Just
about everyone we encounter in Virginia is extremely nice. All of the teachers at Glen Lea are so great;
they’re strict and a little scary at times with their classes, but only because
the kids need a lot of discipline to focus.
Diana, the teacher coordinating our work there, gave us all cards and
treat bags of candy today to take home. All
the teachers and other volunteers at Peter Paul are so nice, so accommodating,
and genuinely curious about Kansas and Alternative Breaks. At St. Stephens Church where we are staying,
we have been offered the epitome of hospitality. The youth group that uses the
room we are sleeping in on Sundays for class made us welcome signs with
Jayhawks on them. Deb and Steve, the two people coordinating our stay, have
both provided everything we need and are very kind people to talk to. We have also met several parishioners, including
one local lawyer who invited our group over to his home to watch the KU game on
Friday night since the church doesn’t have cable. I won’t be going because I have the early
driving shift at 6 am on Saturday as we head home, but it was unbelievably kind
of him to open up his home to a group of college students from halfway across
the country. Al, the evening security
guard at the church, is one of Carlye, Emily, and my favorite new
acquaintances. He is an older gentleman
who works part time at the church, and he is always willing to help us out and
loves to joke around with us in the evenings! I’ve really been enjoying all of
this southern hospitality!
Today
at Peter Paul, we had prepared a short presentation over Kansas and our school
to give to the kids there. One of Peter
Paul’s main goals is to get their students on the path toward college by making
sure they do well in school and getting them started early thinking about their
education. During the presentation, we
asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up and if they want to go
to college. We presented to a small
group of second graders through high schoolers, and it was nice to see that all
of them said they wanted to go to college.
Many of them said they want to be teachers and doctors, and chef and
engineer were also popular career paths.
The kids were also really interested in hearing about how far we had to
come to volunteer. Before the
presentation I worked on math homework for a while with a fourth grade girl
named Amber; when she found out that we came all the way from Kansas just to
work with them, she told me something along the lines of ‘man, you guys must be
some of the nicest people ever’ and I think it made an impression that even
coming from so far away we genuinely wanted to come tutor and mentor them.
When
presenting about Kansas History and discussing the Brown vs. the Topeka Board
of Education case, I almost felt guilty, because while that case ended legal school
segregation, there is still very much an existing but often unacknowledged form
of segregation by income, and in Richmond that clearly seems to be tied to
race. I highly doubt that any of the
kids have more than a few white, or even Hispanic, children in their elementary
schools, while most of the children at the private school next to the church we
stay at are mostly white; All the kids
at Peter Paul are African-American and from poverty-stricken families. When I read Savage Inequalities for the Alternative Breaks midterm, the fact
that the poorest children still tend to be minorities was brought up a lot, and
it is very evident in the schools and programs we work with here. I really think more needs to be done about
improving schools for low income children, who seem to be the new victims of
this form of segregation by school funding, which is something I had in mind
before this trip but am now very much convinced of having seen this problem
first hand.
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