THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512020168
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS
STAFF WRITER
BY PERRY PARKS
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 272 lines
CHESTER DUNTON wraps his arm around 8-year-old Thomas and huddles with him over a worksheet called ``numbers to hundred thousands.''
Leaning over Thomas' paper, Dunton coaches the P.W. Moore third-grader through a problem. Then, in a flash, he hops up to help another student.
``That's two out of six,'' he calls over his shoulder to Thomas. ``You've gotta do four more with no help.''
Thomas grins mischievously.
``When I get through,'' he says, ``I have to get one dollar.''
``One dollar?'' Dunton says, mocking shock.
``Two,'' Thomas insists.
``Two?''
Dunton sticks his hands in his pockets. ``I'm broke.''
Another student spending the afternoon at the Hugh Cale Opportunities Industrialization Center comments on Thomas' strategy. ``He's going up instead of down,'' he notes, wryly.
It's 3:30 p.m., and Dunton is working the room of a dozen young men from some of Elizabeth City's poorer neighborhoods. Dunton, from the Pasquotank branch of the Cooperative Extension Service, is putting in time at the Hugh Cale center to make sure these kids, some of whom have been referred by the juvenile justice system, do their homework.
Part showman, part teacher, part big brother, he moves among the kids and jokes, cajoles, helps, questions. When a new student comes in he cheerily asks for a name, age and favorite basketball team. The kids, mostly fourth- through seventh-graders, are at ease before they even sit down.
This is just one of three full classrooms of boys and girls at the Hugh Cale center's new location in a former Catholic school on South Martin Street. It's the fourth year for the latchkey program, which gives kids a two- or three-hour stop after school where they are pushed academically, fed a snack and juice, and kept off the streets.
Many of these kids are the ones who act out in school, defying teachers, refusing to work, maybe picking fights or worse.
But here, under the supervision of more than a dozen strong, caring adults, they fall into line. From kindergartners to middle school kids, they sit when they're told, raise their hands when they're reminded, and show respect for those around them.
``It's good that they're here,'' Winfred Simpson Jr., son of Hugh Cale executive director Shirley Simpson, says of the kids who have already brushed with the law. ``Otherwise they might end up going to some boys' home.
``This is the last resort. Once you put them on the street, what are they supposed to do?''
The Hugh Cale organization sprang up in the middle of the 1980s, Shirley Simpson says, when ``the Shepard, Cale and Martin Street area became totally infested with drugs.''
Residents concerned about the pattern organized into the Hugh Cale group, named for the late 19th century state legislator credited with founding Elizabeth City State University.
Around 1989-90, the group found its home in a donated Presbyterian Church on Shepard Street - renovated with $24,000 in city funds earmarked for rebuilding the troubled area. The little pink building over the years has become a symbol of hope in the tattered community.
When the group began looking at funding for programs it hoped to run for lonely children and struggling adults, it chose to become part of a larger organization. In 1991, the Hugh Cale group aligned itself with OIC of America, an international group based in Philadelphia that concentrates on economic development for the disadvantaged.
Now with a $110,000 budget, the Hugh Cale OIC pays a staff of four to run the latchkey and job training programs; GED, college prep and SAT courses; parenting classes; and a nursing assistant program through Roanoke-Chowan Community College. The center also hosts Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
The latchkey program serves the majority of the center's clientele. It had about 54 kids in the old building, but Simpson had picked up nearly 10 more children by the second day in the new complex and was up to about 75 children by the end of November.
And Simpson says concerned residents, backed by a determined police department, have managed to push much of the drug problem out of the Shepard, Cale, Martin neighborhood. But poverty and turmoil remain.
Just next door to the center's new location, the city's only murder this year was committed at a private birthday party in the American Legion Hut, where a man was shot to death in February while beating and stomping on the killer's brother.
Since 1985, Simpson says, she's counted off too many murders of area youth.
``I have been terribly, terribly concerned about our young black and white men,'' she says.
That's why the Hugh Cale center is so important.
``The main intent was to bring them off the streets because of what was happening in the neighborhood, and give them a different environment,'' Simpson says.
At 2:25 p.m., center receptionist Tamika Keys pours bright red juice into row after row of plastic cups, then piles cookies on napkins arrayed on a long table in the hallway. The kids will be greeted, seated and fed in a routine they know well.
At 2:30, Simpson interrupts herself to shout ``They're here!'' and rushes out to the porch, while about 20 children pour off a Pasquotank County Schools bus and form an orderly line at the door.
``You know where you go today?'' Simpson asks each child as she ushers them into the warm building. The kids used to be all in a single classroom at the old place; now they're divided by grade.
Later, more children will arrive - by taxi, by car, some by bike.
Many of them will leave with their parents, mostly single mothers who put in a full day's work to keep their family's heads above water.
``People sometimes get a misconception of single parents,'' says Simpson, who has raised her four children alone for some 16 years. ``The parents that we have want the best. They want to involve their kids in whatever it takes to get them through.''
Many of these parents, Simpson says, ``have to work, because they have chosen not to become a recipient of state benefits.''
As the students separate into their rooms, the third- and fourth-graders park in the adult classroom, where books by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Agatha Christie line the walls and black leaders are prominently displayed on front bulletin boards.
Keys gets the children situated and passes out their snacks. The kids argue over whose day it is to collect the garbage until Keys produces the schedule.
Brothers Develle and Travail are goofing around and settling down at the same time. Travail, a fourth-grader, says he likes the center.
``It keeps me out of trouble,'' he says. ``And when I do (come), I get to play my Super Nintendo when I get home.''
Interaction among schoolkids in a classroom comes in waves. For a time, it is quiet - the students have just been assigned a task or reminded to be still. But during that silence, impatience grows and bubbles into a whispered sentence or a restless tapping.
In a short time, the wave builds toward its crest, with a dozen voices chiming at once and a new chaos of motion and activity.
When Shirley Simpson enters and coldly confronts one standing student with a brusque ``What's your problem?'' - the wave crashes.
The kids are shamed, and still.
Simpson reminds the children how their behavior influences the way people, especially visitors, perceive them. And she reminds them of the logic behind procedures.
``What's the rule about pencil sharpening?'' she asks. ``What would happen if all of us got up at one time?''
``It'd be a fight,'' Travail says.
Two children have taken their books from backpacks and are already concentrating on their homework.
A new wave of studiousness stretches toward its peak, as the remainder of the students reach for a math book or a pencil or a worksheet and grow quiet again.
Simpson, 52, was raised on Walnut Street in Elizabeth City. She attended Bank Street Elementary School, P.W. Moore High School, College of The Albemarle and Elizabeth City State University.
Her bachelor's degree in home economics education is from Norfolk State University, and she's struggling to finish a master's in counseling through East Carolina University.
``But I can't do it,'' Simpson says. ``These kids won't let me do it. It takes a lot of energy for these kids.''
When the Hugh Cale organization started, Simpson says, the executive director job ``was dumped in my lap.'' It's not running the center she likes, but working with the people it serves.
Simpson is at the center about 60 hours a week, riding the ups and downs that at-risk students provide.
``At times I want to throw in my cards,'' she says. ``But then when you look at some of the successes, or you can look at a student you saved, then it gives you the incentive to go on. . . . It has a reward within itself.
``And then, mind you, the need is really great. The need is there.''
Paullette Donovan, field service coordinator for OIC of America, calls Simpson ``the embodiment of self-help,'' the organization's principal value.
``She comes with a dedication that is not easy to aquire,'' Donovan says. ``She is a whirlwind of energy, she's caring.''
OIC of America focuses on job development programs and is working to help the Hugh Cale center recapture some job training funding it has recently lost. But Donovan says Simpson has never faltered.
``She started this latchkey program with nothing,'' Donovan says. ``She doesn't give lip service to improving her community, she actually does that.''
Simpson says it will take a coming together of the races - ``black, white, blue and gray'' - to ensure success for today's troubled youths.
The majority of latchkey volunteers, for instance, are white students from Roanoke Bible College.
``We all need to come together and start working with some of these kids,'' she says. ``My philosophy has been, I don't care who does the job, as long as it gets done.
