Since learning the news of this award a few months ago, I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on the journey that brought me to Atlanta – a journey which started in a small town in Eastern North Carolina.
Having grown up in a working class family, I didn’t take the opportunity to attend college for granted. I knew throughout high school that if I didn’t get a full scholarship, college simply would not be an option. So, when I arrived on campus in August of 1996, there was no question that I would be maximizing every minute of my four years here.
I jumped into many activities, got a job at the Student Stores, and started making many new friends. Within a few weeks, however, it became clear that the academic rigor of my classes was far beyond anything I had ever experienced in high school, and I frankly became quite frustrated that so many of the students around me seemed far better prepared for this experience than me.
For the first time in my life, I started to develop a sense of the inequities that exist in our nation’s education system.
Following my freshman year, my Morehead Scholarship provided me the opportunity to engage in a summer experience teaching students in inner city Houston, and I soon discovered that my personal experience with educational inequity paled in comparison to injustices that exist in many urban school districts around the nation.
I couldn’t figure out why some of the 7th graders I was teaching hadn’t mastered basic math facts and many were still struggling with simple sight words. I was outraged when I learned that children living in low-income communities are already two to three grades behind their higher-income peers by the time they reach fourth grade and that only half of them will ever graduate from high school by the time they are 18 years old, and those who do perform on average at the level of eighth graders in higher-income communities.
That summer experience lit a spark in me that became further fueled by the commitment to social justice that seemed to permeate the Carolina campus. When I returned to school as a sophomore, I immediately started finding ways to become more involved with young people.
I started working at a teen center on Franklin Street and spent a few hours each week tutoring at a local elementary school. I enrolled in a couple of education courses and got involved with Dr. Jim Johnson’s Durham Scholars Program. When it came time to decide my honors thesis topic during my senior year of business school, I seized the opportunity to explore the issues surrounding urban education. I decided to examine Corporate America’s role in urban educational reform.
Given the path I had carved out at Carolina, it didn’t surprise many when I graduated that I chose to deviate from the traditional business school career path, and instead chose the much more lucrative option of becoming a 3rd grade teacher in Atlanta with the Teach For America program.
During my first few months in Atlanta, I must admit that I asked God many times why He had let me struggle through the challenging accounting, finance, and marketing courses in business school if he had really intended for me to be a primary school teacher. It seemed like a cruel joke. I humored myself by creating elaborate grade books in excel with complicated formulas, but that didn’t exactly leverage the business degree in quite the way the Kenan Family had probably envisioned.
That’s not to say that teaching 3rd grade was a cake-walk. In fact, quite the contrary.
I was putting in banking hours and barely seeing a return on my investment. One of my more challenging clients was a student named Trey whose mischievous grin welcomed me on my first day of teaching in Atlanta.
Though Trey initially appeared to be very self-confident, this could not be further from the truth. He often called himself dumb because he had been held back and was still reading on a kindergarten level. Trey also had many challenges outside of school, as he had recently lost his father during a drug deal that went bad.
Despite his emotional and academic challenges, Trey and I quickly bonded, and I soon found myself helping him daily after school. Through countless hours of tutoring and “pep talks”, Trey gained confidence in his academic potential, and by the end of the year he was reading on a fourth grade level and was one of my brightest math students. Trey was hungry to learn and he was determined to break the cycle of poverty in his family by staying focused in school.
While I was encouraged by the progress I saw in students like Trey, deep inside of me I knew what lied ahead for Trey. You see, Trey was zoned to the lowest performing middle school in the state of Georgia, and if he persevered through that war zone, his only option was to matriculate to one of the worst drop out factories in the nation, also known as Washington High School.
While I had grown up believing in the American Dream, I began to recognize that for kids in certain zip codes, their destiny was being determined by an education system that was failing them.
My experience at Carolina taught me that public service and leadership had no age restrictions, and being young and dumb, I was determined to change that educational reality for kids in the 30314 zip code. Two years out of college, I set out to open a college preparatory charter school to not only change the life trajectory for students like Trey, but just as importantly, to challenge people’s notion of what is possible for “those” kids.
Unfortunately, our school opening missed Trey by a year, and he proceeded down the predictable path paved for him. Trey’s 18 now, and I often see him in the neighborhood. It breaks my heart to share that Trey never made it out of high school and he has recently taken up drug dealing in order take care of the baby he just fathered.
While we can drive by thousands of Trey’s each day and pass judgment on the life choices that landed them on a street corner, as Trey’s 3rd grade teacher, I know that somewhere along the way our society failed a student who once sat in my classroom hungry to learn and determined to be successful.
While we have a long ways to go in this fight both in Atlanta and across the nation, I’m optimistic tonight because my generation has embraced educational equality as our civil right issue with thousands of socially conscious college students graduating each year ready to make their mark, and not surprisingly, Carolina has been a leader in this movement.
Last year, nearly 8 percent of UNC’s senior class applied to Teach For America, which is at the forefront of this fight, and throughout Teach For America’s 20-year history, more than 540 Carolina alumni have joined the ranks of TFA.
It’s no accident that Carolina is producing students who not only care deeply about their community, but who are also equipped to affect change in substantive ways for students like Trey. For me, I know that the road from rural North Carolina would have ever intersected the road to inner city Atlanta were it not for the challenging experiences and leadership opportunities provided by Carolina.
I am forever indebted to this institution and humbled to call myself a Tarheel!
