Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Seldom in life are we given
what some may consider once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,
opportunities that mean so much to you
that you can't place a monetary value on them.
I was fortunate enough
to receive one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
Exactly 20 years after graduating from my alternative school,
I was offered a position as a turnaround leader
to lead a transformation initiative.
Although I had worked in other educational settings
leading transformation,
nothing could have prepared me for the flood of emotions
that followed me as I went to school and home each day.
I cried.
I cried tears of gratitude,
tears of gratitude
because I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity
to make a difference in the lives of kids who walked down the same halls as I did
and faced some of the similar challenges that I faced growing up.
I cried tears of sadness because -
there's a French proverb that says,
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
After 20 years, some of the same mindsets
that was ever present at my alternative school
were still there.
New faces but the same issues were persistent -
low expectations of students,
instability in school leadership,
dysfunctional team dynamics -
all those issues were forever present.
And so as I walked through the doors of my alternative school,
the memories of the past infiltrated my mind like infomercials,
screaming and depicting the need for school transformation.
My journey, going from alternative student to administrator,
started in a very small town.
There was an article written in The New York Times
by Nathaniel Henderson, an economist from Harvard,
that said,
"A child growing up in poverty in Eufaula, Alabama,
has a 2.7% chance of being successful."
The odds were stacked against me from the very beginning:
where I grew up,
the family I was born to,
my race and my sex.
My mother was a teenage mother who gave birth to me at 14 years of age.
She continued the cycle of generational poverty
that had been plagued by my family since the time of slavery.
My grandmother had seven children.
We lived in the public housing projects.
Four boys slept in one room, three girls slept in another room.
I slept in the bed with my grandmother until I was in middle school
when enough of my aunts and uncles had moved out of the house.
I, myself, continued the cycle of generational poverty in my family.
My aunts and uncles -
four out of seven of them graduated from high school.
None of them went to college.
My father was a town drunk and drug addict.
So dealing with the function of dysfunction of my world,
I attempted to commit suicide.
Luckily enough, I was not successful,
but I went to school every day
and no one knew that I was severely depressed.
I made good grades,
so no one seemed to care or to know what was going on with me.
So I continued to self-sabotage by becoming pregnant
because I wanted something to love me,
something that would always be there and love me.
After my grandmother found that I was pregnant,
she said, "I raised my children,
I raised my grandchildren.
I am not going to raise my great-grandchildren."
So she kicked me out.
So she told me I had to go live with my mother, who lives in Atlanta.
Now, my mother was like my sister.
So here I am, in a new city
with this woman that I considered to be more like a sister to me,
with a baby,
trying to learn how to function within the dysfunction of my world.
My first glimmer of hope came when I attended my alternative school.
The principal got up and said
a student with zero credits could graduate in two years.
I was a junior at the time, so I said,
"Yes, I can graduate in a year,
and I can get away from this crazy woman
called my mother."
So I began my first introduction into goal setting.
I began to map out a plan to determine how many courses I could take
and how long I would take to complete each course.
Seeing some success in my plan, I went to the school counselor and said,
"Yes! Guess what? I think I'm going to graduate a year early."
That was my first introduction into a dream killer.
She said, "Sweetheart,
that principal gets up every year and makes that same announcement,
and nobody's ever done it.
So you can keep on trying, but chances are you'll be here with us next year.
So I began to self-sabotage once again.
So I began to skip school,
and I would hang out with my boyfriend,
who had moved to Atlanta to be closer to me and the baby.
And it was boyfriend at the time
that had the forethought of trying to set the standard for our family.
He said, "I don't want a dummy.
If we're going to have any type of chance
of a life together,
then you need to graduate from high school.
Those words burned a hole in my soul
because I didn't want to be considered anybody's dummy.
So from that day forward,
I continued on my path of going to school
and completing my goal of trying to graduate from high school.
Research says the deciding factor on whether or not a child is successful
is whether or not they have a caring adult that makes a difference in their life.
My caring adult at McClarin was not the administrators,
it was not the teachers nor the counselors.
My caring adult was a daycare worker.
