ROCHELLE RILEY

City Year tucks Detroit kids under their mentors' arms; they gain trust and hope

Rochelle Riley
Detroit Free Press
Nyema Passmore a fourth grader at Burns Elementary school with her City Year mentor Kristian Rice Friday, June 9, 2017 at Burns Elementary in Detroit, MI.

Kristian Rice remembers the day she met Nyema Passmore. 

She was attending a block party thrown by Burns Elementary to kick off the school year, when a beautiful 9-year-old, all gangly arms and legs and fearlessness, walked up, away from her mother, sister and brother, strode right up to her and asked: “Are you guys gonna be at my school?”

“She seemed real excited about it,” Rice recalled. “And a few weeks later, she was in my fourth grade class."

That was the day that she and Nyema became inseparable. Rice gained a mission, and Nyema gained a much-needed big sister, mentor, tutor and friend.

And over the next few months — from November through March — Rice did many things to help her young charge: empower her to think for herself, to stand up for herself, to express her emotions in ways that would not limit her potential. But arguably the most important was to help increase her reading level from first grade to fourth grade.

“I can’t take full credit for it,” said Rice, 22, who spent the year at Burns as a part of her duties in the City Year AmeriCorps program, which placed 71 young people from diverse backgrounds in seven public schools across Detroit last year. “For one, she liked coming out of the classroom to do extra work. She was always willing to work and play educational games and write and read. She was driven in her own way. I can’t take full credit for that. She’s a trooper, wanting to come with me and do extra work on top of the classes she had during the day.”

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Read Rice’s quote again. That is what is important about what happened between a 22-year-old and a now-10-year-old who bonded over achievement. It is at the heart of what William Pickard said a few weeks ago to a gathering of Detroit leaders at a Michigan Chronicle breakfast. To start improving Detroit’s schools, we must begin with the premise that all children can learn, all children can excel, all children can achieve. 

City Year mentor Kristian Rice works on reading with Burns Elementary fourth grader Nyema Passmore Friday, June 9, 2017 at Burns Elementary in Detroit, MI.

We need to stop making excuses for why we don’t help the children.

We won’t help the schools because officials steal. 

We won’t help the teachers because they keep asking for more money (They shouldn’t have to ask. They deserve it.) 

We won’t help the district because parents aren’t doing their jobs. 

Now rewrite all those sentences in your head and replace whomever you’re not helping with the word "children."

We won’t help the children because of theft.

We won’t help the children because of unions.

We won’t help the children because some have lazy parents.

Really, can you justify the end of any sentence that begins with: "We won’t help the children...”?

Kristian Rice couldn’t. She had just earned an associate’s degree from Wayne County Community College District, and she wasn’t trying to decide what job to search for. She was trying to decide what community service was her duty.

“I wasn’t sure where to start or which organization to work for,” she said. “I was also trying to go to U-M Dearborn, and I looked on their website at community service projects connected to the schools and I saw City Year. 
 
“I saw a picture of bright, smiling faces and red bomber (jackets), and I didn’t think too much about it,” she said.

But her stepfather encouraged her to apply.
 
“And I ended up here, which is where I am supposed to be,” she said in an interview at Burns Elementary, the east-side school where she met and became instantly connected to Nyema.
 
“I wanted to do community service because I’ve gone to Detroit Public Schools my whole life and I know what it’s like to be able to give back to my community,” she said.
 
From the time she arrived, Rice was assigned to a classroom comprising children who needed extra help and nurturing because they were behind or had behavioral issues in other classrooms. She was assigned to 14 students, but she worked extra hard with Nyema, mostly because Nyema wanted to work.
 
“I even developed a nice little friendship with her, more like a sisterhood,” Rice said. “And I wasn’t even expecting that. It all worked out.
 
“I came to find out, based on her test scores from the previous school year, that she was reading at a first-grade level in fourth grade. I decided I would work with her for the remainder of the year to get her caught up. It was the test scores.”
 
Those danged test scores, the ones that determine children’s futures, damage teachers’ reputations and diminish districts’ statures.
 
Many teachers don’t teach so children can learn. They teach so kids can pass the tests, some say privately, because every year that Detroit is on the bottom is a year that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos can convince business people to open more charter schools with no oversight and little accountability to parents. I know. I know. It’s not all charters. Some are working, and working well. Others wind up closing, the children sent back to public districts, where they are woefully behind.
 
That is what Nyema faced when she was so behind in reading. And that is where Kristian Rice started, so for nearly five months, she worked with Nyema one on one, in class, after class and during recess.
 
The pair spent 45 minutes to two hours on additional work a few times a week, with Rice making it as fun as possible, sometimes with games. They demonstrated in a sunny classroom at Burns, a place Nyema no longer dreads, even when she’s doing extra work while other children are playing.
 
