Reposted with permission from the American Federation of Teachers
http://www.aft.org
Where We Stand
By Albert Shanker
A Real Role Model
Camara Barrett sounds like a classic high-achiever. Valedictorian and first 
in his class when he graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn 
this spring, he was also class president, editor of the school paper, a peer 
tutor, and an award-winning public speaker. And he worked 15 hours a week at 
a Brooklyn medical center, getting experience in one of the fields he is 
interested in pursuing. So it's no surprise that he got admitted to eight 
universities and is going to Cornell with a scholarship from the university 
and another from the United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 of the American 
Federation of Teachers. The surprise is that he achieved all this while 
living in a homeless shelter.
     Everything seemed fine for Camara when he came to this country from 
Kingston, Jamaica, several years ago. He was living with his mother and 
stepfather, taking tough courses and getting top grades at Thomas Jefferson. 
But after a bitter fight with his parents, he found himself out on the 
street. For four days, he lived and studied on the subway at night, getting 
off to go to school during the day. 
     This would throw most kids for a loop. Even if they're not getting on 
well with their mothers and fathers, young people depend on parents to 
provide food and shelter and a certain degree of emotional support and 
stability. But after people at Thomas Jefferson helped Camara get settled in 
a homeless shelter, he pulled his grades back up, studied for his SATs, and 
applied for college admission. Rather than devastating him, the experience 
of being alone, with nowhere to spend the night but a subway car, seems to 
have strengthened Camara's resolve to study and make something of himself. 
Speaking to a _New York Post_ reporter about being homeless ("Subway Scholar 
is on an Honor Roll," May 21, 1996), Camara said that he "was depressed 
[and] filled with melancholy...[but] what doesn't kill you...makes you 
stronger and that definitely made me stronger. " 
     How was he able to pull this off? What makes some kids who face 
enormous problems fail and a few, like Camara Barrett, succeed? Christopher 
Armstrong, one of the counselors at Independence Inn, the homeless shelter 
for boys 16 to 21 where Camara spent last year, says that Camara sees a 
challenge where other people might see obstacles. But this doesn't really 
explain how he found the guts to meet the challenge. 
     If he hadn't been able to get off the subway and step into the world of 
school, would he have made it? I'm not just talking about the people at 
Thomas Jefferson who helped him through the crisis--though they were 
important. We always used to think of education as the salvation of poor 
kids who wanted to rise above their poverty. It prepared them to make a 
better living than their parents. But, more than that, going to school and 
studying math, learning about American history, reading books by Dickens and 
Shakespeare, and perhaps even seeing some Shakespeare plays--all these 
experiences took you out of your immediate circumstances and connected you 
with a world that was much larger. That seems to be what Camara is talking 
about in the scholarship essay he submitted to the United Federation of 
Teachers. He says that, even when he was a boy growing up on the streets of 
Kingston, surrounded by ugliness and poverty, he was able to lose himself in 
television and books.
     Americans have always believed that somebody can start with little, 
overcome terrific odds, and succeed. So Camara's is an American story. It's 
also a story that poor, minority kids especially need to hear--the ones who 
look at the difficulties in their lives and say, "Why bother?" I wonder what 
would happen if those sporting-goods and soft-drink companies whose ads 
feature huge color photos of movie stars and sports heroes started using 
heroes like Camara Barrett as their poster boys. What would the effect be if 
every day poor, minority kids could see a three-story-high photograph of 
Camara Barrett? Now there's a real role model.
Chuck Beams
cbeams@dreamscape.com
http://www.dreamscape.com/cbeams
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* UniQWK #5290* Any twit can understand computers, and many do.
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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