Bad Girls
Doing time at the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What's surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.
Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008
While she’s here, Diamond Jordan-Brown looks perpetually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it’s with the weary resignation of someone who’s seen it all.
If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her—as he has before—she’d be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she’s been sentenced—she’s more than halfway through a six-month “bid,” as the girls call it—she’s wearing “state blues”: state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.
On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It’s a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it—double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on—but it’s also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as “a highly structured, secure residential facility,” and the children are called “residents” rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential “cottages” based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.
Diamond’s friend Jessica* is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green “juice” from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.
The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.
Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School’s level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.
Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what’s more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. “Our clique is basically Level 3s,” says Jessica. “When you’re down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It’s kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder.”
One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct—all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn’t look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.
Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond’s incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She’d be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What’s more, she’d get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family’s house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.
“I wasn’t the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go,” recalls Diamond. “You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down.” She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn’t stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.
The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. “It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening,” says Auretha. “Before, she was really angry when I’d go visit her. She didn’t like this staff, she didn’t like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I’m doing right now is not going to get me out of here.”
After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys’ school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls’ school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.
During class, minor tiffs erupt about who’s sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.
“Stories on the outside are you’re going to get beat up [in here],” says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School “doesn’t test you like that,” she says. “It doesn’t test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you’re coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don’t get your mind right, if you don’t have that emotional breakdown here, you’re going to come back. If people walk out and say, ‘My time was easy,’ they’re going to come back. If I’m like, ‘My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I’m so happy to be out now,’ I’m less likely to come back.”
Emotions run high. Social worker Sirinath Seneth is the female unit manager; before this summer, when she began the top job here, she was a clinical social worker in two of the boys’ units: the maximum security facility (known as the Youth Correctional Center) and the substance abuse unit. More often the victims of trauma and abuse, she says, “the girls are more needy. With the boys, forty or fifty kids? I can cover it. Here, with only ten or fifteen girls, it’s difficult. They get nervous, they get anxious about what it’s going to be like when they get home. They get jealous, they get mad, they talk about each other.” With the boys, Seneth said, she had to ask them to come see her. “Don’t you have issues at all?” she would joke. Whereas, with the girls, “if you don’t see them for one day, two days, they want to know why they haven’t seen you.” Juvenile Program Worker Dawn Nunez agrees. “The girls are too needy,” she says. “They’re much more emotional” than the boys.
Mandated both to enforce the rules and to provide emotional support and encouragement, Juvenile Program Workers, or JPWs, are something of a cross between correctional officers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentors. Residents call them by their first name, with an honorific tacked on: Miss Jackie, Miss Michelle. To be hired, they must have a minimum of an associate’s degree and some work experience with adolescents; many have worked previously in group homes or residential programs. Before being hired, JPWs attend a six-week academy where they learn everything from fire safety to restraint techniques. One of the key things taught at the academy is the virtue of a “redirect.”
If a child talks back or disobeys an order, explains Joe Cardin, deputy superintendent of programs at the Training School, “you don’t make a big investment in it. And you certainly don’t go back to that schoolyard thing: escalation. The next thing you know you want to kill each other,” he says. This is, philosophically speaking, a huge departure from the classic correctional model, where if an inmate challenges the staff’s authority, the staff must reassert who’s in charge at all costs. Cardin recalls a recent incident where a pregnant resident refused to go to her room when instructed. The wrong response, according to Cardin, would have been, “‘Well, you’d better go to your room.’ [Because] then you get, ‘Well, put me in my room.’ Then you’re at a point as a staff member where you’ve just been called out. So what do you do? Do you people really want to drag a nine-month-pregnant female to her room? Does that make a lot of sense to you? Just walk out of that. There’s no direct threat to anyone. Except your ego.” Instead, staff members told the resident, “Fine, sit there if you want. We’ll come back in ten minutes.” She did, and they did, and then
she went to her room.
Very few girls are sent to the Training School for violent felonies. Training School data, which reflect the residents in custody on a single day in 2007, indicates that only two girls out of sixteen, or 12.5 percent, were serving time for felony assault. The largest proportion, almost 40 percent, was there for simple assault, a misdemeanor. The remainder were incarcerated for crimes against property, illegal-substance-related crime, and obstruction: resisting arrest or escape. Boys were more likely than girls to be serving time for violent felonies—almost 20 percent were there for felony assault or first- or second-degree sex crimes—but the majority of boys, too, were there for nonviolent crimes, about 40 percent of which were crimes against property.
Like many of its residents, Jessica is no stranger to the Training School. (According to an analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count, 25 percent of youth at the Training School in 2006 had been incarcerated previously.) This marks her fifth time here, though her previous visits were for a night or two, a week at most.
At sixteen, her skin is lightly smattered with acne, and her soft face still lacks the sharp angles of adulthood. Her boyfriend’s name is inked in dark-lettered script on her shoulder.
“They’d always say, do this program, let us see that you’re doing good at home, and you can go home for good,” she recalls. “I never got to that point [of changing her ways]. Reality didn’t hit.” Now that reality has hit, Jessica has the kind of perspective on her life and her behavior that she’d lacked.
Her mother was only fourteen when Jessica was born. Their closeness in age meant that it wasn’t always clear who was in charge—at least not to Jessica. “I wanted to be the mom,” she says. Shortly after Jessica was born, her father was sentenced to forty years in the ACI for second-degree murder. Her mother met her current husband while he was in the ACI serving time for breaking and entering; they got married while he was still locked up. “Me and my sister felt like she was picking him over us,” Jessica recalls. “She would always be at his visits, every other day, put money in his account when she couldn’t even buy us something. It was real hectic.”
Her stepfather was released about a year ago, and her young-est sister was born shortly after that.
Still, things didn’t start to get really out of control until about three years ago, when her father’s parole date began to approach. “When it started getting close to him going up for parole, I started acting up to my mom, yelling at my mom, disrespecting my mom,” she recalls. “Kinda like, ‘I don’t need you, I’m going to have dad.’” It only got worse when he was released, though, and all of the promises he’d made to her over the years—trips to the zoo and to the mall, quality time together—were broken one by one. “He was doing his own thing; he didn’t want to deal with nobody,” she says.
Jessica’s fights with her mother escalated to the point that in 2004 her mom filed a Wayward/Disobedient Petition with the local police department, essentially a parent’s way of asking law enforcement for help controlling her child. The petition brought Jessica into the orbit of the Family Court, which handles all juvenile justice cases. From there, the judge placed her in one group home after another, and in the group homes, she’d get into fights, she’d skip school, she’d run away.
In fact, that word “run” echoes through the girls’ unit at the Training School. The girls in orange, the girls in blue, from one DCYF placement to the next: run, run run. “This stuff shouldn’t be bringing kids into core corrections,” says Joe Cardin. “But they only come here because the courts tried alternatives, like probation, and the kids run. They always run.” Violation of probation, truancy, disorderly conduct, violation of probation, vagrant and disorderly conduct, reads one girl’s charge sheet, a litany of misdemeanors. Another sheet includes fully nine counts of violation of probation, or VOP, which means, usually, she ran. Wayward/disobedient, violation of probation, escape, simple assault, truancy. “It’s kind of like a broken record,” says Cardin.
As the chief judge of the Rhode Island Family Court, Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah sees a lot of these children in front of his bench. A man of imposing girth who’s known to many of the kids in the system as a sympathetic listener—“He feels people,” says Diamond—he says he hates to send kids to the Training School, but often he has no choice: “What do you do when you say to a child, ‘Here’s the deal: I want you to go to school regularly. I want you to respect your teachers. I want you home at eight every night. And if [you meet] those conditions, then I’m going to suspend your sentence.’ What do you do when they don’t follow those conditions? I don’t think you have any choice but to send them. Because otherwise they’d laugh at you.”
In fact, for some girls, visits to the Training School become as much, or even more, a part of the fabric of life as school and family. I visited the Training School twice over a one-month period, and on my second visit, one girl I’ll call Ramirez reminded me that I’d met her a month ago. “I was in orange then. I’m in blue now,” she says. “I got sentenced.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell her.
“That’s okay,” she says. “I won’t be here long.” We are eating a lunch of soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup with plastic spoons out of Styrofoam bowls and canned pineapple rings. Most of the girls are complaining about the food, a common refrain in the dayroom, and discussing what their first meal “on the out” would be: Chinese food, homemade lasagna. From there it’s a quick jump to how uncomfortable the beds are. Ramirez pipes up to say she doesn’t mind the food. Or the beds, for that matter. “I actually kind of like it here,” she says. I ask why. “I feel more...” she pauses to find the right word. “Stable. When I’m not here, I’m running.”
Data provided by the Training School indicates that Ramirez’s experience is not unusual. Of the sixteen girls incarcerated on a single day last spring, only four had been living with a parent or family member immediately prior to incarceration; nine had been living in a group home, residential facility or shelter. Three had been AWOL, which is to say, running. (This data stands in stark contrast to the boys, almost 50 percent of whom had been living with one or both parents prior to incarceration.)
Once they are in the system, many girls rack up enough misdemeanors and violations of parole that it is only a matter of time before they get caught up in something more serious. For Jessica, that something turned out to be possession and delivery of marijuana. Jessica doesn’t even do drugs, she says. Her grandmother died of complications from drug addiction, and her father gets abusive when he’s drinking, which, these days, is often. “It’s in the family, and I don’t want that to happen to me,” she says. But still, her boyfriend had been shipped to his native Dominican Republic to clean up his act (like Jessica, he entered the system at fifteen or sixteen and had been in and out of group homes and the Training School ever since), and she was trying to make some quick money to bring him back. There was already a warrant out for her because she was on the run from a program, and when the cops found her, they also found the drugs. If she hadn’t had the drugs on her, she says, “I would’ve just had a violation of probation, probably go to another group home. But in a way, I think it was God that did that. If I didn’t have the drugs, and I got sentenced to another group home, I would’ve ran. I would have a warrant out for my arrest right now. On the street, having to watch my back all the time.”
It’s decidedly unnerving to hear one girl after another say that, ultimately, she’s glad she was incarcerated. Diamond feels the same way. Now that she’s home, she says, “There’s no fun in what I used to do.
Before, my mentality was just like party, party, party hard. Now, I kind of get a head-ache around loud music.” Two months before her release, Diamond’s social worker held her prerelease meeting at the Training School. In addition to Diamond and the social worker, also present were Seneth (the unit manager), Auretha and outreach workers from two different programs in the community. Together they crafted her release plan: Meet each of the outreach workers plus her parole officer once per week. Other girls’ plans are more elaborate, including visits with psychiatrists or social workers, curfews, attendance at school and other such restrictions, but, according to Auretha, the team decided these weren’t necessary for Diamond. She’d always done well in school, and her adviser—she goes to the Met School, which stresses individual attention —had been visiting her weekly while she was incarcerated so she would be able to dive right back in when she got out. And so she has, becoming a tour guide for visitors and prospective students at her school and teaming up with some fellow students to plan a volunteer trip to Africa for three weeks this spring.
Being away from her family, says Diamond, helped her learn not to take them for granted. By the end of her sentence she was entitled to two visits per week, and if her mother wasn’t there every Sunday and every Wednesday, Diamond was heartbroken. (“This girl is spoiled,” her mom says.)
“I’m glad I went,” Diamond says of her time at the Training School. “I’m not glad I was there for that long. It didn’t take me that long to get the picture. But if I didn’t [go], I’d probably be in a worse predicament than I was in.”
I ask Diamond and her mother if there is an alternative to the Training School that would have had the same effect. They’re sitting beside each other on the couch in their tidy Pawtucket living room, and images on the muted television dance silently in the background. Neither of them can think of anything. “She needed that long bid,” says Auretha.
Judge Jeremiah suggests that an effective foster care environment, like a group home but less institutional, a place where guardians can provide the guidance and support and structure that the kids so badly need, would be a better place to send kids like Jessica and Diamond. “Nobody cares about kids,” he says. “They don’t vote. So they’re hurting.” The foster care system and alternatives to the Training School are not allocated the resources they need. “It’s about money,” Jeremiah says.
Parenting classes and additional resources for families would also help. Many of these kids’ parents never learned how to parent because they grew up in similar environments to the ones they’re providing for their kids. “Sometimes they don’t know how to nurture their babies, even to hug them,” Siri Seneth says of the girls’ parents. “Because they never got that from their parents.”
Jeremiah agrees. “It’s a breakdown of the family unit,” he says. “I think that’s what lands them [at the Training School]. How often does somebody say to a child, ‘I love you’? How often do they say to their child when they come home from school —say they had a 70 average, now they have a 78 average—‘Gee, congratulations, you’re doing better.’”
However, indifferent or ineffectual parents are better than the alternative. Many of the residents were victims of abuse, whether at their family’s home, at a group home, or while on the run. An analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count found that on a given day 48 percent of adjudicated youth at the Training School were victims of documented abuse or neglect. All of this can lead to some serious emotional struggles and mental illness. “For females in particular, comorbidity [having more than one psychiatric diagnosis] is the norm rather than the exception,” says Dr. Joseph V. Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Training School. “With all of the physical trauma and abuse, this may be the first place they feel safe. They’re like pinballs all over the system. They get here, and they’re locked down; they finally realize they’re not going anywhere, and they start to make real therapeutic progress.”
