Life Transformations in the New Salem Educational Initiative >>>>> College Preparatory Instruction and Whatever Else Is Needed to Ensure That Students and Their Families Survive and Thrive

Every day, lives are transformed through the experiences of students in the New Salem Educational Initiative.


In the Tuesday program, numerous students come from homes where poverty has endured for generations. One cluster of siblings features students at the ages of three, seven, ten, and twelve years old. They have two parents who work diligently but who are distant from the educational lives of their children; that area of the children’s lives is governed by a highly attentive grandmother, who ensures that the children get to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church every Tuesday, each week.


The two younger children have emotional struggles through which I and the tutors assisting in the Tuesday night program work to ensure that the these young ones thrive academically: For the three year-old, this means proper preparation in verbal and counting skills necessary later to become an adept reader and math student in the K-12 years; for the seven year-old, this means especially the patience and loving attention to personal behavior issues necessary to arrive at that demeanor that will make successful learning possible.


The older children of the family have no deep emotional problems, and they are highly intelligent youngsters. They love learning and the twelve year-old is an avid reader, of a kind not witnessed in many children in this technological gadget-replete year of 2016, especially in families where generations have not graduated from high school. But neither of these children gets what he needs in the way of culturally sensitive support at school (Bethune K-5 in the case of the Grade 4 student; Franklin Middle School in the case of the young male at Grade 6), and neither do they get the persistent, responsible academic instruction necessary. My mouth is constantly agape in observing what these highly capable boys have not learned in appropriately sequenced knowledge and skill sets.


For two years now, every Tuesday had been a constant struggle on my part to re-stoke the fires of confidence in the Grade 6 student. The Tuesday program is one and one-half hours per evening, the first fifteen minutes of which involves getting the Grade 6 student’s attitude and self-regard in a mode wherein productive learning is possible. During this academic year of 2015-2016, attitudinal stoking and adjustment became necessary for the Grade 4 student, as well. But the superlatively important fact is that I am consistently able to perform this feat and get the students in a learning mode wherein smiles and success reign at evening’s end.


This family presents four important individual cases of student needs and the effort to ensure productive learning. There are many others on Tuesday evening alone, some of them extremely needy cases such as these, others less taxed and taxing:


One Grade 2 student arrives at the behest of a very attentive mother and is thriving under the instruction of my tutors and me at a level approaching that of a grade 4 student. She already, for example, knows her multiplication tables and can perform multiplicative operations.


Another student (Grade 4), cousin to the four siblings mentioned above, is better attended at school, is functioning fully at grade level on the strength of school performance alone, and under the curriculum of my design and my personal instruction is moving ahead toward knowledge and skill mastery more typically associated with students at Grades 5 and 6.


A Grade 6 student who is also a cousin of the aforementioned group of children is better supported academically at home but lacks an everyday father, suffers from fades of confidence, and must be continually assured with sequential task mastery and much verbal banter on my part to move the learning enterprise forward. We succeed every week. This entails a lot of work on the part of the student and myself.


A Grade 4 student hails from a single-mom household in which he is the only child. He gets strong support from one of my tutors who is his aunt. He typically arrives with a bundle of homework and succeeds in mastery of the material, at my personal behest and that of two of my tutors who rotate in their work with him.


Each of the other cases of students attending on Tuesday evening is singular, particular as to the needs and the correct approach. But the curriculum and the academic goals are the same for all students: All students deserve the same knowledge-intensive curriculum. The specification of life circumstances and strategies offered to prepare students to learn differ. But the knowledge and skills to be mastered are the same.


This important observation constitutes further principle-in-action for emulation by decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools.


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The Tuesday, program, then, features a lot of drama and a lot of student progress toward success in school and prospects for reversing the cycle of poverty that has plagued people living at the urban core for decades.


The drama and the success is all the greater in terms of aggregate numbers for those students enrolled in the seven-day-a-week small-group program. I work even more personally and individually with students in the 17 small-group (one-to-five students each) academic sessions.


This program features, for example, a student now anticipating Grade 9 who has studied with me since he was in Grade 2. He moved this year from the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to a well-regarded Roman Catholic private school (at his mother’s behest, not mine--- I try to keep my students enrolled in MPS while giving them their real education with me and exerting pressure on decision-makers at MPS to overhaul the education delivered at the central school district level in accordance with my four key principles). He and his academic session mate, also a Grade 9 student (whom I have known since he came into the world), are flying very high intellectually and have already completed the first three chapters (Economics, Political Science, and Psychology) of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education . The first student mentioned above was born in Mexico and had only begun school in the United States when I met him; he speaks only Spanish at home, to a mother and her significant other, each of whom speak very little English.


