Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 25, 1995 TAG: 9505250035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If Mary borrowed David's bicycle and it turned up with a flat tire soon after she returned it, then she should help him pay the $6 to replace it.
Jenny Doyle's class of fourth- and fifth-graders at Forest Park Elementary had no trouble coming up with that compromise. They sat intently on the floor in front of mediation specialist Patti Bozada, twirling their corn rows and fiddling with their baggy shorts.
Bozada, a guest speaker from the Conflict Resolution Center, used the fictional flat-tire scenario to teach the kids that arguments don't have to come to blows. ``Mediation works when people listen,'' Bozada said. ``They ask each other, `What is the problem?' Then they brainstorm. But the key is always to listen.''
Then Bozada asked the kids to share their own real-life conflicts:
``My brother hits me, but when I hit him back I get in trouble,'' said one girl.
``Now tell her how old your brother is,'' Mrs. Doyle interjected.
``He's 1.''
``Sometimes adults get to drinking and acting stupid,'' another girl explained.
``Sometimes there's a fight over who's gonna get the children, and they get all mad about it,'' another added.
``At my mama's house, the people across the street are always cussin' and hollerin'. ...''
``There's this man called Crazy Chicken who's always going by my house, joggin' and punchin' in the air and mumbling.''
Fifth-grader Michael Scaggs related some advice he'd been given by his guidance counselor earlier in the day. Michael heard a man getting shot last week just yards from his Lansdowne home.
``She told us not to be scared,'' Michael said. ``And she told us not to be out late at night.''
The kids' scenarios, Bozada later admitted, ``were a lot more realistic than an argument over a bicycle.'' She said she was shocked to hear such big-people, big-city stories coming from children as young as 9 years old - in Roanoke.
I've quoted a lot of people recently who recite the worn-to-cliche African proverb: It takes an entire village to raise a child.
They talk about how the issues that scar today's kids aren't just school or police or church or court problems, they're ``community'' problems. And they're right.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a village.
Every time I wander with my pen and pad outside of white, middle-class Roanoke, I'm struck by how fragmented our community really is.
After interviewing two Northwest Roanoke teens last year, I drove them to downtown Roanoke for lunch. The restaurants, the stores, the farmers market - the girls saw it all for the first time, the way I remember seeing my first beach.
They live less than four miles from the First Union Tower, but they had never stood in its shadow.
At an interview a few months ago in a Hunt development apartment, I noticed that neighbors kept poking their heads in the door. ``They're trying to figure out who you are,'' the woman who lived there explained.
``When a white person comes here, it's always either a social worker or a baby snatcher.''
It's easy to quote proverbs and spout vague sound-bites about the ``community getting involved.'' But until people step outside their sheltered communities, until they really see the entire village - and get uncomfortable about what they're seeing - the talk's just rhetoric, the proverb just words.
Patti Bozada got uncomfortable last week. So did lawyer Chris Floyd, who invited her there to be part of the lawyer-mentor program she gives at Forest Park each month. ``My bent is, if we give them information that keeps them from having to hire us in the future, we're really contributing something as lawyers,'' Floyd says.
So Floyd has choreographed a mock trial for Doyle's class, taken them to a real trial downtown, brought in a sheriff's deputy to talk to them and shown them the inside of the Roanoke City Jail.
It may surprise you to learn that many of the kids had already seen the inside of the jail, while visiting their relatives.
But Floyd was not fazed.
She knows now that kids need people to guide them beyond their square-mile world of shootings, fights and drunks - so they can see life outside the village.
She knows that if children don't see success, they're doomed to repeat the failure around them.
And she knows that an argument over a bicycle is pointless - if a kid can't afford to have one.
Beth Macy is a feature writer and Thursday columnist. For more information on the Young Lawyers Mentor program, contact Chris Floyd at 983-9381. Other professionals interested in volunteering, mentoring or tutoring within Roanoke City Schools can call Suzanne Avis or Lissy Runyon at 981-2816.
by CNB