A student's loss, and search for a new life
Reader Comment: Think about how much good the 57 million dollars Stephen Hill stole from the DPS could have done at this school. More about Hill here.
Thank you to the reporter for acknowledging The seismic shocks many of the district's 85,000 students carry with them through the doors require extraordinary measures. Thank you to the school for offering students a chance.
This alternative school's principal was invited to speak on urban issues at the London School of Economics. In her own city, emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has never sought her advice.
By Jeff Gerritt
Sade Lewis wondered for months whether her mother was alive, sometimes finding her blasting in a crack house on Detroit's west side. She'd wait for her mother to finish before bringing her burgers from a Coney Island. Lewis, 18 and a senior at Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit, would stay with her while she ate, knowing that if she left, her mother would sell the food.
On March 4 at about 9 p.m., Lewis locked the door to her room in the Catholic Social Services' west-side home for teen mothers. She had just learned that her 46-year-old mother had died two months before. Her ashes were at Perry Funeral Home in Detroit.
"I knew my mother wasn't suffering anymore, but it was a pain in my heart that I never even knew her," Lewis told me last week. "I couldn't stop crying."
She stayed home the next day and called the funeral home, hospital and an attorney, trying to secure the death certificate and other papers she needed to get her mother's ashes. The death hit her especially hard because her 55-year-old father had died of AIDS last July. Raised mainly by a grandmother, older sister and auntie, Lewis just met her father five years ago.
In Sterling Heights, Livonia or practically any other school district in the state, Sade Lewis would be an anomaly; few would face this kind of hard-knock life, day after day, year after year.
But in Detroit, her story blends with thousands of others. She tells it in a chillingly matter-of-fact tone, echoed in young voices all across the city.
An embarrassment of poverty
The burdens borne by Lewis and her peers pose special challenges for Detroit's failing public school system, plagued by rampant illiteracy and dropout rates approaching 70%.
The seismic shocks many of the district's 85,000 students carry with them through the doors require extraordinary measures.
The city's adult drug problems haunt the kids who attend its schools. So do the sky-high rates of poverty and incarceration.
When I asked Lewis and nine of her classmates how many had a parent who had been incarcerated, nine of 10 raised their hands. Six students had only one parent at home; the other four had none. More than 90% of the students at Catherine Ferguson meet income guidelines for free or discounted lunches, as do 77% in the district.
At the Boys to Men Education Forum in Detroit last November, a third of the 225 teens in attendance reported that they had to sell drugs to survive. Enter any Detroit classroom and ask who knows someone who has been shot to death or incarcerated, and watch nearly every hand rise.
In the four years that science teacher Nicole Conaway, 32, has taught at Ferguson, she has attended the funeral of a student's baby and lost another student to gunfire. Once, during a class, one of Conaway's pupils matter-of-factly showed her a gunshot scar on her shoulder.
When Conaway related the incident to a fellow teacher in the suburbs, the teacher said that suburban schools have poor students, too. "I said, 'You have 10% who are in poverty. I have 90%,' " Conaway recalls.
Heralded abroad, not at home
In their approach to Detroit's crushing social and economic problems, schools like Ferguson Academy, an alternative school for pregnant teens and young mothers, provide models for best practices that could be put to use across the city's public school district.
Tucked in a poor, near west-side neighborhood and housed in a dingy 90-year-old building, Ferguson graduates nearly all of its students and sends almost all to two- or four-year colleges. In a district where high school students miss an average of 45 school days a year, Ferguson reports average daily attendance of 97%.
Named after a freed slave from New York City who dedicated her life to education, Ferguson was designated a Breakthrough High School in 2004 -- one of just 12 recognized by the National Association of Secondary School Principals for outstanding achievement among schools with high poverty rates.
Ferguson's success is widely attributed to Principal Asenath Andrews, 59, a former art teacher who took charge when Ferguson's doors opened 24 year ago. Andrews, in turn, credits her staff.
This month, the London School of Economics paid for Andrews to travel to England to speak on urban issues. It's absurd that, in her own city, emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has never sought her advice.
What works at Ferguson is constant, intense individual attention to the students' academic, social and economic needs.
Andrews knows most of her nearly 300 students by name, and she expects her 15 teachers and support staff to take a personal interest in all of them. Smaller class sizes of 18 are essential. Andrews divides Ferguson's students into small groups and makes one teacher responsible for ensuring that each group succeeds and graduates. If a student doesn't show, that teacher calls her, or one of her parents. If she is at school, the teacher encourages her.
Emissaries for urban farming
Lewis calls Ferguson Academy a blessing.
A month before her father died last July, Lewis' son was born. Always interested in far-away places, Lewis named him Ziaire, after the central African nation, adding an "I" for flavor.
In January 2009, after attending nine other schools, Lewis enrolled in Catherine Ferguson, where she maintains a B average. She plans to study nursing and anthropology in college.
This summer, she and nine of her classmates will travel to South Africa as part of the Urban Youth Entrepreneurship Program.
Each student must come up with $500 for the trip. So far, Lewis has raised $370 by selling her abstract acrylic drawings, as well as buying and selling chips, pop and pickles. Others selected to make the trip make money by preparing meals, throwing bake sales, cleaning and asking for donations at church. The 10 will raise more money by performing a play, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf," on April 16.
Ferguson Academy includes a four-acre garden and farm, where students grow raspberries, sweet potatoes, eggplants, broccoli, spinach, peas and carrots. In South Africa, Lewis and her Ferguson classmates will conduct workshops on urban agriculture, teaching and learning from South African high school students. Thirteen other Detroit students will work on solar energy projects.
When they return to Detroit, the students plan to convert an abandoned Detroit school into a community center for urban agriculture and solar energy. All 10 plan to attend college. With the right attention and support, other Detroit students can do the same.
On March 17, Ferguson students learned their school would close and relocate. Students from Ferguson and Boykin academies will attend a new school at the Westside Multicultural building. In class the day of the announced closing, students reacted angrily, raising questions about day care, credit transfers and the school's urban farm.
Schools close while liquor stores open, Lewis complained. Still protesting, she and her classmates trudged upstairs to rehearse the upcoming play. After school, Lewis bundled 9-month-old Ziaire in his stroller and headed for the bus stop out front, where the bus came 15 minutes late. She went home, still seeking her mother's ashes.
— Jeff Gerritt
Detroit Free Press
2010-03-28
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100328/OPINION02/3280439/1322/A-students-loss-and-search-for-a-new-life&template=fullarticle
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