Serving Students from Challenged Economic Circumstances: Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Evidence on a Single Saturday

Third Major Communication to MPS School Board


If the Minneapolis Public Schools as an administrative and academic entity is ever going to transform itself into a model centralized school district, decision makers at the district must approach the service of students from economically challenged circumstances in a fundamentally different way. The academic and personal relationships that I have forged with young people and families of North Minneapolis via my numerous roles in the New Salem Educational Initiative have transformed the lives of those I have been fortunate to meet and know and love. Those seriously interested in educating the children of the very poor should read carefully the following account of a single Saturday in the life of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- from which there is much that can be extrapolated for application by the Minneapolis Public Schools.


The names used in the account given below are data privacy pseudonyms.




A Saturday in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative




Part One: 9:00 AM


Ginger Taylor-Myers splits time among three different residences in North Minneapolis. Her maternal grandmother lives on 6th Street North not far from the intersection of West Broadway and Lyndale Avenue North. Her father lives on Thomas Avenue North, a block southwest from the intersection of 26th Avenue North and West Broadway. From either of those residences, either Russell Wilson or Tom Brady could throw a football to a waiting receiver positioned in front of the Minneapolis Public School administrative building at 1250 West Broadway. Ginger’s Mom lives at a location that would provide Russell and Tom more of a challenge, inasmuch as she lives on Aldrich Avenue North in far North Minneapolis; the two quarterbacks might prefer to station their receivers at Jenny Lind K-5 school.


Ginger was at her dad’s house on this particular Saturday in January 2015. She had company, a friend I’ll dub Monica Freeman, also a Grade 5 student at Jenny Lind. I have known Ginger since she was two years old, and she has been a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade K. From the time that Ginger was a toddler, living at the time exclusively at grammy’s, I would pick her up, swing her around, and begin to teach her informally by speaking to her with a subtly sophisticated vocabulary and running additive and subtractive exercises by her on my fingers. She loved all of this and was proverbially chomping at the proverbial bit to start the program by the time she reached kindergarten.


Ginger asked me on that Saturday morning if Monica could come along, and I said that she could--- but would have to study separately since Ginger and her cousin Barnard would be continuing their reading of Macbeth. I have also known Barnard Williams, who lives at the 6th Street North address of grammy, since he arrived in the world, and he, too, enrolled in Grade K. He began reading Shakespearean literature with me when he was in Grade 6 at Olson Middle School, and he is now on his fifth work of the Bard: He previously read King Lear, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Hamlet.


Ginger first read Shakespeare with me as a Grade 4 student: She read Hamlet as a Grade 4 student, played the part of Osric in my compressed version of the play (all original language, emphasizing the most important scenes in a thirty-minute presentation) at our June 2014 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, and traveled with me to Winona for the Great River Shakespeare Festival to witness a first-rate take on the dilemmas of the Prince of Denmark. Barnard has already accompanied me to Winona on three occasions (for performances of King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; he was in the audience at the Guthrie with me for Othello). He has played the part of Kent in King Lear and the part of Laertes in Hamlet in my compressed versions at the banquet.


So Ginger and Barnard, whom I have known for many years, are traveling high in the academic cosmos; Monica, whom I just met on this particular Saturday, is doing fine as a conventional Grade 5 student but not anywhere close to being able to sit and read with the same alacrity as Ginger and Barnard. So I told Monica that I was so happy to have her along and would have some important assignment for her once we arrived at the church (New Salem Missionary Baptist Church at 2507 Bryant Avenue North, where I do all of my academic instruction with students).


As we made our way from the 26th and Broadway intersection to pick up Barnard at the 6th Street North abode, I quizzed Monica on multiplication tables that Ginger and Barnard have known since Grade 2. Monica, in Grade 5, came up short on the products (multiples) of at least five sets of factors, so I knew that this was where we would start once we got to the church. Barnard piled into the car at about 9:15 AM, and over to the church and down to our basement classrooms we went.


Monica sat in one room, going in logical sequence through the problematic multiplication factors, quickly getting those under control. We then successively practiced double and triple-digit multiplication, division by two digit-numbers into dividends of three digits, decimal application of these skills, and addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers--- all skills concerning which Monica felt insecure but in performing with me she emerged confident after our two hours together. She asked if she could participate in my program, and I said that I was mighty full but that I’d make space for her. She wrote out her mom’s phone number and is now attending weekly.


My work with Monica was all done as quick, intensive check-ins as I read Macbeth in another room with Ginger and Barnard. The three of us were at the point in the play at which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are implementing their plan of assassination on poor King Duncan and setting the guards whom the inebriate up for a fall. This is all engaging stuff, and at the end of the two hours these two young people, whom I love as if they were my own, and with whom I indeed interact as I did with my son Ryan Davison-Reed when he was at the K-12 stage---- were disappointed that we had to leave after two hours, even though we were headed to Taco Bell for lunch.




Part Two: 11:30 AM


We swung by 6th Street North again and picked up Barnard’s brother and sister, Natalie and Desmond. The six of us went to Taco Bell for lunch, at which I sat and worked with Natalie (Grade 1, Jenny Lind) doing mental math and writing out vocabulary items on my yellow pad. Natalie counts backwards from 20 with great skill and can apply that skill to higher starting points in subtractive exercises; similarly, she can count to a hundred and beyond, so she can perform the mental addition exercises that I give her adroitly. Natalie, for example, added 7 to 45 with the correct outcome of 52; and she took 8 away from 72 to get 64--- all in her head.


I sketched out the words freedom, pause, family, mother, father, residence, compare, grandmother, and wisdom for her on my yellow pad--- and before we departed what I call “Taco Shells” (my malapropism for Taco Bell, to mess with the kids’ brains and bring a smile to their faces as they correct me), Natalie had learned definitions as necessary and spelled all of these words correctly.


I then drove Barnard and Natalie to grammy’s; I took Monica and Ginger to the latter’s dad’s house.


“Nice to meet you today, Monica,” I told my new student. “I’ll be in touch.”


“Nice to meet you, too, Gary,” she returned. “Don’t forget to call my mom.”


“Hey, wassamatta, you think the ol’ man can’t remember nothin’?” I joked.


“I just meant---“


“Bye-bye, Snodgrass,” I said to Ginger, using the silly name with which I’ve addressed her since she was knee-high to a tadpole.


“Good-bye, Harry,” Ginger said with her own chiding appellation.


I acted like I was going to get out of the car to chase the girls and they both squealed with delight as they ran to dad’s front door and I drove away with Desmond still in the car.




Part Three: 12:30 PM


I’ve known Desmond since he was an approximation of humanity in his momma’s womb. We went down to the same room at which I had read Macbeth with Ginger and Barnard. I ran him through his multiplication tables, on which he started in Grade 1 and mostly mastered in Grade 2. He’s still perfecting the inevitably most difficult factorial sets to remember: 6 x 7, 7 x 7, 7 x 8, and 8 x 8. By the time that we departed that day, Desmond had these under control. He is among only five students in his Grade 3 class who has all of the multiplication tables through nine committed to memory.


Desmond and I also read some lively stories that are part of the compilation put together by scholars and teachers working to produce What Your 3rd Grader Needs to Know: The Fundamentals of a Good Third-Grade Education under the editorship of E. D. Hirsch. We read “The People Could Fly,” “The White-Bone Demon,” and a selection from One Thousand Arabian Nights ("Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”) . We then did some explicit vocabulary work form those selections, including words as follows: staggered , overseer, snarled, scroll, monk, demons, feast, niche, wondrous, and precious. Before I ran Desmond to grammy’s at 2:00 PM he could define and spell all of these words.




Part Four: 2:30 PM


I went back over to the church for a few moments to put some materials in order and then went by three different homes to check on matters of concern to the families of my students. One child had been acting out in his Grade 1 class at Nellie Stone Johnson; another (Grade 7 at Northeast had gotten in a fight that week and been suspended for three days. These two students are relatively new to my program; these sorts of difficulties tend to abate upon several years of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and they almost never start for children whose families I have known for a long time.


My third visit came when I went over to the new residence of a family whose members I have known for a decade. The New Salem Educational Initiative participants are now Grade 9 and Grade 10 female students at North High School. The family is dysfunctional in the extreme and presents me with my gravest weekly challenges. North is the eighth school that these girls have attended in three years. Their Mom is chronically volatile, mercurial, and occasionally abusive. The Grade 10 student met a guy on Facebook who raped her, got away with it, and left her with emotional scars several depths below those she already had. I talked momma out of a diatribe-laced funk as I worked with the Grade 10 student on the introduction to an essay and led the Grade 9 student through the logical steps of an algebra problem of mid-level difficulty.


This latter family seemed less likely to cut each other’s throats as I headed over South to pick up a brother duo (Marco, Grade 5; and Mateo, Grade 7) and their cousin (Maria, Grade 7), all students at Folwell.




Part Five: 4:00 PM


Hispanic kids make up about 35% of an otherwise African American student contingent of participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Marco, Mateo, and Maria have familial roots to Mexico; their parents have periodic immigration issues and at times have had to leave the United States for as many as three months at a time. These three have participated in the New Salem Educational Initiative for four years each in the cases of Marco and Maria, a total of five years in the case of Mateo.


Maria is razor-sharp mentally but at times has been inattentive to homework. She fell far behind on assignments as a Grade 6 student, caught up during that academic year (2013-2014), and has mostly charted a better course during this academic year 2014-2015.


Marco is academically gifted but psychologically spacey and still bears separation anxieties due to a long absence by his mom when he was in Grade 2. But he is inevitably cheerful with me and a genuine mathematics whiz, having learned his multiplication tables with me during Grade 1, read Hamlet with me at Grade 4, and now proceeding to algebraic tasks conventionally learned at Grade 9 and now being introduced in Minneapolis Public Schools classrooms during grades 7 and (more intensively) at Grade 8.


