Group Aims to Help Students Succeed

Virginia Newell has spent much of her life working to see that black students receive the best education possible, which, for her, means holding high expectations for their achievement.

Newell is a retired professor of mathematics at Winston-Salem State University who has also run a summer math-and-science academy for younger students. In February, she read some things that made her wonder whether federal Title I money earmarked for poor students in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools system was being used as effectively as it should be. She picked up the phone and called the Rev. Carleton Eversley to talk about her concerns.

Eversley, the minister at Dellabrook Presbyterian Church and president of the Ministers Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity, has had a long-standing interest in public education.

Eversley suggested that they invite others in the community to sit down and look into what they might want to do. They put out the word.

"One of the keys to our group is we are using networks," Eversley said.

When the group met for the first time in April, Eversley would have been happy to see a couple of dozen people show up. Fifty did. When the group met for the second time in May, 50 people -- about 40 blacks and 10 whites -- showed up.

One of them was Cecilia McDaniel, who has a doctorate in education and who has taught at N.C. A&T State University, Winston-Salem State and Forsyth Technical Community College.

"The issue is high-quality education," McDaniel said. "If it is high-quality education, some of the other issues will resolve themselves."

The members of the group want that for all students, Eversley said. Within that context, the group is placing "unapologetic emphasis" on poor students, black students and Hispanic students.

"We are concerned with the students in most need," Eversley said.

"In other words, Title I schools," Newell said. "Title I schools are abysmally failing."

Title I schools are schools that have a high percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. The group came up with a list of six goals by modifying a list of five long-standing NAACP goals and adding a sixth suggested by Newell.

The list includes high expectations for all students, equitable practices in discipline, the same percentage of black and Hispanic teachers as students, a curriculum and extracurricular activities that reflect blacks and Hispanics, sensitivity training, and an advisory team for each Title I school.

The advisory teams were Newell's idea. The group is working to organize those advisory teams with the goal of having them in place during the coming school year. After the teams start working with the Title I schools, it's going to take some time to see results, they said. Eventually, they expect there to be measurable results, such as higher scores on standardized tests.

"You can take those low-performing kids and fix those kids so they will be better than average," Newell said.

They said that they know there is more to it than just saying that all students should be held to high expectations.

"We have to look at the fact that learning is complex," McDaniel said.

Sleep, nutrition, vision, hearing and how students are treated at home are just some of the factors that come into play. Plus, students need dynamic principals and teachers. Committee members also noted more than once that self-discipline is inextricably linked to good education.

"We want high expectations; we want strict discipline," Eversley said. "And we want to offer ourselves as partners."

Eversley made that point to members of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools' Board of Education when 10 people from the committee went to the board's meeting Tuesday night and spoke during the public-comments portion of the meeting.

Eversley has sometimes had a contentious relationship with school officials, and, in hopes of getting things off on a positive foot, he was chosen to make the point that it is the committee's intention to work with the school system to the benefit of all students.

Some of the other committee members took a more aggressive approach. One read through a list of things that schools should do and then went back through the list, telling board members, point-by-point, that they had failed.

Earlier, members of the group met with Superintendent Don Martin to talk about their goals.

Theo Helm, a spokesman for the school system, said, "We want to work with them."

The group and the school system share many of the same goals, Helm said. "We may not agree with every single point but there are a lot of areas where we are in complete agreement."

Eversley said that committee members are committed.

"We are willing to make a long-term commitment to advocate for our children," he said.

With that in mind, long-term plans call for creating a nonprofit organization. For now, though, the group has no formal structure or official name. Eversley and Newell are calling themselves co-conveners, and the group is calling itself the Community Advisory Committee on Public Education.