What the Inauguration means to me!!!

What the inauguration means to me….

On the eve of the election I have reflected on what this means for me and when I was this excited about an election. I think it was when I was a kid and John Kennedy was in office. Not to tell my age but I was in the seventh grade where you think you know everything and especially if it is completely opposite of what your parents think. My Dad, born and raised in the South, was a die heart Democrat until it came to Kennedy and then oh my goodness you would have thought he came from Mars. He could not imagine a Catholic in the White House. Of course he had never set foot in a Catholic church. Of course it did help some that my best friend at school, Mary Liz (whose mom was from Panama) was a Catholic and I even got to go to Mass with her one time. She even came to our Southern Baptist Church. However that did not deter my Dad from being highly skeptical of someone other than a Baptist being in the White House and a Yankee to boot!

From the time I can remember I was interested in politics. My Dad and I argued all the time about issues. My Mom and younger sister did not understand that we were having a great time debating as neither of them had any interest in politics. My sister to this day still has no idea or cares about politics as she actually wrote in Jimmy Buffett for President...thankfully it was a secret ballot so no one really knows that. I thrived on reading about politics and fully planned as a youngster to go to Harvard or Yale and become a lawyer and run for Governor one day. At that point in my young life I had not been told that women did not run for political office or that young women could not take some subjects because they would distract the boys in class or that of course we had no money and the only choice I would have to go to college was to find scholarships to a state college.

Being young my enthusiasm continued and I took journalism class and wrote about my idol President Kennedy. I followed his every move and that of Jackie and family. Until that fateful day in November when I was in journalism class and the principal announced over the loud speaker that President Kennedy had been shot. It still seems like yesterday and when I reflect on it tears still come to my eyes.

In spite of the horrible year that followed, President Kennedy had left an impression on me and a challenge in my heart that I needed to continue with my dream. Then came high school and I left the comfort zone of my small school which I had attended since first grade, and got to go the big regional high school that had merged five small community high schools in to one large comprehensive high school. Just as others before me and after me, I found high school to be exciting but mostly it was about the boys and not the education that caught my attention. I joined every club possible, was a cheerleader until I decided I would rather someone cheer for me by playing basketball than stand on the sidelines and cheer for someone else, so I jumped in full force. I ended up being all district. I actually tried to take some higher level courses but was told that I could not take them because I was a girl. Honest, I was denied acceptance to a trig class because I was the only girl!

You have to remember back then in small southern towns, we had only a few choices if we wanted to be anything else than a stay at home mom. I could be a nurse, a teacher or a secretary. I chose to go in to teaching and at the beginning of my sophomore year became a member of Future Teachers of America where I served my junior and senior year as president. I also had not lost my love for politics and for social issues, so figured I could at least major in social sciences and political science.

I graduated in 1967 right at the height of the Vietnam War and started college at Radford University, at that time the second largest women’s’ college in the US. I loved the small classes, having real professors and loved history and social studies. I thought that I would become a social worker until I found out that more jobs were available in teaching than social work and that I could teach in underserved schools where I would actually be a social worker/teacher.

I also got married! Yep. As the ripe old age of 19 my high school sweetheart who had gone to Virginia Tech and I decided to get married. Being underage my parents had to sign for me to get married. My husband was only 20 so we were not ready to get married. What were my parents thinking!!

The good news is that I had to make a commitment that I would graduate from college and I swore that I would do so. Although we both had to work ourselves to death I did in fact accomplish that goal. Although being young, married, and a very poor college student is not recommended, we did it. Both of us graduated, stayed focused and put off having children. Then came 1970 and my husband was #13 on the role call for the draft. The next few years was a continuation of riots, debates and frustration as a war we did not understand kept taking our young men, many of whom did not come back. Fortunately my husband was able to get in to the National Guard and only had to be gone for six months of training. I moved back on campus (cheapest way to continue) and once he got out he took a job in Winston-Salem. He had majored in accounting one of the hottest jobs at that time.

Since I was in a Virginia college I had to finish on campus and drove back and forth every weekend in the fall from Winston-Salem to Radford to attend classes. I remember driving up old 52 up Fancy Gap Mountain before I-77 was built and now cannot even think that any sane person would have done that!! But I was young, in love and invincible!

I was so lucky because the next semester I got to start my teaching career. I got a job student teaching and then teaching at the foot of Fancy Gap Mountain in a small school just over the state line in Cana. It was my dream come true. It was a small Appalachian community where all the kids were very poor but I truly felt that I was giving them a ticket out of poverty. It was a truly unique experience. The parents loved the teachers and treated us as if we were majesty. I remember being invited to homes of the parents, getting home baked goods and visiting the homes of all of my students. I remember the poverty. So many of my children were sleeping in one room shacks with dirt floors but they were happy kids and loved school. It was their escape. Most of the kids did not know they were poor because they had nothing to compare it to and at that time in the 60’s poverty was rampant.

I wanted to stay in that school system forever but because it was so far to travel each day I knew that I would have to try to find a job closer to home. I applied for a teaching job in the Winston-Salem school system. I remember my interview in which I said that I wanted to teach ninth grade. I also remember the director of personnel, Mike Lee, looking up over his reading glasses asking me to repeat what I had just said. He said it might be first time anyone had ever asked to teach ninth grade (after my first semester I understood why) SO I got a job teaching at Carver High School. It was the first year of court ordered integration and Carver, which had been one of the premier black high schools, was relegated to a school for ninth and tenth graders and kids from the most rural part of Forsyth County were bused in to the school. It was an interesting year in which I am sure I learned so much more about life and kids than they certainly learned from me about social studies. Classes were full. We taught six classes a day with sometimes up to 45 students in a class. Sometimes if they all came (which was rare) some students had to sit on the window sills. KKK members protested outside, all the doors were locked and guards were in the parking lots. It was also the height of LSD and experimentation had shifted from college to high schools. Vietnam was still raging and kids were constantly losing parents, brothers or sometimes sisters who were either killed or going off to war. It was not unusual to have the emergency squads on campus taking another “overdosed kid” to the hospital. I remember one time I was convinced that a student had overdosed in my class when he was in fact having an epileptic seizure but fortunately we discovered in time to get him the help he needed. His Mom had forgotten to inform the school that this might happen.

My four years at Carver were a true learning experience from the first day of class when I had one of my students stand up and say “Ms. Lady this classroom looks like an Oreo cookie….the chocolate on the outside and the cream in the middle”. Of course it did because I had seated one black, one white, one black, one white to help them integrate. The funny thing was they did not need us to do this for them they did it for themselves. If the adults on the outside had just left things alone the kids have an amazing ability to adapt.

I learned so much from those kids that year. Most of them, like my Appalachian mountain kids, had very little in terms of riches but they had heart. They had wisdom far beyond their years and they taught me that any child can learn when we understand them and give them support, encouragement and love.

It was a great experience teaching there. It was a wonderful faculty of caring teachers –some young and inexperienced and some older more experienced teachers but we survived and thrived. Some of the teachers are still in education to this day although most are retired.

My experience there also started my interest in special education. I had a particular student named Perry who was one of the most verbally talented young men I knew but the child could not write or read a word. He was so sweet he had been passed from one grade to another. Being stumped I attended a class at Bowman Gray School of Medicine where they were talking about highly gifted children who could not read or write correctly. They read backwards. For some reason I wondered if this was Perry’s case so I asked them to see him and they agreed. Much to my amazement they determined that he had a SEVERE case of dyslexia and to this day he was probably one of the most severe I have seen. Fortunately he got help (years of help) and graduated from high school and as I understand it still has one of the most successful garden centers in the area.

Perry also taught me that even the kids we want to give up can learn...maybe differently but they can learn. I went to Bowman Gray and studied minimal brain dysfunction which is now called learning disabilities. In 1974 along came 94.142 which made it a federal law that any child regardless of disability or ability to attend a public school. Child find was launched to find kids who should be in school.

Later I would teach in junior high, then middle school and again in high school. I would teach in inner city schools, suburban schools, but mostly poor schools and I would always CHOOSE to teach those students that were not being successful. I taught regular education but some of my greatest challenges and success was teaching students with learning differences and behavioral issues. I got kids out of jail, picked kids up the middle of the night, comforted moms who had their kids arrested or suspended and even helped kids escape from some pretty serious stupid things they that would have gotten them in jail or worse.

Fast forward through years of graduate school, certifications and random experiences from teaching in college to having my own consulting company where it did not take me long to figure out that the ones that could afford me did not need me and the ones that needed me could not afford me. Thus I chose to move in to the nonprofit sector. Twenty years later I understand why they call it NOT FOR PROFIT. It completely works backward from economic theory of supply and demand. As the needs and demand go up the supply of money goes down. Our sector is supposed to do more with less. We are supposed to work for lower wages and yet have incredible demands on our professional judgment and our emotional challenges.

I have learned so much along the way about what it means to come together for a common purpose. In my work with Communities In Schools of North Carolina I have worked with grass roots groups all across the state, worked with national non profits, state and local government, individual, local and state leaders. I have worked with business leaders, agency leaders, civic leaders and politicians. I have found caring, considerate although sometimes misdirected people who want to make a difference. I have also met people who were paid to help our children become the best they can be yet don’t really believe that all children can learn. While publically they would never acknowledge that they have little faith in some student’s ability their actions speak louder than words. I have had school leaders tell me that I was crazy for believing in “those kids”. I have had other teachers question me or my student teachers about why they were even trying with the kids who aren’t making it. In their belief system we are wasting our time. But I have also seen teachers, and other professionals go way beyond what was rationale to help a child learn to read, overcome a family issue or deal with frustration and failure.

Today I am excited. A new President has been elected. An African American President. When I think back to growing up in the rural south where my best friend and playmate, Helen, was not allowed inside my house, where her Mom and Grandma who loved my family, baked me birthday cakes and were the only black people who came to my grandfather and father’s funerals. Where finally my senior year in high school I walked proudly down the aisle of the First Baptist church in our town with the first black student to come to our school. Where we as young people embraced Ruby but watched as some of the adults walked out when we walked in that Sunday morning. I have hope!

It is also snowing in Myrtle Beach for the first time in five years. I can’t help but believe it is a sign of hope. When both my Mom and Dad died it snowed on the day of their funeral. I took that as a sign that things were going to be okay. I believe the same today. We are going to be okay. We as a nation are going to survive and eventually we will thrive again. My hope is this next time it will be more inclusive and where hate, greed and jealousy have often gotten in our way of making things better for all people, we can put those differences aside. We have to believe to achieve. I believe!

Linda Harill

January 17, 2009