Born to Rise by Deborah Kenny

Author:Deborah Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Path to Justice

“Do you have a child in fourth grade?” Yohana asked passersby on the sidewalk of 125th Street as she handed out flyers about our new school. I had hired her in February to help recruit students, and she was tireless—chatting up parents at supermarkets, schools, and housing projects. Yohana was cheerful and bubbly, and people responded to her.

I’d met Yohana at Edison along with Diallo, another part-timer I’d hired. He was an enterprising fellow, tall, thin, and brimming with energy. They were both willing to take on multiple jobs, which was precisely what I needed on our startup team.

Yohana flagged down parents with young children at bus stops and didn’t hesitate to walk up to mothers in the vegetable aisle. Diallo and I met with parents as well, in church basements and Harlem community centers. Almost without exception, the parents we met were frustrated with their local schools.

“My son’s school is out of control,” one mother with a black coat, bright red hat, red scarf, and red high-heeled boots told me outside near the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. After talking for five minutes, she was interested. “The school on our block is filthy,” she said. “And it’s dirty and disgusting!” added her little boy, practically jumping up to participate in our conversation. Her name was Grace and her son, a short boy with glasses, was Kareem. I later learned that he had good grades, loved chess, and had never met his father. His father had been in jail since Kareem was little. “Every day there are fights,” Grace sighed. I asked Kareem what he does when he sees a fight. “I don’t know what to do. If I stand there I get kicked in the face. But if I run away, the other kids call me a loser.” As he spoke I saw Grace tearing up. I prayed he would make it into the lottery.

Our simple, one-page application asked for a name, contact info, and Social Security number. There were no admission requirements, no transcript or behavior background checks, and no interviews.

Once parents understood that we really did have open admissions—the lottery was monitored by auditors, and there was no way for us to select the top applicants—many opened up about their children. “He’s getting F’s and D’s, and a few C’s,” a young mother confided to Diallo at a bus stop on Lenox Avenue. Her son Brandon was a fourth grader at a local public school. The year before, he and a bunch of third-grade boys had thrown pencils at each other and the teacher had walked out of the room. The incident had escalated into a full-blown fight and Brandon came home with slashes near his eye.

At first I had been worried about whether we’d be able to recruit students for a school that didn’t yet exist, that didn’t have a building, that lacked a complete faculty, and was called a “charter school,” a concept completely unknown at the time to most parents.

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