See, my caring adult, she cared about me enough
to want to make sure
that I knew how to care for my child when he was sick.
She cared enough about me that she was willing to break the rules,
so when it was pouring down raining,
she knew that I had to walk to the train station
with a baby bag on one shoulder, a book bag on the other,
all while pushing a stroller.
So despite my family dynamics,
despite instability in school leadership,
despite the counselors not focusing
or willing to believe in the vision of their principal,
despite not having any social-emotional program
at the school,
I met my goals.
I ended up graduating a year early.
(Applause)
Now, fast forward.
Now, I am the administrator of my alternative school.
I walked through the doors, passionate, on fire,
to make a difference, to transform the world.
The year before I got to my alternative school,
we had a 19% graduation rate.
We went on fire that we were going to do all these great and wonderful things
to make a difference in the lives of kids.
The first year, the data flatlined.
So disturbed by the data, I decided that we needed to reset.
So I took my staff on a retreat.
On that retreat, we had conversations about what happened -
the why behind our work.
I pulled a list of our high-school dropouts,
and I began to call their names out
one by one
to the group that was at the retreat.
As I would call out the student's name,
something very similar to every student that I called out
was silence.
Nobody knew the students.
Nobody knew the issues.
Nobody knew anything about them.
At that point, after I called out each child's name,
I said to my team,
"We all need to be fired, including me.
Because just like a parent who takes their child to the hospital,
there's a need of emergency care.
That doctor has to come out and say these words to them:
'I have done everything in my power to save your child.'
If we can't do that as educators when parents drop their kids off,
where we get to a place where that child is considered a dropout,
if we cannot look at them in the face
and say, 'I've done everything in my power to save your child,'
then we don't deserve our paycheck."
That was the wake-up call.
That was the moment of transformation in my alternative school.
That was the moment that my team decided
that we were the intensive care unit of the educational system
and we had to do everything in our power
to make a difference in the lives of kids
who walked down the same halls that we served in every day.
You see, 75 to 80% of our kids were not graduating from high school.
We were considered to be a dropout factory.
But from that moment, we had to look at,
What were we doing?
Are we running a school that focused on the needs of adults?
Are we running a school that focused on the needs of kids?
So we began to do things.
We began to look at ourselves in the mirror.
And that look in the mirror,
we had to have a conversation with ourselves.
Does our school improvement plan
really meet the needs of at-promise students?
Does our school improvement plan,
does it meet the needs of the grandparent that does not know how to read or write?
Does our school improvement plan meet the needs of the families
that don't have transportation to come up to the school for meetings?
Does our school improvement plan meet the needs of a child
that don't have a role model in their family
that's ever graduated from high school, let alone college?
Do we have social-emotional support programs in our building?
Do we focus on post-secondary options,
or just getting them across the stage,
is that enough?
We had to talk about,
Do we have dysfunctional team dynamics in our building?
Because if you have sick adults trying to take care of sick kids -
that's not a good combination.
So upon us having that conversation,
and that's redesigning our school
to make sure we were meeting the needs of kids
and not meeting the needs of adults.
So what did we do?
We opened our doors
from 8:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night
to make sure that students could come to school when it was convenient for them.
We were serving teenage parents, homeless students,
students that were head of household.
So we had to cater our -
make sure we had a flexible master schedule to meet their needs.
We had to go out into the community
and develop the community's school's model
to have wraparound services
to make sure we were able to meet the needs of students.
We had to have social-emotional support programs
because our kids come to school faced with trauma.
So once we put all these things in place,
my alternative school went from a dropout factory to a model school
focused on the needs of students
and not on the needs of adults.
We received a five-star rating from the Georgia Department of Education,
was listed as one of the Beating the Odds Schools
from the Governor's Office of Student Achievement
and numerous state, local and national awards.
My last day as principal of my alternative school, I cried.
I cried tears of gratitude,
tears of gratitude because I was fortunate enough
to lead a dream team of people that was willing to buy into my vision
to create a school that met the needs of students,
that I was able to transform my alternative school
to be the model school.
Because once we knew better, we did better.
Thank you.
(Applause)