Since she’s been at the Training School, Jessica has been involved with programs about anger management, personal responsibility, safe sex, and loss and grief. She attends the speech and debate classes taught each week by Brown University students. She’s involved in Project Peer, a program where residents at Levels 3 or 4 can apply to be a motivational speaker for kids who have gotten into trouble; the judge sends them by the vanload to the Training School for an afternoon to see what’s in store for them if they keep it up. She’s also earning her GED. “My thing was I could always start something, but I could never finish it,” she says. “Now I’m actually getting certificates. I’m actually going up in levels. I chose to finish those groups.
I don’t have to. I chose to work up the level system. I’m choosing to use my time wisely here.”
When Jessica is released, she plans to enroll in Community College of Rhode Island and take classes towards becoming a dental hygienist. She’ll move back in with her mother, but since her boyfriend is back in Providence with his own apartment, Jessica knows she has a pressure valve, someplace she can go to get away from it all rather than fight with her mom. “I’m doing it for my sisters,” she says. “Because my sister is going down the same exact path that I did—acting up, talking back to my mom, everything. It’s all coming out. I got a feeling that she might come here,” and she wants her sister to see that there’s another way.
Classes end for the day at 2:30 p.m., and the girls spend an hour and a half in their rooms, doing homework, napping, writing letters. At 4, pairs of girls are handcuffed to one another and loaded into a big silver van in which they’re driven to the gym for a surprisingly spirited game of indoor soccer. At 5:30, while everyone else is showering, Jessica starts setting up for tonight’s dinner and wonders aloud about what her next job is going to be when kitchen duty ends tonight (“All I can say is it’d better not be bathroom.”) At 6, Miss Michelle shouts, “Ladies! To your doors with everything you need for the day- room!” At 6:30, a JPW named Tay is dishing out dinner, and by 7, Jessica and one of her fellow residents are clearing tables, wiping them down, folding them and wheeling them into the corner. They clean out the fridge while two other girls sweep. And then everyone settles down to play cards until bedtime. These girls, along with the JPWs, are singularly focused, fierce competitors at spades. The bedtime for Level 3s like Jessica and Diamond is 10:30, but Tay lets them and their friend, Julie, who’s still at Level 2, stay up until 11, because their game is so heated. The television mounted on the wall plays a baseball game nobody’s watching.
Although her time here has been marked by slow emotional progress, Jessica knew coming in that this time would be different. “I knew I had to change,” she says. “It’s the end of the road. I’ll have another year until I’m eighteen. This is the end of my childhood. I don’t want to waste it in another group home. I try to tell girls who run, you cannot run forever.”
*Jessica's name and identifying details have been changed per her mother's request.
I am an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn (formerly based in Providence, R.I.) and and an MFA student in creative nonfiction at the New School. This is not a blog, but rather a collection of some of my work. ~ My favorite stories are about people: people who do unlikely or awe-inspiring things, people with dreams and visions and singular voices, people and communities whose voices are marginalized or forgotten by the popular press. I have a special interest in the criminal justice system and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised, particularly HIV/AIDS. I also write news and book reviews, and have been known to write enthusiastically about books, beer, old houses, music, and politics. ~ Thanks for stopping by to take a look at my clips.
Rhode Island Monthly>Bad Girls
Rhode Island Monthly>Faces of War
With a mom or dad deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, sons and daughters step up to fill their boots on the ground.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Iraqi Life Online
Iraqi Life Online
By Beth Schwartzapfel
May/June 2007
“You can join a band, or you can join a militia,” says Adel, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student at the University of Baghdad as he straps on an electric guitar. “Playing this live music and screaming, it’s like a therapy,” he says, flashing a gap-toothed grin toward a video camera.
Adel is one of three Iraqi students who are chronicling their lives on HometownBaghdad.com, a series of documentary videos produced and distributed by Michael DiBenedetto ’03. In addition to the movie-star-handsome Adel, the cast includes medical student Ausama, and Saif, who wants to become a dentist.
Hometown Baghdad made its debut on the Web on March 19, the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. New episodes are posted every few days, first to Salon.com, where they appear exclusively for twenty-four hours, then to YouTube and other sites. The “webisodes” range from forty seconds to five minutes.
Some are funny, some poignant, some banal. In one episode, Saif and his friends hang out, watching soccer and playing guitar while they prepare to say goodbye to a friend leaving for Jordan. In another, Ausama turns the camera on his young cousins as they describe a man they saw on their way home from school; he’d been shot in the head, and his brains spilled onto the road. Then the boys race around the house firing imaginary guns at each other and laughing goofily.
In an episode called “Hidden Camera,” Adel hides his video camera in a bag with a hole cut into it so he can film the wreckage and garbage in his neighborhood. “I’ll try to be careful and not say anything in English,” he says before leaving the house. If he’s caught with the camera, he says, “They’ll kill me!”He says this in a singsong voice, but he’s dead serious. “The Iraqi producers risked their lives to do this,” says DiBenedetto. “The cast members put themselves in a ridiculous amount of danger.”
Hometown Baghdad was originally conceived for television. DiBenedetto works for NextNext Entertainment, a Manhattan-based media production company whose subsidiary Chat the Planet had produced an extraordinarily successful series of TV specials linking young people around the world. In early 2006, DiBenedetto and a colleague headed for Los Angeles to pitch a Baghdad-based reality-TV series to cable networks.
Then the urgency of life in Iraq persuaded DiBenedetto and his colleagues to use the Internet instead. They learned that their Iraqi filmmakers and cast “were receiving death threats and thinking about leaving Baghdad,” says DiBenedetto. Deciding not to wait for television’s snail’s pace, the producers went to two of their most reliable funders—the Shei’rah Foundation and Cinereach—and said, “Listen, we really want to tell these stories. We don’t really know what it’s going to look like. We don’t even know who is going to leave halfway through our production, but we need to start shooting,” says DiBenedetto.
The funders agreed, and in June the Iraqi team began filming, sending 120 hours of tape to NextNext’s New York offices for editing. The documentary will ultimately comprise forty-some episodes, upwards of two hours of programming.Using the Web allowed the producers to connect viewers in ways TV could not, says DiBenedetto. “Online video has such an amazing ability to generate dialogue and real engagement,” he says. “There’s so much sharing with blogs that if it catches on, it will immediately spread.” So far, the Hometown Baghdad blog has received about 4,000 hits a day. Some episodes have been viewed as many as 10,000 times on YouTube. Online giants like BoingBoing, DailyKos, and Huffington Post have been spreading the word, and in the first week of the series the blog search engine Technorati registered more than 150 blogs linking to hometownbaghdad.com.
