debbie m. price

'Pope' would save them all

The boombox is cranked and the guys are jamming. Two men are lounging on a concrete porch, slouchy hats pulled low over their eyes; a third hangs, watchful, on the edge of Perkins Homes.

It is the middle of the day, the middle of the week and into the middle of this little set-up sails Irona Pope, parent liaison for City Springs Elementary School.

Pope is making a home visit, but when you’re the parent liaison for an inner-city school, a home visit is never just a home visit. Things pop up. Things must be dealt with. Else, things - and these can be horrendous things - get in the way of teaching children to read.

Bundled against the winter chill, Pope - “the Pope” to the people of Perkins Homes and Flag House in East Baltimore - waltzes right up to the men and tells them to turn down the radio.

They smirk. No old lady is going to tell them what to do.

At that, the Pope begins to dance.

She jiggles and twists and swims in place like some bad dream from “American Bandstand.”

“Oooh, baby. I’m hot,” she squeals. “Come dance with me. What, you can’t dance?”

The men laugh. Who is this woman?

“I’m Mrs. Pope from School Eight,” she says. “You got brothers, sisters at the school? I’ll put you to work in the cafeteria.”

What does it pay, one wants to know.

Volunteer. “Be good for you.”

It’s an insane moment.

The parent liaison is dancing. She’s pitching cafeteria duty like she really believes these twitchy characters are going to be busing trays. The very air in the courtyard breathes trouble, but Pope doesn’t seem to notice. A clot of men on the corner breaks apart and drifts her way. The closer the men get, the louder she gets, until they have moved on down the street and disappeared.

You cleared that corner, a companion whispers.

“I know,” she laughs. “I do it all the time.”

Score one for the Pope and her private little war on drugs. Busting up drug corners isn’t spelled out in her official Baltimore public school job description, but the way Pope sees things, it might as well be.

At most schools in Baltimore, the parent liaison is a peripheral figure, responsible for organizing the PTA and making sure that the free-lunch applications get turned in on time.

But at City Springs Elementary, where almost all the students live in the surrounding housing projects, Pope is one of the essential personnel in a continuing battle against educational blight.

Her never-ending efforts to knit together a frayed community are as important to learning as what happens in the classrooms.

The school can have the best teachers and the best curriculum, but if children are sleeping on the floor because there are not enough beds, if their bellies are empty and their hearts hurting, if they get smacked around and yelled at, if they don’t come to school, these children cannot learn.

Pope knows this.

And if the good people who are at their wits’ end with trying to hold it all together don’t get some help, the burdens become too heavy and things fall apart.

Pope knows this too.

“Once you’ve met me, you’ll never forget me,” Pope will tell parents. “If you want to make a change in your life and move in the right direction, I’m your very best friend.”

But if not? Look out.

Can’t turn in the free-lunch application? She’ll find you in church or track you down at the nightclub. Can’t get up in time to get your kid to school? She’ll take you to court to see that you do.

Don’t go plucking her nerves. She’s not playing.

All the difference

Good parents can make a school; bad parents can bring down a school like nothing else and make the principal’s life rougher than rough. City Springs Principal Bernice Whelchel has learned this by now. Two and a half years into the job, she has been cursed at and threatened and has had to call the police more than once.

“{Mrs. Whelchel} had to let the parents know, ‘I’m not taking no stuff,’” says Daryl Dunaway, president of the Fathers United chapter and of the Parent-Teacher Organization. “What she says she’s going to do, she does. You can take it to the bank.”

Formidable in their separate ways, Whelchel and Pope come from worlds that could not be more different. Whelchel is all control and professional polish. Pope is unabashed street, apt to turn on her “crazy act” before unhelpful bureaucrats.

“You’d better watch me. I got seven psychiatrists. They say I’m not stable,” Pope teases her victims, watching them with a wicked gleam as they squirm. “The only way to get me calm is to give me what I want.”

Together, with the help of a cadre of hard-working parents, principal and parent liaison are making inroads.

Whelchel has hired eight parents as teachers’ aides and hall monitors; Pope has organized more than two dozen volunteers. One parent, who began as a AmeriCorps worker and now is a teacher’s aide, is studying for a college degree in elementary education.

The school building itself has become a hub for social services, with a wellness center run by Greater Baltimore Medical Center and GED classes taught twice weekly at the “Parents Academy.”

At City Springs, all the efforts have a single purpose: teach children to read.

Two years ago, none of the school’s third-graders passed the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) test in reading; last year, two children did.

The gains are tenuous and hard won. No one wants the good work accomplished in the classroom undone by problems at home.

For Pope, that means helping parents learn how to be parents. The Nurturing Class meets once a week.

The aim of the class, as Carm Dorsey of the Julie Community Center, says, is to teach parents alternatives to “hittin’ and hollerin’.”

Each Wednesday afternoon about a half-dozen regulars meet to deal with the usual worries of parents everywhere and some that are uniquely theirs. Peer pressure, house rules, discipline.

I tell them, don’t nobody eat ’til the kitchen is clean. I tell him, don’t go walking through Dallas Court. I tell him, he can’t have money. Next thing I know, he’s out exchanging something or letting people ride his bike for money. What’s next?

Everyone has a question and everyone has an answer.

“Boys are very manipulative of their mommies,” warns Ethel Jenkins, a grandmother who helps Dorsey run the class.

Like so many women in the projects, Jenkins, whose granddaughter is a first-grader, has found herself in late life rearing yet another family. She brings to the class understanding that comes from experience. She has her issues too.

“I have been raising children since I was 9 years old,” says Jenkins, retired from the Social Security Administration and soon to be 62. “I am so tired and I say, ‘When is my time going to come?’”