Mateo is an interesting case of a student who entered my program at Grade 2, was lost in a residential netherworld wherein even I could not locate him (I maintain multiple phone numbers and generally know when the families of my students are moving), and then reemerged into the light of my universe in Grade 4. Mateo is not as intellectually gifted as younger brother Marco, and when he first reentered the program he had fallen two years below level of school enrollment in both math and reading. His confidence was at low ebb and his mood was frequently surly. But he came back around in good time and has been on an academic ascent ever since.


On this particular day, I guided Mateo and Maria through a mathematics homework assignment wherein they were asked to figure ratios from stated student population situations and from participant composition in various organizations. Both came in very confused but went out confident and smiling.


Marco had no homework and rose to every algebraic and geometric challenge I put before him. I also led him through a reading from a Barron’s ACT exam preparation manual, defining along the way words such as disposition, acquiescent, truculent, detachment (military unit), and raw-boned. Even enormously bright Hispanic and other immigrant kihuge English language vocabulary deficiencies that I have to be continually addressing through very aggressive acquisition efforts.


Marco, Mateo, and Maria were all smiles and frenetic action when I told the “church ghost--- Phil” to get off of Maria’s shoulders; The students beat me to the car by a full minute in their escape from the frightful spirit.




Part Six: 6:30 PM


About this time every Saturday I drive over to the apartment a block off Maryland Avenue, just east of I-35N in St. Paul., that houses two half-brothers, their mother (Evelyn), and her significant other (Marcel); the latter functions as a stepfather to the boys, Damon Peterson (Grade 6) and Terrill Baker (Grade K). These are the only participants in my program who live in St. Paul. The students in the New Salem Educational Initiative live overwhelmingly in North Minneapolis, with a few Southsiders and a smattering of students who live in Northeast Minneapolis. How Damon and Terrill landed in St. Paul quite a story.


Terrill was just a babe in arms when Damon first entered my program at Grade 1. Evelyn and Marcel had just moved to Minneapolis from Southside Chicago, finding housing on Dupont Avenue, a block off Glenwood Avenue North in a venerable old section of the Northside that is long past its residential prime. Damon thrived in the program, overcoming a perceived speech impediment and numerous unfavorable teacher reports to gain solid academic footing by the end of his Grade 2 year. Evelyn was very attentive and enormously thankful for my help, always sharing information pertinent to grade reports and conferences at school.


But the apartment, shabby as it was, apparently became too expensive by the end of that academic year 2010-2011, and the family moved into a high-rise just off Olson Highway, not all that far on a trek northward from the Glenwood area residence. There had always been a sort of reefer stench about Evelyn and Marcel’s apartment and personages. This condition seemed to intensify with the move to the high-rise. The apartment was soon cluttered with debris of various sorts. Evelyn and Marcel seemed less happy with each other. But Damon’s participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative continued almost every week, and he prospered as a Grade 3 student at Bryn Mawr K-5 next to Anwatin Middle School.


Then, as I returned from Dallas, Texas, in the late summer of 2012, following a visit with my then 90 year-old mother, the family had vamoosed from the high-rise. Evelyn’s cell phone number had changed, and Marcel’s seemed to be out of order due to unpaid bills. Four weeks went by as I sought leads to the family’s whereabouts. Then finally, as I was driving northward from Olson Highway close to Harvest Prep with Damon’s academic session mates one Saturday, Marcel came running up behind the car, waving his hands. He told me a story that included separation at the insistence of Evelyn, who had moved he knew not where.


  Then, two Saturdays later, Evelyn called me on my cellphone from her own new phone. I got the address of her new apartment complex in far South Minneapolis, close to a Cub Foods just north of the Crosstown Highway. I connected with Damon, who had already fallen behind in school and was clearly suffering from the dislocations. He was acting out in school and not turning in assignments.


Then in the summer of 2013, Evelyn moved again. She was concerned that Damon might be separated from me again. I assured her that my relationships with students and families are forever. I began during the 2013-2014 academic year to drive over to St. Paul every Saturday evening about 6:30 or 7:00 PM. When I could, I took Damon over to New Salem to get him into a different physical environment and mental space. But my Saturdays eventually became so packed and the time so tight that we began conducting our academic sessions in the hallway outside the apartment. The apartment had too little furniture and was too messy and dimly lit.


Terrill clamored for entry and I allowed him to start formal academic sessions with me when he was a preschooler. He is now a Grade K student at Bruce Vento K-5 in St. Paul, thriving with the math and reading skills that would do an upper middle class student proud. Damon and I continue to work in that same hallway, sitting on the floor, back against the wall. He of the former speech impediment has mastered oratory full of eloquent Frederick Douglass flourishes. His most recent report card revealed all “A’s” but one. He bats not an eye at the challenges of algebraic equations that I place before him.


Prior to last June’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, I got a gloomy text message from Evelyn that confided that the family might not have bus fare to make it from St. Paul. I drove over to the apartment and slipped Marcel (the adult at home at the time) a twenty dollar bill before returning to the church and preparations for the banquet.


That night, Damon did his Frederick Douglass speech. Terrill showed the crowd that as a preschooler he could count backward from twenty. The boys beamed. Evelyn andTerrill fought back tears amid competition with broad smiles.


I wondered why I should be the one so blessed to spend my life this way.