DiBenedetto, who says he “lives his life online,” is a passionate believer in the power of the Internet to connect everyday people and thus to humanize the war in Iraq, which is his ultimate goal. “People deserve to hear these stories,” he says. “ It may change the way that they see the whole war and the whole world.”
FORWARD>Education>Doors Open for Disabled Kids
Doors Open for Disabled Kids
Programs for Students With Special Needs Join Forces
By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 19, 2007
Each week, Michelle Alkon tried to light Shabbat candles with her family. But each week, when her son Ben saw the burning candles he would sing “Happy Birthday” and blow them out. “I wanted to have a happy Jewish home, [but] after week after week of trying to teach him that [Shabbat] was a special and wonderful thing, we just gave it up,” Alkon recalled.
Ben is autistic; his parents had tried to enroll him in Hebrew school at their synagogue in Newton, Mass., but found that the school was not equipped to deal with his special needs. Then, five years ago, the family connected with a program where Ben could attend Hebrew school and even become bar mitzvah. Today, said Alkon, everything has turned around for Ben, now 15: “He says the blessings over the candles, he says the blessing over the challah, and he says the whole kiddush. He doesn’t just do borei p’ri hagafen—he does the whole thing.” Ben had his bar mitzvah in 2005.
The program that helped Ben is Etgar L’Noar, a Boston-area nonprofit founded by parents in 1999 to provide supplementary religious education to moderately and severely disabled children who are unable to attend Hebrew school at their local synagogue. Etgar L’Noar recently merged with the Jewish Special Education Collaborative, also founded in 1999, which provides support for students with special needs in day schools. The newly merged organization is called Gateways: Access to Jewish Education.
“As a merged organization, [we can] extend our reach — to serve more kids, to be more effective, to be more excellent,” said Arlene Remz, who was executive director of Etgar L’Noar and now holds the same title at Gateways. Etgar L’Noar and JSEC will maintain their separate names and discrete programming while operating under the Gateways umbrella, but they will share administration, fund-raising and other infrastructure. The merger has created an organization with four full-time and 35 part-time staffers and a combined budget of $900,000.
Merger talks began three years ago, when the Boston-area Combined Jewish Philanthropies funded three local day schools to pilot innovative programs and curricula as part of its $45-million Peerless Excellence Initiative. When none of these funds were specifically earmarked for special-needs kids, members of the Jewish special-education community convened a task force and applied for additional funding under the Initiative; they got $2.5 million. A portion of the money went to Etgar L’Noar to begin providing services in day schools, and a portion went to JSEC to develop its infrastructure. Members of the two groups soon realized that “there was a possibility that we would start to have an overlap of services, and we did not want that,” recalled Remz. “The fact that both of us got very generous grants, it sort of turbocharged us toward each other.” The merger became final on July 1, 2006.
Twice per week, Etgar L’Noar students gather at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Mass., for classes, groups and activities. Between the various programs, there are 45 students from some 40 different synagogues, with a range of denominational affiliations; families come from as far away as New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Etgar L’Noar is designed for kids with moderate to severe disabilities; “kids with milder disabilities, such as learning disabilities and ADHD, are starting to be served better in our local Hebrew schools,” said Remz. “For the most part, the kids that we have at Etgar, their Hebrew schools are not able to modify or provide the support that they need.”
About 50% of Etgar participants have autism; there are also children with cerebral palsy and pervasive developmental delay, or mental retardation. There are kids who are blind, deaf and in wheelchairs, and some are nonverbal. In addition to the Hebrew school and b’nai-mitzvah-preparation programs, Etgar also offers a program called Mitzvah Mensches, for teenagers post-b’nai mitzvah, and a tots program for 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds and their parents. Classes typically contain between five and 10 students, each of whom is paired with a teen volunteer; classes are led by a special educator and one or more specialists, such as a music therapist. Each child has his own individualized learning plan, which is developed in conjunction with his parents, teachers and the Etgar staff.
Where Etgar L’Noar offers supplementary education, JSEC is integrated into the day-school setting. Operating in nine Jewish day schools in and around Boston, JSEC brings speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists and learning and reading specialists into the schools to provide support to 125 children whose disabilities range from mild to moderate, who otherwise might not be able to remain enrolled. “All of these are services that, if a child were in a public school and had an [individualized education program], they would be eligible to get for free,” said Remz. “And in fact, many of the kids in the day schools were accessing those services for free in their local public school. What that meant was that Mommy or Daddy had to go pick up the child at 10 o’clock at the day school, drive them across town to the public school, get your half-hour of speech-and-language therapy, drive back to the day school, go back to your class, and you’ve just missed an hour and a half of reading.”
In addition to supporting the students, JSEC staff also provides coaching and professional development for teachers. Jane Taubenfeld Cohen is the head of school at South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Stoughton, Mass., which has been involved with JSEC since 2001. “It makes the teachers better teachers for every student,” she told the Forward.
Cohen estimates that 25% of the school’s 200 students are involved in JSEC. They range from kids without any formal disabilities, who simply need some extra support, to kids who require several hours a week of additional instruction and therapy. “We have kids who could have been okay. But then you have kids who really need a special way of learning. Those kids, in general, were being counseled out of day schools and going to public schools,” she said. In general, JSEC students are not as significantly disabled as the kids in Etgar L’Noar, and JSEC kids are largely integrated into classroom settings with their more typically developed classmates. Remz says that within the next two years, Gateways hopes to pilot a day-school program with self-contained classrooms for more significantly disabled children.
Tuition for Etgar L’Noar is $950 per session per year; children who attend the once-per-week Hebrew-school classes and the once-per-week b’nai-mitzvah classes, for example, would pay $1,900.
For JSEC, tuition varies according to the services a child requires and is paid in addition to whatever tuition the family pays to the day school. Costs range from $600 for a year of weekly half-hour group-therapy sessions to $4,800 for three hours of weekly individual therapy. The fees work out to about $45 per hour, which, although it is more than families would pay in a public-school setting, is far less than they would pay for private therapists.
“We want to make it affordable, so we’re really subsidizing the cost to parents, and we also do offer scholarships,” said Remz. The schools also pay membership fees, which range between $1,800 and $5,400 per year, depending on how many students are enrolled in JSEC. This year, JSEC is piloting a new program for kids who have more intensive needs; for a flat fee of $5,000, a child receives additional remedial instruction, case management and an inclusion aide in the classroom.
Ultimately, the merger of Etgar L’Noar and JSEC is about choices, said Alkon, who is on the Gateways board of directors. “Philosophically, we now are able to say to parents who are coming in: You want your child educated Jewishly. What does that mean for you? If it means they want to be part of their local synagogue community, but have their kids educated in public school, we can do that. If it means they want to be in a day school, we can do that.”
Speaking as the parent of a child with special needs, Alkon concluded, “That sense of having a choice is not one that most of us have ever had before.”
FORWARD>Giving>Youth Philanthropy Movement Gains Momentum
Youth Philanthropy Movement Gains Momentum
By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 10, 2006
‘Charity is right up my alley,” said Sara Goldstein, who volunteers at a hospital near her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., and teaches Hebrew school at her local synagogue. So when the time came for Goldstein’s bat mitzvah, it was only natural for her to set aside $180 of her gifts to donate to charity. But rather than simply giving it away, Goldstein got a $320 match from a local donor and started her own personal endowment fund.
One of a rapidly growing number of young people involved in formal Jewish youth philanthropy programs, Goldstein — now a 15-year-old sophomore at Desert Mountain High School — will appear Monday with three other teenagers on a panel titled “Our Young Philanthropists” at the United Jewish Communities General Assembly in Los Angeles. The panel is the first of its kind for the annual gathering.
No longer simply the realm of nickel-and-dime-filled cardboard tzedakah boxes, giving among Jewish youth is increasingly modeled after adult giving, utilizing formal mission statements, strategic decision-making and financial planning. Jewish youth philanthropy has “matured to a place where, frankly, it can no longer be ignored as a movement,” said Iva Kaufman, who is organizing Monday’s session. The movement now comprises some 50 organizations nationwide, which collectively account for $1.2 million in assets, according to Kaufman, UJC’s associate director of planned giving and endowments.
Youth philanthropy was pioneered in the 1990s by secular organizations like the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. In 1998, philanthropist Harold Grinspoon saw an opportunity to engage Jewish youth in an innovative way, and he founded the B’nai Tzedek Youth Philanthropy Program from within his western Massachusetts-based Harold Grinspoon Foundation. B’nai Tzedek provides infrastructure and matching monies for young people to create personal endowment funds, like Goldstein’s, from which they donate the interest each year to charity. The concept has rapidly gained a foothold nationwide, with the number of local chapters almost doubling to 33 from 18 in the last three years. “My goal is to help create a new generation of Jewish philanthropists who support Jewish causes worldwide,” Grinspoon told the Forward.
Broadly speaking, in addition to the B’nai Tzedek model of individual funds, the burgeoning Jewish youth philanthropy movement encompasses two other models. In the youth foundation model, pioneered by the San Diego-based Jewish Community Foundation and the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation, a foundation allocates a certain amount of money each year, and then selects a youth board, which collectively decides how to spend it. Since its inception in 2001, the Denver program has engaged some 100 teenagers, who have distributed more than $190,000 to organizations and initiatives as diverse as supporting gay and lesbian Jews, providing Hebrew language instruction and fighting homelessness. Alternatively, in the group endowment fund model, teens contribute to a group fund — which may then be supplemented by a local donor or foundation, or by the teens’ own fundraising efforts — and then the group decides collectively how to spend the money or the interest on the money. This model is gaining traction in Jewish schools during the year when most children become bar or bat mitzvah; known as “seventh-grade funds,” in these settings schools often encourage parents to make a lump donation to the fund in lieu of giving individual bar and bat mitzvah gifts throughout the year.
Programs usually include educational components, hosting forums throughout the year where teens wrestle with everything from evaluating nonprofits to improving financial literacy to creating their own personal tzedakah mission statements.
Many local federations or foundations offer more than one of these models, and the specific approach in each setting is different. The “Give a Mitzvah — Do a Mitzvah” program at the UJA-Federation of New York, for example, combines a group endowment fund with fundraising and direct service. The New York program alone has raised some $400,000 between donations from teens and the teens’ own fundraising efforts, according to UJC’s Kaufman.
“There’s a lot of momentum,” said Gail Lansky, national director of B’nai Tzedek. B’nai Tzedek capitalized on that momentum in April, when it sponsored a youth philanthropy conference in Denver, which piggybacked on the annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network by hosting 100 teen members of B’nai Tzedek from across the country. For most of the conference, the teenagers participated in separate panels and discussions, but on one day “they fully overlapped with the adult conference, and participated as complete equals in sessions,” according to JFN’s president, Mark Charendoff. “Funders saw 100 teenagers milling about and participating in sessions. It was a terrific experience.”
Adam Simkin, 17, a senior at Northampton High School in Massachusetts, was at the April conference. With $180 in bar mitzvah gifts and $320 in matching funds, Simkin started a B’nai Tzedek personal endowment fund at 13. He has been adding a quarter a day ever since, and it has grown to $800; with 5% interest from his fund, Simkin makes gifts ranging from $25 to $50 each year to Israeli nonprofits such as ZAKA, which provides first-aid and rescue services and assists in identifying victims of terror and accidents. “The biggest thing I took away from [the conference] was a lot of energy and excitement,” he said. “More than just an activity that people are organizing, [youth philanthropy is] becoming a very powerful force.”
Recognizing that a movement is taking shape, this summer JFN hired its first director of youth philanthropy. Stefanie Zelkind took the job in August, with the aim of providing education, staff training and infrastructure support to Jewish youth philanthropy programs nationwide — “to serve as a central address for local programs that already exist,” said Zelkind, “as well as communities that are looking to establish programs and are looking for guidance as to how best to do this.”
Most Jewish youth philanthropy leaders mark the Grinspoon Foundation’s investment in making B’nai Tzedek into a national model as the turning point between a good idea and a real movement. But as with all things, timing is also a factor. Charendoff said that a group of JFN funders convened some five years ago to discuss hiring a youth philanthropy coordinator. “It did not take root. There was not that kind of support” at the time, he said. “Why did it take root this time around? Part of it is the timing. Ideas have to ripen before we know enough about them.”
Trends in Jewish giving have also played a role. “The big trends in philanthropy, in the Jewish world, are… this very robust picture of the endowments, and philanthropic funds growing,” UJC’s Kaufman said. “So you have endowment funds in many forms, and one of the forms that’s emerging is individual funds for teens.”
Beyond these factors, say Jewish youth philanthropy advocates, it’s simply a good idea. “It’s transdenominational. It doesn’t matter if you can read the Torah backward and forward, you can be a good Jewish philanthropist,” said Valerie Gintis, B’nai Tzedek director for western Massachusetts. “Most of the data shows that when teens finish their bar or bat mitzvahs, they start to disappear from the radar screens of Jewish institutions.” In a community that is constantly struggling to maintain the attention of young people in a secular world, said Gintis, “it’s a very unifying way to engage teens in the core values that underlie Jewish beliefs.”
