DEL.ICIO.USThieves hit Rosa Arnold preschool; neighbors step in
Plucky day care center, which keeps kids for free, embraced by Ormewood community
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Rosa Arnold’s free day care for underprivileged kids has had a roller-coaster summer. It’s been homeless, found a new home, became a crime victim and was embraced by its new neighborhood.
Early this month, Arnold was riding an upswing. After her landlord refused to renew her lease, her shoestring operation found a new home at Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church.
Elissa Eubanks/eeubanks@ajc.com
Rosa Arnold, 67, leads her program in songs and prayer on Tuesday. She started the free preschool in memory of her son, Albert T. Mills, who was murdered.
Elissa Eubanks/eeubanks@ajc.com
Rosa Arnold hugs CaMaiya Cotton, 3, after CaMaiya tells her she ‘misses her mommy.’
But on Aug. 6, she walked into the fellowship hall, where she was setting up classes for her 3- and 4-year-olds, and noticed her laptop computer was missing.
Arnold went back to her car, hoping she had left it there. Nope.
Back inside, the bad news became apparent with each glance in a new direction.
Someone had broken into the church and cleaned her out.
Thieves took her laptop, with years of precious records on the hard drive, along with chairs and a table, computer programs, CD players and TVs. They nabbed towels and sheets and even frozen meat that was meant for her flock of charges from some of Atlanta’s toughest streets.
“It was awful,” Arnold said.
Hundreds of children from single-parent homes of the working poor, crack babies, kids who spend as much time in state custody as at home, and an occasional boy or girl born with AIDS have attended Arnold’s day care without cost. They get ready for kindergarten by learning their ABCs and counting, by working in groups or silently at their tables.
When police cars began showing up in the church parking lot, word spread quickly through the neighborhood south of I-20.
Within hours, neighbors replaced everything — TVs, towels and furniture. She even got a desktop computer to replace the laptop. Now, two weeks into her fall schedule, the day care is running and Arnold feels something that seemed missing from previous locations.
“This is the first place I’ve been where I’ve been wanted,” Arnold said Monday.
Her little nonprofit that she started in honor of her murdered son, Albert T. Mills, has bounced from one location to another since she opened it 13 years ago. Arnold said she wanted to help the kids she saw on the streets, to give them a door out, a hand up, so they would not end up like the two young men who were convicted of her son’s shooting death.
Last spring, she got word that her lease in a Glenwood Avenue building would not be renewed. The owner planned to put a Montessori school there in the gentrifying neighborhood.
A story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution brought offers of help. Realtors, neighbors, lawyers and activists lit up their lines with phone calls and e-mails.
Carl Johnston, one of those who inquired about helping, said, “I was just touched by her ability to rise above the adversity of the murder of her son.”
Word eventually reached the congregation of the Rev. Dana Hughes, who invited Arnold to use its fellowship hall. Then came the break-in.
From bad came good, Hughes said.
“Out of this, the community has discovered her,” Hughes said. “Before, everyone knew there was a school in here, but no one knew exactly what it was. Now, everyone here knows her and wants her here. God is using the opportunty to open doors and hearts.”
Hughes said, “The irony is, the people who did this to her are the kinds of people she is trying to keep her kids from becoming.”
