A PRINCIPAL IN POVERTY
Thomson, Peggy Bebie
A Principal in Poverty by PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON "Tf poverty weren't in, I could be out," Marguerite C. Selden says cheerfully as she assesses her four years as principal at Washington, D.C.'s...
...Selden laughed...
...In the years of Mrs...
...I used to rail at the children for being late," says the school's head teacher, Mrs...
...The school collected statistics and helped win a repeal of the regulation...
...Thank you, dear Mrs...
...Eloise Scales, trim, attractive, self-assured, is in and out of the office, all day, bringing news of families' needs, following up with assistance, escorting mothers with school emergency funds to buy food and shoes...
...The pay is low...
...It turned out they were from a family of six, newly moved in, destitute...
...She knows who 'they' is...
...Selden has had a hand-in-glove working arrangement with just about every service agency, church group, foundation, and action committee in town...
...Selden to the point where a Harrison mother, president of a group called "The Innovators" (that raises funds and provides services for the children and their families) has become her right arm and, at her request, a paid school board employe, Mrs...
...it's I." When Mrs...
...Selden's freewheeling tenure, the once-forbidding old red brick fortress with its stairwells of Dickensian gloom has come to be looked upon as a kind of extension of her own generous, concerned, determined personality...
...Besides, the normal work load is thirty cases, and when she hears we've been carrying fifty on our own she may be scared away...
...He was almost vicious...
...As the oldest of six," Mrs...
...Robinson is radiant over the results...
...Selden has been doing for years in her makeshift, make-do fashion, with limited staff and cash...
...On the stairs a recreation aide with a whistle around her neck passes a music aide with a violincello in her hand and a basket of instruments strapped to her back...
...The most severe handicap of the people in her area, according to Mrs...
...Two skinny strips of asphalt and concrete are its playgrounds...
...As it is, I am haunted by the lost children—I could name fifty— who seem to make no progress...
...Her own regret in the deliberate choice she made of her role as principal is how little attention she has been able to give to the instructional program...
...If there were a way to cut our pupil-teacher ratio to twenty to one," she contends, "we could change these children's achievement patterns in five years...
...Larry," she says, "had a reading vocabulary of five words...
...Selden muses, "when the school had one typewriter in semi-working condition for getting out a requisition...
...Trouble doesn't always come to Mrs...
...Its notorious man-in-the-house regulation disqualifies whole families for public assistance where the Department believes there is an employable man who is a member of the household...
...A school," Mrs...
...Last October I saw two boys rummaging through our trash...
...A teacher who looked in on us said over Larry's head, 'What a charming boy.' " When she can, Mrs...
...a nurse, a social worker, and encouragement to experiment—all in the attempt to offset the children's enormous home disadvantages and to break, decisively, the cycle of low expectations and low achievement...
...That means she has a "man^in-the-house" although he has lived elsewhere for years...
...For a mother whose thirteen children were scattered while she was hospitalized, Mrs...
...It was a good experience —giving...
...It seems natural to find a shelf in the principal's office stocked with bread and jelly, and, open on her desk, a checkbook for the school's emergency fund listing disbursements: to Safeway for groceries, to Mrs...
...She in turn gives time to a number of boards...
...A Principal in Poverty by PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON "Tf poverty weren't in, I could be out," Marguerite C. Selden says cheerfully as she assesses her four years as principal at Washington, D.C.'s all-Negro Harrison elementary school— five years in which she has involved the community so deeply in her school and has committed the school so thoroughly to meeting the terrible and immediate needs of its community that Harrison has come to be a kind of cultural trading post and social service agency combined...
...Selden attends to the stream of visitors making their way down the second-floor hallway to her office...
...When she is presiding at the school, Mrs...
...In a single block-long alley of small houses, around the corner from school, live something like 150 children, about ninety of them pupils at Harrison...
...It's a problem...
...M. C. Robinson, who knows the children's home situations and who shares her principal's blend of compassion and drive...
...Its food allotments are based on seventy-five per cent of 1953 costs...
...Today help for Harrison is on its way in whopping doses...
...I can't remember having said anything to him but 'stop that' or 'clear your mouth of gum.' Alone with me, he learned fifteen words in the first three half hours...
...Last year our older children, who have flutes from a private grant, presented $44 to Children's Hospital from their concert...
...Still," she admits, "I was staggered at Harrison by the overwhelming need...
...Selden got the woman an appointment to appeal, she sent the school's part-time social worker to wait the six hours with her at the Welfare office...
...Children's stomachs are nourished there along with their minds, shabby self-images are made to shine, and people desperate for help find it...
...The children would then become wards of Welfare at probably six times the cost of the allotment the mother has not been able to secure...
...A fifth grade teacher, a former Peace Corps employe, visited all thirty-eight of her children's families...
...Sel-den's Scout troop going, a custodian opened the school on Saturdays for months, without pay...
...Selden supplied a loan...
...How many weeks ago was it," Mrs...
...Some of the children live in rooms too dark to see a hand before the face and with parents so severely limited they scarcely speak, or read enough to distinguish the denominations on bills...
...In February she relieved her head teacher of her class of thirty-eight problem third graders to see what a remedial reading course for the ten bottom children in the class could do...
...Where to put them in her aged plant is one problem...
...Selden says, "meets PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON is a free lance writer...
...college students to run after-school clubs in a project called Double Barrel...
...Selden heard a man was keeping his six and seven-year-olds home from school to tend babies aged two and three, she told him, "You can't do that...
...Her engagement calendar," Mrs...
...The three Model Models are to get much more money for books, equipment, and in-service training...
...Sometimes she jots down a list of her lengthy appeals, like: "Item 9. Contacted Child Welfare Division to determine whether it would move into the case if Public Assistance (the other welfare arm) turned the case down...
...She chucks a carbon into her file labeled "The System...
...Washington's Public Welfare Department has five times as many investigators as any city its size...
...The four-block area around the school, which is about two miles northwest of the Capitol, is known to have Washington's highest crime rate and some of the city's most crowded housing...
...she often goes out to meet it...
...We can just forget about our instructional program unless we give these children the kind of assistance they need...
...Later they liked to tease me with, 'Miss Black is white.'") To keep Mrs...
...Ever since she set off with her athletic, soft-shoe stride to scout out community resources, Mrs...
...Mrs...
...D. C. Transit Union Local 689 provides buses...
...More than fifty of the school's families live in a state of constant multi-problem crisis...
...As a result she was able to organize step-by-step plans for reuniting the family, repairing the house, investigating the cause of high utility bills, getting diagnosis for a retarded child, placing youngsters in church nurseries, and setting up a program of budget counseling...
...Selden," wrote the mother, "I think I am halfway straightened out...
...That's the area where we can be useful through our PTAs, not with middle-class programs on home rule, but with information on food stamps, family planning, legal rights...
...In the school's basement a storage room does triple duty as a classroom, as a breakfast and lunch room for the free brown-bag meals served each day to the children who need them, and as an after-school laundry where neighborhood mothers may wash clothes...
...The mother couldn't get public assistance because her husband lists her address as his residence...
...Selden's direct approach is too much for the recipients of her help...
...The little he paid her was the little she needed, to eat...
...From her teachers Mrs...
...a psychologist from the "early identification program" of dropouts come to discuss borderline candidates for first grade...
...Harrison is an old plant—some of it built eighty years ago—with twenty-one teachers (nineteen are Negro) and 690 pupils, more than half of whom live in poverty...
...The men are putting a lock on the boiler room door to keep me out, but I think if I can get a liquor store grill I can convert a hall to a library...
...Selden is authorized to add forty-one members to her staff...
...The school has no library, assembly hall, or gym...
...Harrison was one of nineteen schools in the Model School Program, launched in 1964, which for various reasons of confused jurisdictions and tardy fundings has been less than a shining success...
...She had thought a great deal about the need for community schools, written about it, and had served as principal in a low-income area school...
...the needs of its community...
...Cases, I was told, are not referred from one division to the other...
...I do so because my alternative is to report the ultimate starvation...
...Finding qualified people to take the jobs is something else...
...According to the Model Model prospectus, Mrs...
...The people around Harrison say that the Model Model approach is just what Mrs...
...Our problems here happen to be poverty, apathy, deprivation...
...Her last article in The Progressive was "A Fresh Wind in Farmville" in the April, 1964 issue...
...Selden asked to keep the piece of paper as her testimonial...
...At one end of a hall a Howard University coed rehearses her dance corps in Cast Your Fate to the Wind, while children at the other end have lined up to hear a Negro History Week program of gospel singing, spirituals, and blues...
...Selden has attracted to her school troops of volunteers: counselor and reading aides from the Urban Service Corps to work on an individual basis with children who are falling behind...
...That is where she comes in, too, as interpreter, challenger, and provider of emergency relief...
...Indigenous leadership has been encouraged by Mrs...
...If the children come to school hungry and drained by their experiences, we won't reach them," Mrs...
...To a mother perplexed by Welfare instructions to buy $68 of food stamps when her check was $98 and her rent due was $80, Mrs...
...When one of the supplicants in her office came in recently with a letter from Welfare referring her to the Salvation Army and the Harrison school as sources of aid, Mrs...
...And mean...
...She is taking cloakrooms for offices, putting desks in storage rooms, moving her supplies to the free space in lavatories, and eyeing the waste space along the ceilings...
...Selden is not one to savor praise or to save her "I love you" and "Thank you" letters, but she enjoys her triumphs...
...The corridors, with their rather bizarre traffic, frequently have a kind of You Can't Take It With You air...
...Selden says, "no matter what we teach...
...They wander in at 9:20, 10 o'clock...
...One teacher brought her baby and a bucket of paint to school one Saturday and painted her room...
...Recent ones called for a four-week teacher-pupil camping experience at nearby Prince William Forest, Virginia, and for an after-school typing class with machines bought at surplus and renovated by Washington's vocational school students...
...I may never get my social worker...
...Selden gets the same kind of extra mileage she herself gives, even though most of them did not choose to teach in a poverty situation, and few were trained for it...
...The Innovator she sent to escort a mother to a ringworm clinic found she couldn't rouse the woman from bed, so she bathed the babies, fetched clothes and carfare from the school, and kept the appointment herself...
...W. for a rent loan, and a large check to a family for the funeral of their youngster, killed by a truck as he ran home to share his free lunch...
...Junior League women to run a school-wide music program...
...The proposals she fires off to the school board are usually accepted...
...I was at Harrison only a few months when I made up my mind...
...F. for medicine and carfare, to Mrs...
...School age...
...Other groups give shoes, counsel, cash...
...A teacher followed them...
...A number of them have no apparent income...
...One family's plight with a suspended Welfare check may keep Mrs...
...Selden attended a conference of representatives of five agencies...
...Selden adds, "I tend to be a little autocratic...
...Selden, is a lack of awareness of their resources...
...Now I just say, 'Come on in, honey.' I'm thinking, 'You'll be better off here.'" Mrs...
...They do not know their rights or where to get help and are reluctant, sometimes afraid, to try...
...Selden telephoning for a day and a half...
...The need in poverty areas for truly community schools is the basic tenet in the recent naming of three District schools, Harrison among them, to be "Model Model Schools...
...Tell her next time Hhef will come...
...Mrs...
...Occasionally Mrs...
...Mrs...
...At first the children were unnaturally polite...
...She found a neighborhood woman to take over...
...Selden is a Washingtonian, a product of the segregated public schools, who got her degree from Miner's Teachers' College and began teaching in 1943, the year that her mother became president of the District's Colored Congress of PTAs...
...Everyone who can wedge in gets a hearing: the child unjustly punched at recess who wants instant revenge, or at least a friendly ear...
...Music is a built-in success experience with our children," Mrs...
...If we were bricklayers we'd be fired...
...Welfare takes his word unless she can prove otherwise...
...It takes away the onus of failure...
...Selden slips into classrooms, to watch a Traenor language demonstration, or to see the teachers who took part in the Model School's Science Institute set up class experiments with the balances and microscopes and the assortment of live gerbils, chuckwallas, and iguanas which the teachers' training qualified the classes to receive...
...When Mrs...
...On her return the mother opened an eye and said, "Tell them not to send any more busybodies to do my job...
...Selden occasionally claims that her exposure to poverty at Harrison has left her with a "confused gestalt of emotions: anxiety, anger, bitterness, frustration, despair...
...a mother in arrears with her fuel bill...
...a battery of special teachers...
...Children's Hospital treats her pupils and launders her borrowed blankets...
...The highly articulate principal, who is known for her machine-gun rate of talking, is relaxed and warmly attentive as she listens...
...Yet the face she turns to the world is confident, cheerful, and poised...
...As a super-gilding of the lily, Harrison has just been named a Project Discovery school, which will receive from Bell and Howell Company and the Encyclopedia Britannica complete audio-visual equipment for every classroom...
...If she loses, we'll go to Legal Aid next...
...For years, along with other District schools, it has been starved of the art and music programs that schools around the country take for granted...
...The day the children got the batteries and bulbs to experiment with, they were so excited they said, 'We're not going home at all.' " Mrs...
...She sends the document along to the proper authorities with a closing blast: "You would know it is not within the scope of the school to guide a family's attempts to secure aid in this manner...
...Selden tells clubwomen, "is as crowded as yours or mine and frequently to better purpose...
...Others have carried pupils to the hospital and sat beside them into the night...
...Seventy per cent of our chil-dred test below grade level, and half of these are two years behind in reading...
...No shoes...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