``It's gonna take unity to do it. . . . If we work harder toward unity, I think it will happen.''
In the center's entranceway, Simpson works with a girl named Teesha, who is struggling with her math homework. Simpson prods until Teesha comes up with the answer.
``See? See?'' Simspon says. ``All you gotta do is think. . . . Read it, and if you don't understand it, read it again.''
At 3:15, Simpson escorts a disconcerted child into the family resource room, where kindergartners through second-graders are pursuing word finds and calendar worksheets.
The boy is a cousin of one of Simpson's regulars, but he has come in unexpectedly. Parents are required to sign their children up for the program and to participate in monthly meetings. A volunteer takes him home.
``I don't know him well enough to take him in here without being signed up,'' she says. ``Some of the students I will take if I know their parents, but for safety reasons and certain rules and regulations, we have to sign them up.''
In the room where Thomas is doing math with Dunton and Winfred Simpson, Pasquotank Elementary fifth-grader Demetre is doing a word-find. He's been coming to the center for three years.
``It's fun,'' Demetre says. ``It helps you with your homework. And it keeps you off the streets from doing bad things.''
Demetre says he has friends who hang out in the streets. ``Sometimes they get shot at.''
Something about the Hugh Cale center makes the students who go want to stay out of trouble.
``That's that one-on-one with the kids,'' Winfred Simpson says. ``Because all of us here are close. You can't tell me that any of these kids here are close to their teacher.''
It takes some checking up to make sure the students are doing what they're supposed to. The Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools now put assignments on telephone voice mail machines, which has helped a lot.
``If it wasn't for that homework hotline, I guess we'd be lost, because some days they say they don't have any homework,'' Winfred Simpson says.
A little after 4 p.m., things are winding down for most of the kids. Some will stay until 5:30, but the majority will be sent off in about half an hour.
Volunteer Jenni Collins, who is dual-enrolled at Roanoke Bible College and Elizabeth City State University, is taking a break outside her classroom.
She says she loves the affection that the kids pile on her, and she likes to see the academic progress they make with her help.
``There's some of 'em that are really smart that you can tell right off,'' Collins says. ``We help 'em with their homework, and then it gets so we don't have to help them that much.''
At 4:25, the kids are putting on their coats and zipping up their bags. Parents and guardians are ambling in to pick up their charges.
``It's been a good program,'' Margaret Leary says as she helps her niece Laquetta put on her coat. ``My niece, she's in first grade, and she's doing third and fourth grade math. . . . She likes being here.''
The children are filing out now, boarding bikes or cars or hoofing it to homes that are only blocks away. One girl chews the purple handle of her umbrella as she climbs into a mini-van.
On the porch, Simpson is briefing parents about their children's progress.
If these kids have or cause trouble in school, they did little to show it during their two hours with the Hugh Cale staff.
``I don't have a problem as far as all-day discipline,'' Simpson says. ``What happens when they leave here? That's what concerns me.
``Is what we're doing in vain?''
Simpson is thinking about expanding the center hours further into the evening, maybe until 7 p.m.
``That's the time they need to be off the street,'' she says. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover, Color photo]
AFTERNOON HAVEN
Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Roger, 11, of Elizabeth City does his math homework the
old-fashioned way - with pencil and paper - as volunteer Chester
Dunton checks the results on a calculator.
Volunteer Chester Dunton, 25, quizzes a student about a reading
assignment the youth must complete.
A new student introduces himself to the other students at the Cale
center. The students, staff and volunteers put in time at the Hugh
Cale center to make sure that the students, some of whom have been
referred by the juvenile justice system, do their homework and are
safe from the dangers of the streets.
Staff photos by
DREW C. WILSON
Betty Simpson hugs a student and works to hold his attention as she
gives him a lecture. Simpson, executive director of the Hugh Cale
Opportunities Industrialization Center, says ``I have been terribly,
terribly concerned about our young black and white men. . . . The
main intent was to bring them off the streets because of what was
happening in the neighborhood, and give them a different
environment.''
Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
A worker at the Hugh Cale center uses a subtle disciplinary action
to quell a student's temper.
by CNB