That time, she knows, is not now. Her daughter and older grandson ended up on drugs; she’ll not let that happen to this child.

Jenkins worries aloud that the school work, particularly the math, is too easy for her granddaughter. She doesn’t have enough homework; the lessons are “babyish.”

The child could count to 100 and add 9 plus 6 to get 15 before school started and she’s done nothing that challenging yet.

“I don’t want her to be a statistic when she goes to take that test,” Jenkins says, referring to the MSPAP. “I don’t want her to fail.”

She has been there

Pope knows firsthand what “her parents” are going through. She had five babies by the time she was 20. Perkins Homes was her home for 26 years, 344 Mason Court. “That was my clothes pole,” Pope says, nostalgically. “That’s where my husband parked his car.”

Her husband, a sanitation worker dead now 10 years, lost toes in an accident and the family struggled. She finished high school and set about educating herself through seminars and lectures. She worked as a seamstress; she got a house with a mortgage.

All her children graduated from high school and four of the five went to college. They all have “legal jobs with a pay stub,” and Pope is very proud of this. She raised a lot of other people’s children, too, 13 altogether. And she is ready to help anyone who wants to do what she did.

“I learned because it happened to me and the more you learn, the more you have to share with your community,” says Pope. “I’m the person against the odds. And I tell them, ‘Do you see me living down here? Do you see my grandchildren living down here? No. I got out and you can, too.’”

On a bright January Saturday afternoon, Pope walks through Perkins and Flag House to deliver letters to parents of several kindergarten children, informing them of a Monday morning meeting. There have been troubling behavior problems.

“What’s this about?” a mother’s boyfriend wants to know. Pope demurs. “All I know is it’s serious.”

As the door closes, Pope hears the boyfriend explode. “I’ll whip his ass.”

She grabs the door and wheels back inside. “What did you say?” Pope demands. “I hear you say something like that, I have to report you. Nothing better happen. You hear me?”

He does.

Everyone knows the Pope

The courtyard is full of children. They all know Mrs. Pope. Out of every other window, someone calls her name. Hey, Mrs. Pope. Happy New Year! How ya doin’?

She stops at the home of a first-grader who has been absent a lot. His mother has just gotten a job and she’s having day-care problems.

That excuse won’t fly, Pope tells her.

“You gotta watch that attendance or I’m going to have to take you to court.” And then, softer, Pope offers, “I know of a house up on Preston Street coming available. $350 a month. Three bedrooms. Real nice. Call me.”

Crash! A few feet away in the play lot where children are swinging and climbing on the slide, a liquor bottle hits the asphalt and explodes, followed quickly by another and another.

Broken glass skitters and shoots across the yard.

One of the boys is chunking bottles as fast as he can pick them up. Pope doesn’t see the culprit, but her radar is sure. Stop it now and don’t ever do it again.

Rounding the building, she sees a teen-ager she remembers from City Springs. She calls his name and grabs him in a big hug. Then almost as though stung, she shoves him away and studies his face. “What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re looking all glassy.”

He says he just woke up. Out late.

“It better not be for some other reason,” Pope says.

Her face reflects all the pain she feels as he shuffles away.

Even if they can teach the children to read, even if they can get them to pass the MSPAP, outside the school doors, drugs, like malevolent spirits that rise on the stink of the sewers, are always waiting to claim the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent.

This eighth-grader was a sweet boy. Now he is a glassy-eyed shell, inarticulate and blank. Pope has lost another one. And she knows it.

“His mother and sisters are junkies. Damn,” she says, “they got him, too.”

The sun is casting long shadows through the courtyard at Perkins Homes as Pope finishes her business. A woman comes up to Pope. At first, Pope does not recognize her.

“Miz Pope, Miz Pope. Do you know where I can get some free food?”

It is early in the month still. What happened to the food stamps?

“I sold them,” the woman says. “I was bad. I was getting high.”

At least you’re honest, Pope says. The woman used to work at the school. She has a 5-year-old daughter in kindergarten at City Springs. Without her help, Pope knows, the child will not eat tonight.

“I can get you in a free program,” Pope tells her. “They can help you, but you gotta want to help yourself. What happened? You were doing so good.”

Pity and anger are at war within Pope. She will get the woman enough food for today and tomorrow only. “You sell it,” she warns, “and I will know and it will be the last food you get from me.”

Is she being played? Of course.

Will the help be for nothing? Maybe.

But two days later, the woman shows up at Pope’s office. Give me work, anything to be useful, anything to keep my mind off the drugs, she begs. She wants to fight the demons. She is going to try.

The Pope will help her, she will give her work, she will get her food.

She will do this for the child. She always does.

About this series

This continuing look at two Baltimore elementry schools is part of a long-term series of articles on the successes and failures in teaching children to read by third grade, or age 9

To learn mor

For more information about reading issues and the performance of individual schools in the Baltimore area, go to The Sun’s Web site, SunSpot, at www.sunspot.net/news/

Pub Date: 2/12/98

Credit: SUN STAFF
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Abstract (Document Summary)

Pope is making a home visit, but when you’re the parent liaison for an inner-city school, a home visit is never just a home visit. Things pop up. Things must be dealt with. Else, things - and these can be horrendous things - get in the way of teaching children to read.

Bundled against the winter chill, Pope - “the Pope” to the people of Perkins Homes and Flag House in East Baltimore - waltzes right up to the men and tells them to turn down the radio.

Score one for the Pope and her private little war on drugs. Busting up drug corners isn’t spelled out in her official Baltimore public school job description, but the way Pope sees things, it might as well be.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.