Empowering youth to succeed
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on October 26, 2015 1:46 PM
Sometimes the best pep rally isn't about a sports team or readying students for field day -- it's about empowering them to prepare for their own future.
Men Who Care, more than a dozen area men who have banded together to support students at Dillard Middle School, enlisted the help of two strong women to address a schoolwide assembly Friday afternoon.
The speakers, District Court Judge Ericka James and Lt. Col. Pamela Townsend Atkins from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, were not there to laud their own successes. Instead, they told students that their road had started out very much like the middle schoolers in the audience.
Mrs. James invited a dozen volunteers from the audience to illustrate her point. She lined the students up on stage and asked a series of questions, instructing them to step toward the center if they could respond affirmatively. The scenarios included whether they had known someone in jail, seen someone arrested, witnessed adults fighting and ever had something stolen from them.
In every instance, most if not all shifted in response, including Mrs. James.
At the end of the exercise, she pointed out that the group, comprised of boys, girls, black, white and Latino, had experienced similar things. She said that she was not unlike them in that respect.
And yet she had made it through middle school, high school and then college, with a mother who encouraged her to pursue law school.
"If I can do it, tell me why you can't," she said. "You can't answer that because the answer is, you can."
Mrs. Atkins shared how growing up, she had been a victim of "social passing" -- when students don't have the grades but are still sent on to the next level.
The consequences became obvious when she reached college.
"I spent my first three years in college learning high school. So now I'm three years behind my peers," she told the audience. "If you like being behind everybody else, keep waiting to decide what you want to do. If you want to get ahead, then you have to have a want factor, deciding what you want to do, when you want to do it and how you want to do it."
The hour-long "encouragement pep rally" is just one of the activities Men Who Care has been involved in since introducing the program at the school last year, said Rashad Hinnant, intervention specialist at the school, who is also executive director of the local organization.
"Every Thursday the Men Who Care came to mentor fifth-grade students," he said. "This year they're mentoring sixth-graders. The plan is to follow them all the way through."
The group of men have stepped in to show students that someone cares about them.
Principal Sonja Emerson enthused about the effort, expressing appreciation for the community support.
She also let her students know the importance of such events, designed to help them become the best students possible.
"When you come to us as fifth-graders, we have four years, four years to get you ready for high school. That's a big task," she said, before targeting the eighth-graders in the audience. "You're my first graduating class that has been with me all four years.
"If one of you does not walk across the stage to graduate (in the spring) it will break my heart."