WireTap>Youth Activism>Youth Demand Voting Rights
Youth Demand Voting Rights, Regardless of Ex-Felon Status
Thanks to a proposition appearing on this week's ballot, Rhode Island may join a growing number of states slowly reversing voter disenfranchisement for former felons.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 3, 2006
Andres Idarraga dreams of one day becoming a literature professor. As a junior at Brown University majoring in Comparative Literature, Idarraga, 28, seems well on his way to achieving his goal.
Unlike most of his classmates, however, Idarraga arrived at Brown -- and his dreams -- via the Adult Correctional Institutes, Rhode Island's state prison, where he served six years for possession and distribution of cocaine and possession of a firearm. It was in prison that he began to read voraciously; books like Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and a biography of Thurgood Marshall really stuck with him.
"These guys became like role models to me," he says. "They had this hunger to make a difference." So in the year prior to his release, he sent out his applications to college. When he got out, at 26, after securing a place to live and reuniting with his family, one of the first questions that Idarraga asked his parole officer was: "Can I vote?"
The answer, like that which has been given to some 5 million other Americans, was "no." Under current Rhode Island law, Idarraga will not be eligible to vote until he is 58 years old.
Like 31 other states, Rhode Island bars people with felony convictions from voting while they are incarcerated, on probation, and on parole. Five states bar ex-felons from voting during parole but not probation; in 11 states, some ex-felons lose their right to vote for life. Only Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote. As more and more young people fill the U.S.'s already overcrowded prisons, stories like Idarraga's are becoming increasingly common.
"The criminal justice system targets young people," says Maggie Williams, Project Director of the Voter Enfranchisement Project in the Bronx, NY, Public Defender's Office. "They are the ones that get picked up. They are the ones getting arrested. A lot of young people feel like there is more of a chance that they are going to end up in prison than that they are going to complete high school."
The pattern may start with school Zero Tolerance policies that criminalize students while they are still in high school. Critics describe this phenomenon as the "school-to-prison pipeline." Indeed, the number of school suspensions has almost doubled in the last 30 years, from 1.7 million to 3.1 million annually, even as violent crime among youth has decreased, according to the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 2003 book, Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline, Daniel Wald and Johanna Losen of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project wrote that 75 percent of those under age 18 who have been sentenced to adult prisons have not passed tenth grade.
Idarraga describes the phenomenon this way: "In some schools, the athletes are popular. In some schools, the smart kids are popular. In my high school, the bad kids are popular." Although he managed to graduate from high school, the job skill Idarraga had learned best there was dealing cocaine.
According to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 41 percent of persons convicted of felonies in state courts are between the ages of 20 and 29, and seven percent are under 20. Taken together, these statistics indicate that almost half of all felony convictions nationwide are among people under thirty.
It is difficult to pin down exactly how many young people have been disenfranchised due to felony convictions. No analysis has been done to piece apart which states these young people live in, and therefore which laws they are subject to, but the vast majority of the current felony convicts in America under age 30 (the last BJS count, in 2002, indicated that number to be over half a million) will lose their right to vote for at least a period of time.
Critics say that disenfranchising people who have already served their sentences is tantamount to double punishment, and that engaging ex-felons in their rights and responsibilities as a citizen helps to re-integrate them back into their communities and prevent a return to illegal behavior. "People who are coming out of the system have paid their price," says Kara Gotsch of the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization, which promotes reform in sentencing law and practice and alternatives to incarceration. "They deserve a second chance. That is equally so -- and probably even more important -- for young people, because they have an entire lifetime ahead of them."
Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted on both ends of the school-to-prison pipeline: according to the NAACP, while African-American students in the year 2000 made up only 17 percent of the overall youth population, they account for 34 percent of all school suspensions nationwide. Likewise, while only 16 percent of the overall youth population in 2003 were African-American, they accounted for 45 percent of juvenile arrests in that year. These statistics play themselves out in the voting booth. According to the Sentencing Project, 13 percent of African-American men nationwide are disenfranchised -- a rate that is seven times the national average.
"If you look at the incredible impact that the criminal justice system has on young, urban communities of color," says Williams of the Bronx Public Defenders Office, "and then you spiral that out and think about the implications in terms of civic participation, and the accountability of the political process to communities of color, we are setting up a very long-term pattern of communities not being engaged."
The tide may be turning, however.
Since 2000, six states -- Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, New Mexico, and Maryland -- have expanded the number of ex-felons who could vote, whereas only two states -- Massachusetts and New Hampshire states -- have passed laws that add to the restrictions of ex-felons' voting rights.
Most recently, in 2002, the Maryland legislature voted to restore voting rights automatically to most ex-felons three years after the completion of their sentences. In Florida, one of only three states which automatically bars all ex-felons from voting for life, Republican candidate Charlie Crist -- a former Florida attorney general and "tough on crime" state legislator -- recently joined Democratic candidate Jim David in supporting automatic restoration of voting rights to those who have completed their sentences.
Until this year, no state has ever posed directly to their electorate the question of whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote.
On Tuesday, voters in the Rhode Island district where Andres Idarraga would vote -- if he could -- will find him standing outside. Maybe he'll be handing out pamphlets. Maybe he'll be holding a sign. Maybe he'll simply strike up conversations. However he conveys it, his message will be: "Vote yes on 2." Proposition 2 asks voters whether they favor a constitutional amendment to restore the right to vote to people on probation and parole for a felony conviction. If it passes, 15,000 people -- Idarraga among them -- will win back their right to vote. Both the editorial pages of the New York Times and the right-leaning Providence Journal have both endorsed the measure.
"It's really quite unprecedented," says the Sentencing Project's Gotsch of Proposition 2.
In Rhode Island young people are disproportionately stripped of their right to vote. Young men are the most heavily disenfranchised group in the state, with 5 percent of men ages 18-34 unable to vote because of felony convictions. In neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, the numbers are tripled: 16 percent of young men in Providence's urban Southside cannot vote. Among young African-American men on the Southside, the number jumps to 40 percent.
"Youth from communities where many people have been to prison recognize that this isn't an outlier issue," says Daniel Schliefer, 24, field coordinator of the Rhode Island Right to Vote Campaign, which provides the organizational infrastructure to support Proposition 2. As such, young people are involved in the statewide campaign in huge numbers. According to Schliefer, fully two-thirds of the people working on the Rhode Island campaign are under 30. "Growing up in the shadow of the "get tough on crime" age," he says, this generation is in a position to reconsider the way society thinks about prisons and crime.
Rhode Island Monthly>A Dollar and a Dream
A Dollar and a Dream
By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006
Bruno Barata is pacing. A chubby but compact boy, Barata can’t seem to stand still. “If you get nervous,” says theater instructor Karen Carpenter, “just take a minute and reconnect with Willie.”
Barata, thirteen, is auditioning to be part of the incoming fall 2006 freshman class at Pawtucket’s Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For his audition, he has chosen to perform one of Willie Loman’s monologues from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “A pretty mature choice for an eighth grader,” says Carpenter.
When he’s done, Carpenter hands him a packet of paper. It’s a monologue from Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door. Barata is supposed to do a cold reading of a monologue by Jack Palmer, the caretaker at a home for developmentally disabled men. “This is what we call direct address, so talk directly to the audience and just enjoy it,” says Carpenter.
He tries to enjoy it. He really does. But he’s just so nervous. So the lines come out sounding not like Jack Palmer, but like a nervous teenager reading them off the page. Carpenter takes a different tack. “Let me ask you a question,” she says. And she makes Barata hunt through the monologue for some details, to help him get to know Jack Palmer.
“How long has he been working there?” (Eight months.)
“How many men live there?” (Seventeen.)
“How old are they?” (Adults.)
“When he says ‘escapades,’ what does he mean?” Barata looks through the script and starts to describe some of the antics of the house’s residents. The meaning of the words suddenly sinks in. He giggles. “Yes!” exclaims Carpenter. “Those are the escapades! Enjoy them!”
Aside from playing improvisation games with his cousins, watching the ABC comedy-improvisation show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and generally making people laugh, Barata has had no training that would bring him closer to his goal of being an actor and comedian. But, he says, “I get a feeling when I do it. It just feels right.” He has been meticulous about preparing his audition, calling the school several times to confirm the date and time and to field help in choosing his monologue. That enthusiasm, says Carpenter, “that’s the biggest thing.”
Equal parts Fame! and Lean on Me, the Pawtucket public school opened last fall with aspirations to be a competitive conservatory-style school that feeds into such prestigious institutions as Berklee and Julliard. Admission is by audition only, and, in addition to their academic classes, students are subject to a rigorous curriculum in their chosen artistic specialty. At the same time, the school is part of an inner-city school system whose two other high schools — Tolman and Shea — face corrective action, with consistently low test scores and dropout rates above 30 percent. The result of these competing atmospheres is that the school is very much like its students: it has talent and commitment, ambition and drive, but few material resources and little formal training.
The Walsh School was the brainchild of Pawtucket Public Schools superintendent Hans Dellith. The year was 2000. Members of the Gamm Theatre company, having outgrown their quarters in Providence, hatched the idea of turning the empty Pawtucket Armory into a center for the arts, with themselves as lead tenants. Seth Handy, then the president of the Gamm’s board, approached Dellith about collaborations between the potential new arts center and the Pawtucket School Department: perhaps the Gamm could stage plays in the schools, or the kids could come over to the Armory to work with the artists? Dellith took it up a notch. Perhaps Pawtucket needed an arts high school. “I’d go to school productions, and I’d see a tremendous amount of talent with the students,” says Dellith, who has headed the school department for nine years.” I came up with the idea that maybe what we should do is broaden our horizons and start thinking about what we could do for students in terms of training them.”
The newly established Pawtucket Armory Association negotiated with the city to buy the hulking castle on Exchange Street for $1 and a promise to perform extensive renovations and reinvent the building as the Arts Exchange. A school for the performing and visual arts was to be one of the building’s first tenants.
If Dellith conceived the Walsh School, then its midwife was an affable and energetic Pawtucket native named Donna Jeffrey. Jeffrey, fifty-five, is a classical guitarist and renaissance lute player who began teaching music in the Pawtucket public schools thirty-two years ago. Jeffrey talks about the arts like a physician talks about medicine. When asked why the arts are important, she replies with another question: “Why is breathing important?” Over the years, she followed whatever career path afforded her as much time as possible with students. Early on in her career, for instance, when the budget for her elementary music education program was slashed, “I went from seeing kids twice, three times a week to seeing them every other week,” she says. “And what teacher can teach anything once every other week?” She responded by creating after-school musical productions that kids could participate in, singing, dancing and acting in Disney stories and other favorites like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That way, she says, she could “see them not only in music class but also get them after school.” When a high school job became available, the lure of daily music classes was too strong to pass up. “Imagine what I could do if I saw them every day!” she recalls thinking. And so she left for Shea High School, where she taught for eleven years, during which time she created a steel drum ensemble and taught guitar and chorus classes.
Hans Dellith knew a dedicated arts educator when he saw one, so he tapped into Jeffrey’s enthusiasm and experience when the arts high school was in its early stages. She started attending meetings. Then, when a real school began to take shape, she cut her schedule at Shea back to half-time in order to coordinate the nuts and bolts of bringing it into the world: writing curricula, drafting budgets, creating guidelines for hiring, auditions and admissions, and working with architects and construction teams to turn the second and third floors of the armory into classrooms and studios. All along, however, she planned to usher the school into existence and then return to her steel drums. To head the new school, she says, “I wanted a person who was a principal, who had a degree in fine arts, who had experience as an administrator and in the arts. I didn’t want the job.”
But then came June 2005. The Pawtucket city council had been level-funding the school department for more than a decade, so the city had long relied on the state’s yearly increases in contributions. In an economy where costs are always increasing, level-funding is the practical equivalent of slashing funds. When the state announced that it too was level-funding the Pawtucket schools, suddenly the school committee faced $8 million in deficits. The arts school — along with any other expenditure deemed not absolutely necessary — was on the chopping block. In the end, the school eked into existence when Jeffrey, Dellith and others slashed its budget from $1.5 million to $559,000. One of the cuts was the principal’s job, to be replaced by a lower-paid school coordinator. Jeffrey recalls thinking to herself, “If they’re not going to get someone in here who has more experience and knowledge of this than me, then I will go for the job.”
The former deputy superintendent of schools, a much-beloved woman named Jackie Walsh, had died of cancer the previous fall. She had always been an advocate for the arts. Dellith and Jeffrey agreed that naming a new school after her would be a fitting tribute. And so the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts opened its doors on August 31, 2005, with Donna Jeffrey at its helm. It had admitted its first freshmen class the previous spring, and the plan was to add a class each year so that the school would have four classes by 2009.
Looking back, it seems to have been the obvious next step for Jeffrey. From every other week, to after school, to every day, she has finally settled in a school where more than three hours a day are dedicated to the arts. “Even in schools that have wonderful music and art programs, kids usually only have one — maybe if they’re lucky, two — classes a day in the arts,” she says. “These kids are living and breathing it all day long.”
And even if they don’t ultimately pursue a degree at a conservatory or a career in the arts, Jeffrey is sure that the school’s curriculum provides a solid enough foundation for students to follow their hearts, wherever they lead.
“I want to be a dancer,” says fifteen-year-old Walsh student Iesha Bemway. She pauses to consider her options. “Or singer. Or actor.”
