Joe Newton looks taciturn in the back of the algebra class, his chin melting into his palm as the teacher explains linear equations.
He plots out a graph he has scribbled and then leans sideways to hear what the boy with the earring next to him wants.
“Yeah, three over five,” he answers, as 14-year-old Carlos Pineda plots coordinates on his own hand-drawn graph. Finals are near, so the students are listening.
The two confer again and Newton raises his hand. “He has a question,” Newton states. “Just because you run out of graph, you don’t run out of problems, do you?”
The teacher, Sandy Weiss, affirms Carlos’ intuition. “Yes, this graph could go out to infinity.”
Carlos nods in knowing agreement.
Most afternoons, Newton, who is 68, attends math classes at Radloff Middle School in Duluth. Mornings, he’s at Meadowcreek High. He likes middle school more. The students are still kids, still full of joy, promise and playfulness. They’re also at a crossroads. Middle school is often when students dig in and get it right or wander off to scholastic failure.
Such is retirement for Joe Newton, a former state worker who, when he isn’t researching perceived government waste, raising animus against a political candidate (“I beat 10 of the last 11 politicians I went after,” he boasts) or arguing nose-to-nose with someone who gets in his way, Newton spends his days sitting in eighth grade math, rewiring circuits in his brain that hadn’t fired since JFK was president.
Newton has earned a reputation as a dogged gadfly, a man who creates enemies and hurls himself into controversy. He filed ethics complaints against former DeKalb County Commissioner Elaine Boyer, who ended up being convicted of federal corruption charges in a related investigation. Also, of late he’s been stirring the white-hot cinders of the immigration debate, specifically refugee resettlement.
“It’s not that the refugees are coming, it’s the crooked contracting.” said Newton, who complains of an unholy alliance set up to make a few connected people wealthy while bringing in a host of unprepared immigrants who will depend on American (more specifically, DeKalb and Gwinnett county) largess to survive.
“They’re bringing in lifetime welfare beneficiaries,” he said of the effort.
Still, they’re here and someone must deal with it, so he figured why not him?
Last year, the Gwinnett County resident approached his school system and asked where he could help. Radloff is in the cross-hairs of metro Atlanta’s sweeping demographic and societal changes, carrying all the challenges that come with a student population that resembles a United Nations subcommittee. About 60 percent of the students are Hispanic, 15 percent Asian, and then there’s a host of others: African, Caribbean, Bosnian, you name it.
Newton was going to start as a tutor, but soon decided he’d attend class with students, work out problems, take notes, do homework, even take tests. He figures if the lessons don’t sink with him, they’re not reaching the students. The kids he works with at Radloff are eighth graders who are part of a program set up to help them succeed when they hit high school.
Radloff, with 1,848 students, twice what it started with a decade ago, is the quintessential suburban school, sitting in an old business in Duluth on busy Shackleford Road, within sight and earshot of I-85.
But, there lies one problem, according to Newton, almost all kids are bused to the school and can’t be kept after-hours to get extra tutoring — or be punished for acting out.
“We need them to pay a price for their misbehaving,” said Newton, who said the school system’s bureaucracy (aka the transportation schedule) short-circuits an opportunity for additional learning. Once the buses roll in, the kids have got to be on them.
“We’re prisoners to the bus system,” he said. “Big Al won’t like to hear that,” referring to J. Alvin Wilbanks, the system’s longtime superintendent.
It took him a while to get used to the learning habits of this new generation. They don’t look like they’re paying attention, even when they are. They forget to bring pencils. And they like to talk. A lot.
“Sometimes he’ll look around at kids and say ‘What in the world?’” said Mark Collins, a small, bespectacled student who is Newton’s other seatmate. “He’ll get up and make a speech when things get out of control.”
“His catchphrase is ‘Knock it off!’” agrees Carlos.
He said Newton tries to drive home the fact “that we have an opportunity right now. That we need to take advantage.”
He tells them they’re headed towards lifetime employment at McDonalds if they don’t apply themselves.
“Or Burger King,” Carlos, adds with a smile.
“I tell them you don’t want to be on the losers’ track,” Newton said.” You’ll be lumped in with all the slackers and screw-ups. And then one day you’ll have nothing.”
Not long ago, a Hispanic kid was floating through class and told Newton he was marking time until he could join his dad in construction. How old’s your dad? Newton inquired. Thirty-five, the kid said. Ask him if he wants to do this when he’s 50, Newton told him. A couple days later, the youth said he posed the question to his father. “It turns out the dad didn’t like the business as much as the kid thought he did,” Newton said, hoping that something sank in.
But even more than hectoring, he banters with the students, telling jokes, making goofy remarks, mimicking their excuses in a whiny voice. He knows that toughness only goes so far.
And when a kid doesn’t make it, he takes it to heart. Recently he and Principal Sarah Skinner chatted about a former student who was smart but unfocused; now 16, he’s facing a serious robbery charge. Newton started choking up, Skinner handed him a tissue.
Later, he said his time at school has honed his resolve to get things done. “I’ve been an agitator for eight or nine years. I want to change the system.”
But, until then, Newton will be fighting the revolution one algebra problem at a time.
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