Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 26, 1994 TAG: 9403300011
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Ask anybody at Christiansburg Middle School. Or see for yourself. Kat McClinton, a health and physical education teacher for 24 years, runs the Black Americans Dedicated to Success program with a sassy tongue and generous hugs.
Forty-six?! Is that the best you can do? The slight boy mumbles, his eyes studying the floor for the answer. Don't make any more bad grades like that. You know you can make a B. I know you can make a B. I don't want to see no D's. Don't you start hanging around folk who ain't doing well. Don't get sucked into that stuff.
McClinton, who has taught in the county for eight years, started the program last year when she saw that only five or six black students made honor roll. Christiansburg Middle School had 250-300 honor roll students out of an enrollment of 650-700, with 45 black students.
Now 15 or 16 black students make honor roll - more than those at Blacksburg Middle and at Christiansburg and Blacksburg high schools combined, she said.
Why did 40 percent of Christiansburg Middle's student body make all A's and B's, but only 10 percent of the black students?
McClinton said there were three reasons: parents didn't push enough, kids didn't strive enough, and teachers didn't ask enough.
Many educational studies have shown a bias in the classroom, with teachers expecting black students to fall behind the rest of the class. "That does not mean they do that consciously," McClinton said. "Sometimes they do that unconsciously. They expect them to do less than they are capable of doing."
C.J. Sherman, an eighth-grader with a perpetual innocent look, hasn't made honor roll yet. But he's come up from the F's and D's in sixth grade. "She fusses at us," he said. "She just wants us to do good." Does he try to please her? He raises his eyebrows at the obvious question. Of course he does better, he says, because he doesn't want McClinton to dog him.
He's seen what happens when his mom gets a call from McClinton. "If it's bad enough she has to call, I get grounded," he says. "My mom and her, they're really good friends."
McClinton decided to light a little fire under everyone involved. With the help of academic teachers - essential to the plan - she began scrutinizing students' every up and down. The 42 students in the program no longer could "forget" to bring a note home, or tell their parents "I don't have any homework."
Students admit they can't get away with slacking off anymore.
You didn't turn in an assignment? Miz McClinton knows by that afternoon, when she gets a "zero note" in her box from your teacher. Then she calls your folks. You catch it from them.
When McClinton sees you in the hall, the cafeteria - or your teacher sends you to her - you'll get it but good again. Same thing if you flunk a test in a class you had been doing fine in. And you better believe if you cut up in class, Miz McClinton is going to know it.
McClinton laughs at her reputation. Kids talk about her, she knows. They say things like "'I'd rather have my mom or somebody on me than Miz McClinton.'" She doesn't mind. "Whatever gets them to work, I'll take it. If it's, 'I'd rather not have that old lady on my back, so I'll do my work,' - hey. Do your work.'"
Kids come to her now. "I've had kids stop me in the drug store. 'I'm going to do this grade, I'll do better next time,'" they say. She says they figure if they get to her first, it won't be so bad.
When Mclinton started, the working hours were too long to count, and her graduate school work was piled on too. "Zero forms, I used to get a slew a day," she said. "Now I get them maybe once a week."
McClinton, at a 10:30 a.m. interview during her planning period, uses this day as an example of how it's easier now - today she's only talked to three kids and a parent so far.
But sometimes outside pressures can be a pain.
McClinton, who won a service award from the Coalition for Community for her work, has heard some criticism. A handful of students in her health classes have been more snippy than they used to be, and when she calls home, their parents say she's giving blacks special treatment.
"Nobody in this school is going to give grades to make this number fly up," McClinton says indignantly. "We're not about pretending that kids are achieving something they're not."
Parents involved in the program know no coddling is done. They cooperate eagerly when they know more about what's going on at school, and realize they have the right and the responsibility to talk to teachers about it.
"[Parents] look at us like we're these all-knowing people, that we don't want to talk to them," she said.
Aaron Summerville, a soft-spoken seventh-grader, had been making honor roll half the time before the program. His parents encouraged him, he said. But now, those occasional C's in history have become A's. "They know I can do it, so I have to do it," he said with a shy smile. "It's kind of easy now. Miz McClinton is a good motivator."
Lynetta Lewis looked a little surprised when McClinton pulled her away from the lunch table to be interviewed. Lewis knew she'd been doing fine. "Everybody thinks she's real strict and everything, but she's a real nice person," Lewis said.
Nice, definitely. Speaks her mind? You bet. McClinton runs into the teacher whose student got a 46 and gives her the dirt on the nice little talk they had. He said he left his book in his locker, so he couldn't study. "I said, 'That will not fly. A 'B' is a far cry from an 'F.'"
She asked him why he'd missed so many days this year, and he mumbled he'd been sick. "When I ride down Depot [Street] I see you on the basketball court," she says she retorted. He hadn't gotten detention or suspension all year - until he fell in with a boy who often does. The teacher mentions another boy in the group.
"Oh, yeah, I'm going to dog him too," McClinton says.
Later she says, "That boy's a good boy, but he's done hanging around another boy. I'm not going to tolerate it."
Summerville knows she has no patience for peer pressure. He says that without the program, "I probably would just be goofing off. My friends just goof off in class."
Miz McClinton asks for more - because she believes her kids are up to it. "I ask for the moon, I may get the stars and the clouds," she says. "I expect this dirt down here, I'm going to get this dirt down here."
by CNB