Then there is the mother-daughter duo who live in a low-income high-rise at the edge of Nicollet Mall just off downtown Minneapolis.


This duo was in turn referred to me by another mother-daughter duo who live in South Minneapolis. I have known the latter twosome for four years, having helped the woman’s son stabilize his academic and personal life in Grade 8 before he moved to live with other family members in Washington state; the latter just graduated this past spring--- on time. I am now working with the daughter, a Grade 6 student, who has prospects now of working with me until graduation and being one of my academically high-sailing achievers.


Back to the two in the Nicollet high-rise, the daughter was upon my first encounter considered a highly at-risk Grade 2 student with a special education IEP (Individual Educational Plan)--- but turned out to be an enormously precocious learner in response to my instruction. She is now off her IEP, reading books at Grade 3 and 4 levels, and commanding most items on the multiplication chart with the ability to put these to work to solve problems with double digits top, single digit bottom. And her mother is razor-smart and has begun to study with me with the goal of resuming acquisition of college credits in classes at Minneapolis Technical and Community College.


This tendency of parents to begin study with me in the aftermath of their children’s enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative becomes stronger with each passing year. I have a six-year association with a family that has roots to Mexico and which has enrolled nine students in my program. The mother of three of these students (Grade 4, Grade 6, and Grade 8), all of whom took part in my compressed version of Julius Caesar at our annual banquet on 16 June, has begun to study with me so as to shore up her math and reading skills and improve her job prospects; she dropped out of school at the end of Grade 8 but is whip-smart and quickly approaching the level of skill that should describe a high school graduate (unfortunately, that “should” alludes to the low de facto skill level of too many of our high school graduates, so that this adult student of mine now has skills that in fact exceed many of those who have claimed pieces of paper that are high school diplomas in name only).


The most dramatic example of an adult student is the mother in a family of which I have written often on my blog. I have given her the data privacy pseudonym of Evelyn Patterson, mother to Damon Preston (Grade 7) and Javon Jakes (Grade 1), significant other of Marcel Gibbs (all data prvacy pseudonyms). In a career of working with the poorest of the poor in these mostly un-United States, this is the most impoverished family with which I’ve ever worked:


There is only one item of furniture (a raggedy sofa) in the whole house, bed bug-infested mattresses have been tossed, and the apartment is so ill-lit that when I work with the boys at their own residence in St. Paul (rather than losing fifteen minutes in the drive each way to and from New Salem--- I followed them from three residences in Minneapolis) we work sitting in the grungy hallway outside their humble domicile.


But the boys are thriving:


Damon has appeared on my television show a record four times and has blasted through two chapters in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education;  his outstanding academic performance and exceptionally mature attitude earned him this year’s Student of the Year award at the banquet. Javon is my most precocious young student. He reads at Grade 4 level and excels in mathematical skills at Grade 3, three and two years above level of school enrollment respectively.


I have told Evelyn’s hard scrabble story on the blog. She graduated from high school and completed one and one-half years of community college in the Chicago area before her life unraveled. She is HIV positive (under control with medication, she says, as she compares her situation to that of Magic Johnson). She has multiple psychological issues after a childhood of sexual and other forms of abuse; and due to feelings of guilt and self-loathing for being unable to establish a relationship with her mother before the latter died just under a decade ago.


But Evelyn plugs on, takes hope in the academic progress of her children, struggles to be the good parent that she never had, and has begun to study with me on the strength of a vision of continuing her college education.


She’ll fulfill that vision.


She is highly intelligent and has acquired skills under my instruction through algebra and geometry that were hazy upon resumption of an academic track. Evelyn calls and texts me with great frequency to ask for advice and many forms of assistance. My responses are critical to her ability to keep herself and her family together in the absence of adequate economic wherewithal. Recently, I moved her to a new residence that she located in the northern Minneapolis suburb of Coon Rapids. She resourcefully found a program that gave her free rent for this three bedroom unit in a duplex, but even with her meager possessions a professional mover was going to charge her over $200 for the transfer of items that required only two trips in my Toyota Matrix.


The stories are legion.


The successes are stunning.


The effort is never-ending.


The academic instruction is college preparatory and the services provided are whatever folks need to survive and thrive.


And therein we have more fodder for extrapolation by decision-makers of the Minneapolis Public Schools.