“Yeah,” chimes in Keisha Fordham, fourteen, also a student. “Cause you always have to have a backup plan, in case things don’t work out.”
Tall, slim and muscular, Bemway has an angular jaw and a big, toothy smile. She and her friends are finishing their lunch in a noisy tall-ceilinged makeshift lunchroom before heading back to class. Zuleika Castro is a dance major at Walsh like Bemway, but she has other career plans. “I want to go to business school,” she says, noting that what she has learned at the Walsh School will help her when she gets there. “In dance, you got to follow all the rules, and trust me, there’s a lot of rules. And you got to take this stuff serious. And if I can take dance serious, I can take that into the business world.”
The Walsh School’s thirty-one students — nine boys and twenty-two girls — start up the armory’s big stone steps around 7:45 a.m., trudging sneakers and boots over the giant anchor mosaic at the top of the landing. Five are music majors, four study theater, ten dance, and twelve focus on visual art. About half receive free or reduced lunch. Those who live outside Pawtucket must pay $15,000 per year tuition; there are only two students who do so, one from Burrillville and one from Central Falls. The school occupies the second and third floors of the armory, and the renovations have lent the space the feeling of both a school and a place with history. The walls are painted in bright yellows and whites. The little bank of lockers is blue. Most classrooms have high ceilings, at least one wall of exposed brick and tall windows.
The students gather in the room on the second floor that serves as classroom, studio and cafeteria for breakfast and the pledge of allegiance. From 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m., they take the usual range of academic subjects. At 2:00 p.m., while giant yellow buses begin pulling up to the curb next door at Tolman High School to take the students home for the day, work at the Walsh School is just beginning. First the students take a crossover class; a music student, for instance, can take a visual art class, or a dancer can take theater. Then they have three hours of class in their chosen major. The three hours are broken up into blocks, which might include theory, exercises and practice.
Nancy Rosenberg, a working composer with the demeanor of a hip mom, is equally comfortable discussing the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly as the hip-hop duo Outkast. Pairing students with working artists was one of the goals of the school, and this is reflected in the teaching staff. Karen Carpenter, the theater teacher, is in the company at the Gamm. Tovah Bodner, the dance teacher, directs her own dance company called the Robin’s Egg. And Chris Kane, the visual art teacher, is a sculptor who runs the metals foundry at the Steelyard, an industrial art center in Providence.
When auditions for the school were first planned, sight-reading — performing a piece of music by looking at it, without preparation — was to be one of the requirements for the music majors. But in order to sight-read, students have to know how to read music. Many of the auditioning students sang in their church choirs or with their friends, but few had had formal training. The audition criteria were quickly adapted.
“I don’t care if they sight-read,” says music teacher Nancy Rosenberg. “I’ll teach them to sight-read. I am less interested in what training they’ve received before they arrive than in raw talent and commitment.”
It’s a good thing that the students, for the most part, are starting from scratch. It’s a good thing, too, that they have the dedication required to stick it out despite tough circumstances. Because a student who is already a musical impresario might find the resources at the Walsh School to be somewhat lacking. For instance, when the class studies music theory, Rosenberg pulls out a giant cardboard keyboard, with Velcro dots marking the notes they’re discussing. It’s a far cry from the school where she previously taught, the Boston Arts Academy, a public school much like what the Walsh School aspires to be. It has a full recording studio, every imaginable musical instrument and five music faculty. Comparing the two schools is like “apples and oranges,” says Rosenberg. The Walsh School, on the other hand, has five synthesizers, a battered upright piano and a lengthy wish list:
Drum set with cymbals: $2,000.
Grand piano for performances: $9,000.
Two baby grand pianos: $7,000 each.
Electric guitar, amplifier and case: $800.
That’s only part of the wish list, and that’s only for music. Under “general equipment,” the list even includes twenty cases of Xerox paper and twenty bottles of Wite-Out. “We’ve been living on next to nothing,” says Jeffrey. Aside from the teachers’ salaries and the lease, which the school department pays, “everything has been donated or bought by me,” she says. However, “it’s more important that we’re open than that we have everything we need.”
While Bruno Barata is downstairs pacing during his audition, a handful of other eighth graders wait upstairs for their turn. Marc Tiberius has been acting in after-school programs at Slater Middle School. He had planned to go to Shea High School, until he heard about this school. “I was really excited to find out there was a school for acting,” he says. His dad is excited, too. “I would have killed to have a school like this,” he says.
Jeffrey and Dellith had hoped that each of the admitted classes would have one hundred students, with the number of students topping out at 400 in 2009. However, the numbers have been disappointing so far. Last year, sixty-five auditioned, forty-five were accepted, and thirty-three came (two have since left). This year’s auditions have yielded roughly the same results. They blame the low numbers on the fact that the school’s fate has been so uncertain. In August of last year, just weeks before the school was scheduled to open, Jeffrey was forced to send a letter to the families of newly admitted students warning that the school might not open after all. And though it did finally happen, the construction wasn’t finished in the Armory yet, so the students had to spend the first few weeks in the old Registry Building. Dellith still can’t promise that the school will survive past its infancy, though he says he will continue to fight to keep it open. “These parents are the pioneers,” acknowledges Jeffrey. “There are a lot of families that would have liked to send their kids here, but they were afraid to take the chance. And I feel sad for them.”
The school’s small size, however, has had a positive consequence: family atmosphere. “We see this small group of students every day,” says biology teacher Julia Goulet. “We get a better idea of what their day is going like, and what might be going on in their lives that might be interfering with their schoolwork. It’s a luxury to have the classes be small and manageable.”
What’s more, that the students are committed to their art contributes to a unique atmosphere. “In many other schools,” says Spanish teacher Kayla Campbell, “kids have no interest in school at all. These kids have an interest in being here.” Goulet, who taught at Tolman High School for thirty-five years, says the biggest difference she sees is in attendance. Walsh boasts an attendance rate of 96 percent, at least 10 percent higher than attendance at other Pawtucket public schools. “They want to be here,” she says. “They are here every day.”
Hans Dellith can’t dance.
He says that he has not two, but three left feet. But he knows the power of dancing. “What distinguishes us from the animal world are things like art, philosophy, music, dance, theater,” he says. “All the things that really make us human, these things are very important.” He recalls a day that he visited Tovah Bodner’s class; his dedication to art education was redoubled by what he saw there. “I’m watching this student do a dance routine, and I’m watching the intensity of her performance,” he says. “I’ve never seen that type of intensity in a math class, in an English class, in a phys-ed class, or anywhere else.”
At a time when budgets are being slashed at public schools around the country, the arts are usually the first to go. Nancy Rosenberg herself used to teach music at F