These Schools Give A Lesson Of Hope

‘How late do you usually stay?” the guy was asked.

“Oh, usually until 6 or 7,” he replied. “Some nights a little later. It depends.”

“On what?”

“On how many kids are here,” he explained. “Sometimes, kids are still here at 6 o’clock. You know, they missed a bus or maybe a parent forgot them.”

“What do you do then?” was the next question.

“Give them a ride home” was the answer.

This was a school principal, a government employee, talking as he sat in his office at the Blackstone School in Boston’s South End. His name is Bill Colom and he is 48 years old and has been in the public education business for more than two decades and he runs a school where the children walk around wearing smiles and feeling, for the moments they are in the building at least, that things could turn out OK for them.

The school’s population is nearly 90 percent minority. Colom figures about 75 percent of his students come from homes where there is only one parent around. A huge percentage, more than a majority, are on some form of public assistance. Most of the parents are mothers and, despite their circumstances, they are intent on pushing the child toward some kind of promising future, but it is a difficult task.

No statistics are available to measure the fear many mothers confront daily: The fear that comes with an absence of work. The fear that lurks outside the building where they live, the fear of the street, sidewalk, even a hallway. The fear of not having a man in the house or maybe of having a man who wants to get back into a house. The fear of facing an almost total inability to shape or control events, including simple things that most of us take for granted.

Like when to go food shopping: You and I can stop almost any time that’s convenient to pick up milk, bread or laundry detergent. For Colom’s constituency, food shopping depends on the mail, on a check, on the stamps.

Things like seeing a doctor: When you are poor, the doctor is the emergency room at City Hospital. And getting there often means a couple of transfers on a bus line.

So school becomes a sanctuary, a haven of stability, hot food and teachers who care. And this school - the Blackstone - is not that unusual; there are several others just as good.

Colom isn’t an oddity, either. Throughout town, there are principals working just as hard but you never hear about them because we do not live at a time conducive to good news about good people.

“There are a lot of good things happening here,” the principal pointed out. “But sometimes you are so amazed by the other stuff you can forget that.

“Like when you first hear that a 10-year-old is sexually active. You say to yourself ‘No, that can’t be.’ But it is and you have to learn how to deal with it and talk about it with a parent. That’s one of the reasons I make regular home visits.

“I try to stop by a lot of the homes. Talk to the parent. Tell them what’s going on in the school. Let them know we care about the child and that they can call or come see us anytime.”

This is where the term “schoolteacher” is truly defined: In a large urban system where, in order to teach, you have to really want to teach. This is not some safe suburb with computers, the latest textbooks, a supportive and affluent community, parking lots and athletic programs.

This is the city. This is where many chairs are filled with kids from homes where there is absolutely no clout at all; where good principals and great teachers would be getting six-figure incomes if they were paid per hour; where not many politicians care one way or another about what parents think, fear or want because a lot of them do not vote and more are afraid to raise a voice in anger over a political system run for those at the top.

“Oh, there are some very, very smart children here,” Bill Colom was saying. “There are some children with tremendous potential, too, but you know it will never be realized for a lot of reasons: Mother has a problem. There’s no money. Not much food. Drugs. A lot of things. It’s hard being smart when you’re hungry every morning, you know.”

Stand in the Blackstone or other schools and as the pupils pass you can see the face of the city in 10 and 15 years’ time. Here, they are still young enough to capture, still innocent enough to smile because any harsh reality is mellowed by the gift they get every single school day.

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