THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 28, 1996 TAG: 9605250047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 242 lines
ANKE OTTO-WOLF shuddered when she looked deep into the eyes of the Norfolk middle schoolers. They reminded her of the hopeless faces of war-time, a long time ago, growing up amid the ruins of post-World War II Germany, her native land.
But this was 1992, at the old Ruffner Middle School, and Otto-Wolf was beginning her first day as a long-term substitute teacher. The four-month job became an education in the hard knocks of urban life: youth who settled disputes with violence; children who insulted her and showed no respect to classmates; kids without dreams for the future.
Her heart went out to them.
``I saw no tomorrow in their faces,'' Otto-Wolf said. ``They acted like they had nothing to live for.''
Her daily encounters with the students convinced her that they needed hope; they needed to know they could find their own peace in a world that bombarded them with violence.
A seed had been planted: A year after her experiences at Ruffner, Otto-Wolf formed the Cease Fire Kids. Its premise: To use the ``healing power'' of the performing arts to teach children lessons in life.
In Otto-Wolf's war-torn youth, her family, their home destroyed by bombs, moved to West Berlin following the war and the painful division of Berlin. She remembers like yesterday how a war veteran, a musician, taught her eighth-grade class with the aid of a violin.
``He fed our souls in a time of desperate need, and he showed us that even in the hardest times there is beauty,'' she said.
``It was more valuable than a loaf of bread.''
Otto-Wolf discovered a new way of looking at life through the performing arts - music, theater and song. That is a gift she now wants to pass on to a generation of children facing their own unique hardships.
Her work with Cease Fire Kids has become her passion, part of a wide-ranging crusade to make a difference in the lives of children.
The program is run on a shoestring budget by herself and a teacher volunteer at a Norfolk elementary school. She is developing plans to generate a permanent source of funding and hopes to expand the program to schools throughout the region.
She has formed a non-profit group, Our Children, Our Future Inc., as an umbrella association to support the Cease Fire Kids program and to generate community involvement. Money and volunteers are needed, she said.
The goal of Cease Fire Kids is straightforward: To teach children how to get along with others, and to show them alternatives to drugs, alcohol and violence. And there is another message as well - to do their best in school and stay in school.
A lack of social skills is a major cause of the rising violence among many of America's youth today, Otto-Wolf believes.
``To me, I look at these children - they're all bright, they're all talented,'' Otto-Wolf said. ``They need a chance. They can meet the challenge, I don't care what it is, as long as you believe in them.''
Otto-Wolf launched Cease Fire Kids a year ago at Norfolk's Lafayette-Winona Middle School, where principal Stephen G. Peters has wrestled with ways to help troubled kids stay on the right path. Out of 31 students in the program, nearly half knew family members or friends who had died by shootings, stabbings or drugs in their neighborhood; some had witnessed death, she said.
During a year at Lafayette-Winona, Otto-Wolf worked with the kids in the after-school program two days a week. Behavior got better. Grades improved. Attendance inched up.
``She was consistent: every Tuesday and Thursday she was there. That in and of itself sent a message,'' Peters said. ``I think it gave the kids something to look forward to. It helped them focus more on what they should be doing.''
Children in the program perform skits with anti-drug and anti-violence themes. They sing rap versions of the Cease Fire Kids' honor code, which stresses respect and responsibility. They play games, such as musical chairs, to learn how to win graciously and to lose agreeably.
``I firmly believe that the performing arts is a vehicle for children to express their emotions because they can slip into a character, and they can say, `That's not me,' '' Otto-Wolf said. ``They can let this character express anger and love. It allows children to channel their emotion into an alternative outlet.''
In January, she moved the program to Oceanair Elementary, a school where nearly 80 percent of the children qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches. She saw a need to start working with youngsters earlier to help equip them with fundamental life skills.
``It's amazing how many problems third- and fourth-graders already have with social skills - basic things like consideration,'' Otto-Wolf said.
The number of children participating in the twice-a-week after-school program varies. Usually there's about 15 or 20. Some have problems behaving and don't do well academically. Others get little support at home.
``We have a lot of kids with sad situations,'' said David Faircloth, a fourth-grade, first-year Oceanair teacher who has volunteered to help run the hour-long sessions. ``Many of these kids are just living from day to day, and it's kind of scary. They're the kids who're supposed to be running things one day.''
On a recent afternoon in the auditorium at Oceanair, Otto-Wolf stood amid a whirlwind of youthful energy, trying more or less successfully to keep the 15 or so high-strung 10- and 11-year-olds focused on what they were supposed to be doing: a game of musical chairs. It was a challenge that might send mere mortal adults running for the nearest exit.
Otto-Wolf, though, dove joyfully into the maelstrom, yelling encouragement, liberally doling out hugs.
The kids wore T-shirts that proclaimed: ``Cease Fire Kids. . . Until Cease becomes PEACE.''
There were constant miscues - children cutting up, getting into arguments, stalking off to sulk.
Otto-Wolf commanded one boy to pay attention.
``Huh?'' answered the boy, who was attending his first Cease Fire Kids session.
Wrong response; her long-timers knew better.
``Don't you `huh' me!'' Otto-Wolf shot back. ``That is very disrespectful. This is `yes, ma'am, no ma'am!' ''
Otto-Wolf reprimanded another boy for misbehaving. The boy suddenly burped out loud.
``I'm sorry, it just came out of my mouth,'' the boy said.
``Cease Fire Kids don't do that,'' Otto-Wolf said. Then she hugged him. ``But I appreciate your apology.''
On another afternoon, the kids practiced skits they had created to warn of the dangers of drug and alcohol use.
A boy named Dominique yelled stage commands that Otto-Wolf had taught them.
``Places! Quiet on the set! Action!''
In a brief, largely ad-libbed skit, a boy and a friend approach three other kids.
``Hey, you want to have some fun? You want some marijuana?''
``No man, that's bad for your health.''
``You don't know what you're missing.''
``You don't know what you're getting!'' the kids shouted.
Later, Otto-Wolf explained that the skits help the children think about how they would react in real life.
``The answer can't come from the police or their parents. It must come from themselves,'' she said.
Oceanair fourth-grader Shareena Whitten, 11, shared the sentiments of many children: ``I think everybody in this school building should go to it. It helps kids have manners, and have respect for others, and not fight.''
Carol Shorter, a single mom who works at a fast-food restaurant, said she hoped the program improves the behavior of her fourth-grade son.
``He feels he's the man of the house, and he doesn't want to listen to me,'' Shorter said. ``I'm hoping this will teach him to respect, not just his parent, but all adults; and not just to hear it, but to listen. I just want to help support the school by keeping my child in order.''
Despite a tiny budget - a private foundation grant is funding the Oceanair program - Otto-Wolf manages. She learned last week in a letter from President Bill Clinton that she had been nominated for the 1996 President's Service Award. She wasn't chosen, but Clinton wrote, ``Your efforts are making a real difference in your community and serve as an inspiration to all who are working to solve our nation's many challenges.''
Otto-Wolf envisions great things: One parent told her the Cease Fire Kids could become ``the Mickey Mouse Club of the '90s.''
She is working on ways to generate a stable source of finances to maintain and expand the program. Her first coup: The Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources recently awarded her a $10,000 Governor's Innovation Grant as part of the state's welfare-to-work initiative.
The grant money will be used to train welfare recipients to sew and market cloth Cease Fire Kids dolls based on a series of imaginary characters she created with the help of an artist friend. She hopes to involve mothers who have children at Oceanair and are receiving welfare benefits.
The job trainees will learn entrepreneurial and work skills, and will have an option to buy stock in the production company Otto-Wolf plans to form with the grant.