“At recess, we do a little math, and we play a story game and games like that,” Rice said. She turns to Nyema and asks whether she’d like to play Story Cubes. 
 
“Yay, the game!" Nyema squeals.
 
“This game is good for imagination,” Rice explains, as she dumps cubes the size of dice with pictures on them. “You roll all the cubes and whatever picture comes up, you have to use it to tell a story.”
 
Nyema looks at her nine cubes.
 
“What’s my genre?” she asks her mentor.
 
Kristian chooses Nyema’s favorite: horror. And we watch a 10-year-old weave a tale about a snake who feeds a pill to a bird who dies, but thanks to his magic book bag, he spits up the pill and kills the snake.
 
“I like horror because it brings out the scariness,” Nyema says. “Without horror, it’s a boring movie. And I like this game because I get to tell my own stories.”
 
For her turn, Rice tells the story, as dictated by the cubes, of a skeleton who falls apart, can’t get anyone to put him back together and becomes a circus act. Nyema declares her story better.

Fourth grade teacher Samantha Vann, City Year mentor Kristian Rice and Nyema Passmore talk about the program Friday, June 9, 2017 at Burns Elementary in Detroit, MI.

These are some of the ways that City Year participants make a difference. If you’re a teacher like Samantha Vann, all the patience in the world can’t keep up with a classroom that changes size weekly, loses students to an absence rate that ensures at least a third of the class won’t be promoted and requires teachers to also act as nurturers, nourishers, counselors and a link to stability.
 
“She’s comprehending,” Vann said of Nyema. “Reading is everything. Miss Kristian taught her comprehension. She is now retaining the information that she’s reading so she can answer questions the way they need to be answered. She’s amazing.
 
“I teach them all subjects — life skills, and we have a cooking class that Miss Kristian started,” said Vann, who is in her first full-time stint after years of substitute teaching. “I teach them basic skills and prepare them for what they have to face when they leave: math, science, social studies, English language…
 
“And I’ll be honest… Miss Kristian is the best choice I ever made. They gained a great relationship, one that Nyema needed. She needed Miss Kristian. They have grown together in a way that I could not do with her, and I’m not ashamed of that.”
 
Vann said that Nyema has learned the concept of respect, something she’ll need, something she didn’t arrive at school with. 
 
“She respects (Rice) more than me,” Vann said. “She does anything she  tells her to do and follows her everywhere. "
  
Vann said the impact Rice has had is measurable.
 
“We have kids reading better,” she said. “There is only so much I can do in a class with this many personalities, this many emotions. Having her here to sometimes take some of them out. She tutored half of them, which was excellent for me because I can do my best, but I can’t reach all of them. Because I’ve got kids (other teachers) could not handle, I have different attainment levels and different emotional levels. She’s the ying to my yang. By yourself, it’s a nightmare.”
 
Nyema’s progress in reading means that she’ll be ready for fifth grade when she arrives in the fall, rather than struggling to catch up as she has in years past.
 
“I watched it happen,” Vann said of the 10-year-old's progress. “Any student, if they get one-on-one attention, they’ll flourish, and she took the time with her.”
 
Talk turns to future, and Rice explains that she plans to study public health at Wayne State University in the fall, a career borne of reading nutritional labels on the snack cakes her parents bought when she was little.
 
“My ultimate goal would be to work for the FDA and help change some of the policies they have regarding products that go onto our bodies and the foods that go into our bodies because these corporations get away with a lot of things and that’s why people end up sick and deteriorating while they’re young.”
 
And Nyema? Rice plans to continue tutoring her and helping her reach her goal of being a singer and an author.
 
“I can create my own books,” Nyema said.
 
Suddenly, Nyema, who had been listening in on every conversation and, just realizing it, turned to Vann and said: “I didn’t know I was reading at first-grade level.”
 
“That’s OK that you started at first grade,” her teacher told her. “Look at where you are now. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It’s where you’re going. I got to see it.”
 
Nyema beamed.

City Year Executive Director Andrew Stein hopes that programs like City Year will gain more support as new DPSCD Superintendent Nikolai Vitti transforms the district.

He said independent studies have found that City Year makes a difference. Schools with corps members are two to three times more likely to improve on their math and English language arts assessments than schools without these dedicated AmeriCorps members, he said.

But as important, Stein said: Nearly half of the City Year members express an interest in teaching after a year. That’s good news in Detroit where the teaching ranks are low and getting lower each year. The corps members get a student loan deferment and a nearly $6,000 education scholarship after completing their year of service.

So, City Year also is funding schooling for future students who might not otherwise continue their education without it.
 

To learn more about the City Year program, visit www.cityyear.org/detroit.
 
Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley.