Journals, program help teens find success

By Gracie Bonds Staples

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the media center at Atlanta's Washington High School, 78 seniors sit around tables plotting their future.

Near the back of the room, class valedictorian Deonte Bridges dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. And Veronica Coates fancies the day she will add M.D. to her name.

Four years ago, that would have been an unlikely if not impossible dream. Veronica was more nomad than student, estimating she moved more than a dozen times in her first 15 years of life.

What she and her classmates have accomplished is nothing short of remarkable. Ninety-seven percent of them have been accepted to college, and together they have been offered 320 scholarships worth some $7.2 million.

They are buoyed by the faith of a diverse group of 100 attorneys and staff from Kilpatrick Stockton who in 2006 welcomed them to the Freedom Writers, a mentoring program that pays homage to the student Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement.

Loosely patterned after the original Freedom Writers started by Erin Gruwell, the California teacher credited with helping low-income "unteachable" students become accomplished writers, the program isn’t a new model.

In the Washington High program, students met with mentors every week, and journaling helped the students find their voice. The connection went deeper, with field trips, lessons in life skills, and the knowledge that someone cared enough to come to a student’s game or be their call during an emergency.

For the mentors, it has been a sobering lesson, in the complexity of obstacles that often stand between poor children and a high school diploma.

“I question whether I would have had the dedication and the perseverance to get to this point,” said Diane Prucino, mentor and co-managing partner at Kilpatrick Stockton. “I think I understand now why so many kids quit.”

Ready for stability

Veronica had more than enough reasons to quit.

With her family's many moves, the longest she ever stayed at a school was 18 months.

Her mother is HIV-positive. Her stepfather died of AIDS in 2008. On May 28, the 19-year-old will be the first in her family to graduate high school and the first to go to college.

When she found herself in one of the English classes targeted for Freedom Writers, she figured mentors would be no different from the life she led: here today, gone tomorrow.

That didn’t happen.

They turned out every Wednesday. They showed up on occasion to share lunch, to go on field trips and introduce them to a slew of successful people. They helped chart their future.

Instead of relocating with her family again, Veronica moved in with a cousin, Margaret James of Decatur.

She subsists on $200 a month in food stamps and a $100 stipend from the student-run newspaper VOX, money she uses to take the train and bus to school.

In journaling sessions, she let the private, painful details of her life flow onto paper like spilt milk. Veronica wrote in vivid detail about her mother’s and stepfather’s illness, and of being abused at age 6 by a relative.

“That was how we started to get past being strangers," said Prucino.

“She still holds back to get the lay of the land, but that’s a sign of maturity. She’s a cool kid.”

Law firm gets involved

Veronica decided to take advantage of the opportunity before her.

That was Michael Tyler’s dream when he pitched the idea of launching Freedom Writers to the firm shortly after hearing about the original group.

Not unlike his charges, he was “somewhat cynical” at first, he said, “thinking Gruwell was another white do-gooder who was doing things to ease her own sense of guilt rather than caring about people.”

When he met her in 2005, Tyler sensed that her love for and belief in her students was real.

“It was my sense that if we could inspire folks in the law firm with similar passion and commitment, perhaps we could have the same success,” said Tyler.

Kilpatrick was the oldest law firm in Atlanta. Booker T. Washington was the oldest public high school for African-Americans in Georgia.

“It seemed a perfect fit,” said Tyler, father of three sons and a partner at Kilpatrick since 1982.

Giving back to the community was long a part of Kilpatrick’s DNA, said Whitney Munn, associate director of corporate social responsibility at the firm. Four percent of the legal work staff attorneys performed last year was pro bono, valued at about $11.4 million. Forty-five percent of the firm participated in at least one volunteer project.

Education, Munn said, is the firm's “signature” focus.

Glimpses into 78 lives

If education wasn’t the focus of this group of Freedom Writers, time would soon tell.

They began with five classes of ninth-grade English students, 147 of them.

Today only 78 of the original 147 students remain, said Charles Allen, the academic coach Kilpatrick Stockton pays to run the program. The overall Class of 2010 has 247 students.

Allen, part social worker and part surrogate father, describes his brood as destitute 17- to 19-year-olds. Some are the sole caregivers for their siblings. Some are teen mothers. Others are homeless. All of them have refused to let that get in the way of their futures.

“You have 78 stories that would cause you to pause,” he said.

A reminder of reality

Their stories follow a similar pattern: struggle, opportunity, triumph.

Deonte's starts with his mother’s battle with leukemia and the day he was robbed at gunpoint as he exited a city bus near his apartment complex off Campbellton Road.

A car pulled up and a guy got out and started running toward him.

“He stuck a gun in my right side and said, ‘Give it up,' ” he recalled recently.

Deonte emptied his pockets of everything he had, including his cellphone and the $50 he was saving to buy his father a birthday gift.

Deonte knew he was blessed to be alive. "That let me know it’s real out here,” he said.

Deonte, Washington’s top male student and the first African-American male valedictorian in more than a decade, was always at the top of his game.

But the Gates Millennium scholarship winner said, “I’d be lying if I said I knew all this would occur. All I wanted was to graduate at the top of my class.”

None of it, however, comes as a surprise to his mother, Paris Hardaway.

The day he was almost killed, she said, “I knew God had his hand on him.”

Looking toward future

After high school, Veronica will head to Middlebury College in Vermont. Deonte will go to the University of Georgia along with the class salutatorian Shaeroya Earls, also a Freedom Writer.

“The success has been wildly phenomenal,” said Tyler. “What we were able to do, if anything, was inspire the students themselves to maximize their full potential and believe in themselves.”

At a celebration luncheon May 7, the students and mentors talked about the source of much of that inspiration, Charles Allen.

Veronica called him daddy. Big Munn called him friend.

“He is the magic fairy dust that has helped take this lofty idea into reality,” said Munn, who was assigned the moniker Big Munn by the Freedom Writers.

But they owed their success, too, to having believed in something bigger than themselves, she said, crying.

The tears, though, started to flow long before the chicken lunch was served, before former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin delivered the keynote address admonishing the students to never give up and before Gruwell stood remembering when they were all just 14.

“I look at all of you and I’ve seen your faces,” Gruwell said. “Young people who are going to move mountains and change the world.”

And then, before taking her seat, she asked them to raise their glasses and toast for change and hope.

“You’re going to blow the roof off this community,” she said.

Journal excerpts (with students' names, college they will attend and intended major):

"I remember when I first met my mentors. It was kind of hard to open up to a group of people you hardly knew, but then we started to get closer. To my surprise, it didn't take long for us to build a good relationship." Darrell Stephens, Miles College, business administration

"I now feel like this is my extended family -- pretty large family, but still family. I love my family and I wish I could have it come with me to college but I understand that family prepares you for what's to come so even when they can't go with you, what they have taught you will always be with you." Katrina Cheatham, Albany State University, social work

"I will never forget how I didn't always like what [Big Munn] had to say on Wednesdays when I wasn't doing what I was supposed to ... but she would be at my basketball games even after a long day at work. She was doing just what a ‘mom' should."  Jeremy Lewis, Voorhees College, business administration

"Sometimes I feel like I am going through the worst because there just doesn't seem to be a break in things I have to deal with. I've tried to survive and stay in school. I believe this is because I have grown as a result of this program." Kelvin Lyons, Gordon College, history