomplishment; three indicating grade level mastery; two signifying below grade level performance; and one giving evidence of significant lag below grade level. The ones for Damon included the key skill areas of math and reading, and the concern over Damon’s verbal shortcomings deepened when his teachers seemed to observe a speech impediment.


By the end of that Grade 1 year of school enrollment, Damon was rising toward grade level on formal assessments of his math and reading ability and, just as important for his long-term success, this young student was demonstrating keen knack for focusing on the task at hand, and an elevated interest in achieving academic success. The speech impediment, concern about which I had from the beginning thought overwrought, had faded. Damon spoke confidently, crisply, articulately.


As is the case for all students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Damon has remained in the program for each succeeding academic year. By Grade 3, Damon was attaining threes in the key skill areas of math and reading, and his grades in every subject never again fell below a two. Damon mastered his multiplication tables (a typically Grade 3 skill) ahead of most members in his class, and he seemed poised to rise well above grade level during his Grade 4 academic year.


Then, during his Grade 4 academic year 2012-2013, many dislocations threatened the survival of Damon’s family. Evelyn gave Marcel notice that she was splitting with him. She speculated that she might move to South Dakota to live with a brother. In the course of spring 2012, the family had relocated to a subsidized apartment complex just south of Olson Highway, but in early autumn 2012 I arrived to pick up Damon for three successive weeks without finding the family at home. This meant that the family had vamoosed very quickly, because I maintain a store of multiple contact numbers for all of my students and keep keenly abreast of pending residential shifts.


One Saturday thereafter, as I was driving on a street leading northward from Olson Highway, Marcel came running up from behind, having recognized my car. I had the two students (brothers Orlando Martinez and Mateo Martinez) with me who at the time were Damon’s academic session mates. I stopped the car, and the three of us listened to Marcel catch us up on the family’s travails. Marcel told me about Evelyn’s struggles with depression and her erratic behavior, none of which surprised me, given her emotional state at the time of numerous interactions that I had with her in the run-up to these recent events. Marcel also said that she had moved again but had not let him know where. She had also changed phone numbers. So, at the end of our conversation, the best I could do was to urge Marcel to call me in the event that he did reestablish contact with Evelyn, and to let her know how badly I wanted to talk to her and to reengage Damon with my academic instruction and mentoring.


Two weeks later a call came in from Evelyn as I was emerging from a Northside restaurant at which I typically treated a group of students on early Saturday afternoons. She let me know that she, Damon, and Javon had indeed moved, to an apartment complex in far South Minneapolis, almost to Richfield, near the Cub Foods store just south of the Crosstown Highway.


From that time forward, I picked Damon up as usual on late Saturday afternoon. He was emotionally unsettled by the sudden residential shifts and the absence of Marcel, to whom he was genuinely tethered in a father-son relationship. At times he acted out at school, but he would go for weeks without incident once he and I had a heart to heart talk. He remained academically focused with me, and although his grades at school suffered a bit during that 2012-2013 academic year, we would work through any difficulties, and by late spring Damon had regained his confidence and was demonstrating grade level performance in math and reading.


But Evelyn struggled to pay even the humble rent at the apartment complex. In early June 2013, she informed me that she would be moving the family again, this time to St. Paul. She was distraught, fearing that Damon would not be able to study with me anymore. I assured her that I would always keep Damon in my fold as long as the family was anywhere in the Metro, telling her that I even kept up with students who moved to another state by phone. Evelyn gasped a bit in disbelief, her eyes watering as I made this pledge. Thereupon there radiated from her sweet, plump face a smile that seemed wide enough to encompass that Metro wherein I vowed we would always meet.


And this has been the case since July 2013. Every week, I go over to the eastern reaches of St. Paul to pick Damon up for his two-hour academic session in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Little brother Javon, who as a toddler and pre-K student had whimpered when I would come for Damon because he could not accompany us, now came under my wing when he entered Grade K (kindergarten) during the 2013-2014 academic year. Occasionally, on a day of particularly inclement winter weather or during times of notably heavy traffic, I would work with the boys in the hallway outside their apartment. The apartment itself did not have enough furniture or lighting to be suitable for our academic sessions.


But wherever we met, we studied with great seriousness. Damon underwent moments of academic insecurity at school; ever fearful of failure, he would worry grievously if he did not catch on to a concept presented by his teacher at school (which with the move to St. Paul, became Bruce Vento K-5) immediately. But there, crouched with me in the hallway outside an apartment in disarray, he would feel his academic shift gain ballast again as comprehension rose to match his drive for achievement, and he would upon my departure give evidence of that level of confidence to which Damon always aspired and inevitably rose during his academic sessions with me.


One the day (5 June 2014) of the most recent Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Evelyn texted me that she and the family might not be able to make the yearly celebration of student skill and talent because she did not have bus fare. I went over to the St. Paul residence on the day of the banquet to deliver the fare to Marcel, who by now was reestablished in a relationship with Evelyn and living again with the family.


That evening, Damon gave his best in delivering part of a Frederick Douglass speech that he had practiced. Javon demonstrated that he could count backward from the number 20. Both boys beamed with pride. I shivered with the thought that, absent my delivery of bus fare, they might not have experienced what in the life of an inner city child very well could be a transformative moment.


Damon Preston and Javon Jakes, two of the most impoverished students I have ever encountered in my forty years of teaching the children of the very poor, are each securely on an academic trajectory that more typically describes the life course of the offspring of the upper middle and upper economic classes in the United States. Damon has moved several skill notches upward in the weeks leading up to the posting of this article, he is brimming with confidence, and he believes me when I tell him that he can be one of my very best students.


This delights him, because at the banquet he has witnessed the kind of feats of which my very best students are capable. He, too, will act in one of my compressed versions (shortened for banquet performance but maintaining original Shakespearean lines in the Elizabethan poetic renderings) of Hamlet, King Lear , Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, or one of the other great dramas or comedies from the Bard. He, too, will demonstrate his knowledge of history and government; perform mathematics tasks well above grade level; continue to give speeches identified with important public features; graduate from high school; and chart a viable course to an excellent college or university.


None of this would be possible without my willingness to go wherever my students land, follow them throughout numerous residential shifts, mentally file the constantly changing phone numbers, pick them up for two hours of challenging and engaging college preparatory instruction across the liberal arts curriculum, and forge emotionally rich and satisfying relationships with many members of their families.


This is what it takes. This is what is necessary to reach the children of the very poor. This is what is required to meet the needs of families who struggle but show me every day my feet hit the ground how much they want a better life. Highest quality academic instruction, delivered in a format whereby students from extraordinarily challenging circumstances can thrive: This is the only route that will eliminate cyclical poverty and establish genuine democracy in the world’s richest nation.       So this is what I do.


And this is what we will do for all children in these United States when we have revolutionized K-12 education with strong liberal arts curriculum, delivered throughout the K-12 years in logical grade by grade sequence--- knowing that this will require excellent teachers possessing broad and deep knowledge, keen pedagogical ability, fired by the mission properly to educate all of our precious children.