``We were looking for new ways of tackling old issues,'' said Aisha Bailey, who works for the state Department of Social Services and is coordinator of the governor's grant initiative. ``She's not only giving them job-training skills but they also have ownership in running it. And it makes a difference, because, obviously, money will go back into running Cease Fire Kids.''
Otto-Wolf's dream is to publish a series of Cease Fire Kids children's books based on the characters, to market Cease Fire Kids videos and to interest television producers in a Cease Fire Kids TV show - all of them emphasizing life lessons based on the code of honor.
Otto-Wolf said her goal is to start an education fund that would guarantee money for college or trade school for every child who spends at least three years in Cease Fire Kids.
Del. Frank Wagner, a Virginia Beach Republican who sits on the House of Delegates' Education Committee, is a board member of Our Children, Our Future, and has become an enthusiastic backer of Otto-Wolf's.
``People ask me, `Why are you bothering with her, she doesn't even live in your district,' but in my way of thinking, you fund things that are working,'' Wagner said. ``If we had a million Ankes around here, we wouldn't have any problems.''
Otto-Wolf runs Our Children, Our Future from her apartment in Norfolk's Ghent section. The apartment is filled with artifacts of her life. She has three grown children. She studied fine arts at the Stuttgart in Munich, and led a short-lived career as an opera singer.
``I gave up singing because I had a mediocre voice, but I was drawn to backstage work and promoting,'' Otto-Wolf said.
So instead of singing, she became an agent for opera singers, working in Europe with such operatic superstars as Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.
``In Europe, there's not an opera house I wasn't in,'' she said.
She won't reveal her age, saying only that she entered school in the 1940s, while Hitler's storm troopers still held their grip on Germany.
``Age has no meaning if you love what you're doing,'' she said.
In 1979, she, her then-husband and her children moved to Norfolk, drawn to the region by friends living in Chesapeake. For a few years in the early 1980s, she ran the German Bakery in Norfolk. In 1989, she became an American citizen. In 1990, she earned a journalism degree from Hampton University; her articles have appeared in The Virginian-Pilot, The Baltimore Sun, OnStage Magazine and OperaVoice.
Otto-Wolf began substitute teaching to supplement her income as a free-lance writer. The idea for Cease Fire Kids began to jell almost from the first day she arrived at Ruffner. That day remains vivid - starting with the morning announcements.
``When the national anthem played, I stood and put my arm over my heart,'' she said. ``I had just become an American citizen, and it was important to me. Those kids had absolutely no respect, no discipline. They just laughed at me.''
Slowly, week after week, she reached their minds - and hearts. By the time she left, the kids were standing with her saluting the flag, as well as singing the anthem.
``I told them what it means to have the privilege to live in this country,'' Otto-Wolf said. ``I told them about the war. I told them what I went through with the division of Berlin, the division of my family. They had absolutely no concept what it meant that the Berlin wall came down.''
The seed that has blossomed into Cease Fire Kids seems like destiny.
``I measure success when we turn a young person around,'' Otto-Wolf said. ``This is not a racial thing; this is not a gender thing; this is not an economic background thing. These are kids from across the city, from across society, and they are my Cease Fire Kids, and there are no differences. The problems are there - black, white, whatever.''
ILLUSTRATION: LAWRENCE JACKSON
The Virginian-Pilot
[Color Photos]
Anke Otto-Wolf
LAWRENCE JACKSON
The Virginian-Pilot
Anke Otto-Wolf hopes to involve mothers who have children at
Oceanair and are receiving welfare benefits in the doll program.
HONOR CODE
Central to the Cease Fire Kids is its honor code. Students must
follow it to remain in the program.
The code requires Cease Fire Kids to follow nine rules:
Stay away from drugs
Be respectful, polite and considerate
Don't hurt themselves or others
Don't use foul language
Do their best in school
Accept others for who they are
Take responsibility for their actions
Practice listening
Set a positive example for their peers
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB