At the American Public Health Association we promote public health prevention and intervention
efforts that have a positive, lifelong impact in communities and schools where resources
are often lacking.
What may seem like insurmountable problems can be overcome with small, purposeful acts
towards change, causing a ripple effect of transformation.
The following case study in a Washington DC middle school exemplifies just that: one idea
implemented by a science teacher had a lasting impact on students, faculty and an entire
school.
So the young people that we work with in the schools that we work with, young people are
faced with all kinds of challenges on a daily basis.
They may be homeless.
They're dealing with issues of domestic violence, community violence.
Some of them may not have food to eat on regular basis, when they go home today, they don't
know if they're going to have dinner.
They're living in these under resourced environments that come with all of those challenges and
then they go into the school building.
They don't leave those issues at the door, they take those issues into the school building
and ultimately into the classroom.
You�re talking about young people still going through their development, right?
Brain development, physical development, cognitive development, emotional development, social
development.
They're going through all of that, they're asked to perform at high levels in school
and they're doing all of this in a chronically underesourced environment.
Environments where they're walking through dilapidated communities to go to school.
The neighborhood that they're coming into, it may not be their neighborhood.
So for some of my kids, the neighborhood kids were rivals so to speak.
So this group from this housing community which is right down the street from another
group in this housing community have a conflict, and those kids might be in my class.
Like some days you couldn't be dismissed because there was fights going on outside of school,
so we had to wait like 30 minutes or so until the police could come and clear the whole
scene.
I've been robbed a few times.
There have been a few incidents where people have gotten into fights after school with
neighborhood people.
It's a lot of crazy stuff.
How do I get them to see that that conflict does not have to exist in the classroom.
That when you come into the classroom it could actually be a safe space where we learn and
we work together.
We're in middle school, I have 7th graders there's no recess, their lunch is 25 minutes,
they don't go outside to eat, and there was no real extracurricular activities.
If they had PE they had it twice a week.
If they did something wrong in class, it was taken away from them.
One thing I think with a lot of our students or our families, they need to have an outlet.
So they were in school from 745 to 445 and that's a lot of learning.
So you really can't expect for children to sit there and be quiet all day.
Not having recess, would cause kids to, I would say, use their energy in a different
way.
By the end of the day it'll be a lot of people in trouble just for being energized and they
didn't give no one no type of outlet.
If you did talk back to the teacher, they'd put you on the bench.
The bench it was a consequence where you would have to isolate yourself from everyone in
the class, you might still be in the class sometimes if the teacher allows you to, but
you will be isolated.
Like you will sit in the corner or something and the teacher will tell everyone that you
cannot talk or look at that student.
Besides that they suspend you for the craziest reasons.
The nickname for the school was "something, something, something prison," right.
Because in their mind conceptually they started to make the connection between this and what
I think is jail.
And that's the last thing we want is our kids to think about school.
Seeing that dynamic in the classroom and seeing students that I felt needed to be motivated
in a different way, I had to look at myself and say what can I do to address this need
in particular.
What can I do to help kids feel like "hey, I am a part of something special."
I had a basketball background so I looked I said ok, there's a space for a team, there's
a gym here.
So I said, "ok, I'm going to start one."
I was happy to sign up and volunteer because of the role that basketball had played in
my life.
And how important it was to me when I was
in school.
When the team started we didn't really win a lot of games.
Sometimes we struggled even getting points on the board.
It was like every boy in the school wanted to play.
But like, we just needed something exciting to do.
Because after school you would just go home, but now that we had basketball it just made
our days even brighter.
Students were very excited about basketball but didn't realize that there was a huge component
that was academic.
We had the GPA requirement and then we felt responsible as coaches and teachers who were
helping with the program, we felt responsible for helping the kids actually manage and meet
the academic requirements.
And so we would do study halls before practice.
Having the study hall prior to basketball practice made sure that the boys maintained
the standard that you're the student athlete and not just the athlete.
It was focused mostly on grades because you had to have a certain GPA to play.
You couldn't act a fool in class, otherwise you couldn't play.
So everybody that made the team pretty much had the focus otherwise they wouldn't play.
There were students who the basketball team was something motivational, to get them out
of a hole if you will, that they were, you know, stronger academically than what they
were showing.
The result was that they weren't academically eligible to play in the games, we really held
the line on that.
And the motivation to get in the game really pushed several kids and I think that was sort
of a game changer.
A lot of teachers were trying to get the kids to get better grades by saying, you know,
"if you get better grades, you'll be good enough to go to this particular school."
You're talking to middle schoolers who have these very real challenges, you know, safety,
conflict in the house, conflict in the street, conflict in the classroom.
They needed something more immediate to be a part of.
Almost like a safe haven away from some of the other things that were in their day to
day.
And so when myself and John decided to start the team, once we did those six games we said
this is not enough, so we did a summer league.
Summer league, I don't think we ever won.
But then, every time we lost, well, it went from a large margin of points that we lost
by to getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And that just made us want to work harder because we always wanted to get that first
W.
Now I have children coming up to me in the hallway "Mr. Fluellen can you look at my GPA
can you look at my grades are my grades good enough to be on the team."
Now there's an incentive to want to be part of this growing program.
Where they're changing their behavior in class because they want to improve their chances
of being on the team, being a part of the program.
We tried to get the team acting as one, and the team focused on pulling each other up.
They started to support each other.
Which as a parent makes you happy, because the kids get tired of hearing it from the
adults.
You know, "you should, you should, you should, why didn't you."
But when they are hearing it from their peers it comes from a different place and I think
they have a different appreciation for it.
The basketball team taught me how to help, when you see someone struggling to try to
help them out.
And Coach Flu he, he stayed on us about that mostly, because if we can follow that basic
instruction, then helping each other academically would be no problem.
You saw a transformation start to take place with the kids.
They started to understand how to play fundamentally they started to bond better as a team and
the biggest thing that I saw was when they were playing they felt like they could win.
We had some tough games, on the road, we played in some tough places where the competition
was through the roof, our boys were really just getting themselves together and we had
to go in there and fight it out.
We had to go in there and not quit.
Mr. Fluellen knew our potential, and so he never gave up on us.
And we never gave up on each other and cause we knew what we could achieve.
So we just kept fighting and fighting and working hard, studying, trying to stay on
the court, getting good grades in the class.
And so that helped us a lot, and then eventually we just kept winning and winning and winning,
we just couldn't stop, we just couldn't lose.
We saw the school support grow where people weren't coming to the games in the beginning
to like almost all the middle school, filling up the whole gym.
Now they're hearing that they are getting their homework in on time, someone is congratulating
them about their performance on the court and then on top of that those teachers and
staff are coming out to the games to cheer for them.
And their students in their class were coming out for them.
We got to communicate with parents.
Some parents who didn't come to the school before we started seeing them more at practices
or I was having conversations with them on the phone and they would talk to me about
their kid being on the team and these were parents who would not talk to teachers about
grades.
We would go on road trips and road games, and you know the team would ride out together
on the bus and we had 100% parent participation on road games.
When we were taking them to different counties they were seeing things they never saw before.
They were seeing big buildings.
They were seeing, as we're travelling in buses they're looking outside the window like "Wow,
this place looks so nice, it looks so different than where I grow up, people live like this?"
They start to ask different questions where that can lead to "wait a minute I want more;
I want something different."
So the basketball program through travelling and playing these games opened up their mind
to the world that was greater than just their neighborhood.
Let's create an environment where the kids know regardless of what it is you're doing
in school, we're here to help you.
Regardless of what is going on outside of school, we're here to help you.
You have someone to talk to.
And I think that was the biggest thing that the kids all saw with Mr. Fluellen, they knew
that he was the person that they could actually talk to about anything.
Coach Fluellen's bond and his commitment to us, well for me, it made me a better person.
He taught me how to be a man, mostly.
He gave me the motivation, he didn't give me like a fatherly speech, nor a teacher speech,
he just gave me a man to man speech.
Me, personally, I went through a lot of stuff that nobody would ever know about and nobody
might ever find out about.
So I would just come to school not really feel like being bothered and just shut down.
Not do nothing.
Coach Fluellen was the only one who actually knew me as a person closely and he noticed
it.
He was pretty much the only person who asked me about it.
I mean he was the only one I felt close enough to talk to him about it.
I told him what was going on with me, all the stuff that was going on at home.
And he said, "look, there's a solution to every problem."
Getting that attention and support improves their self-esteem.
It pushes them from a fixed mindset that where they are is all they're going to be, to a
growth mindset that if I put in the effort I can be successful and improve my standing
academically, socially, or behaviorally, or athletically.
I'm a public health professional and the way I got into public health was when I working
on my bachelors when I had an opportunity to realize the power of prevention.
And that if you educate and give people an opportunity that we can prevent many of the
illnesses and diseases that we see.
When I see our young people dropping out of school and derailing their ability to be successful
adults, that's what compelled me to look at it closer and when I realized that the data
supports the fact that if we can get young people to graduate from high school, just
graduate from high school, we can make substantial difference in their life trajectory going
forward.
So it forced me to think about why do they not graduate from high school, start to people
away the layers of the onion and find out what some of the challenges are.
And all of them are preventable.
And adults we're the most influential people particularly those in schools, the second
most influential adults in a young person's life are the people in that school building,
second only to their parents.
At this point there's some students that have graduated from high school did well and now
they're entering their first year of college.
Talked to a few of them, they are very excited about the colleges they have selected.
They're on their way.
They still talk about the program, the impact that it had on them, the outlet that it gave
them, the good times that we had together.
There's a couple families in particular that just consider me a lifelong mentor to their
sons, which is an honor.
I will be leaving soon to go to Shepherd University in West Virginia for college.
My majors are engineering and sports management.
I'm going to college and I'm majoring in business management and a minor in computer science.
If we can only empower school personnel to understand what young people are going through,
they're not all equally resourced, they do not have the coping skills.
If we can help them appreciate that and understand how they can help them be successful, we can
make a difference in the next generation.