Your Turn December winner on how to close Minnesota's achievement gap

By Molly Hensley-Clancy of South High School in Minneapolis

For the past three summers, I have volunteered full-time at Head Start’s BOOST Literacy program. In my time at Head Start, I taught only children of color — African, African-American, Latino, and Native American. I met wonderful, inspirational parents, some of whom I am still in contact with. But I met too many parents that simply didn’t care; too many that didn’t have time; too many that didn’t know how to be a parent. It was in their children that I saw the greatest struggles, the greatest sadness, the most need.

This is the story of a little boy I met, and I believe is the answer to your essay question.

Editor’s note: The name of the little boy, and his older sister, have been changed to protect their identities. There is also profanity in this story that we chose to leave in, as is, because without it the true impact of Jamal’s story is lost.

His name is Jamal, or he might be Jamar. We were never really sure because he never told us, never answered our questions.

“What’s your name?” He spins around and un-velcroes his plastic Spiderman shoes and pulls a chipped toy airplane out from under his saggy, too-big yellow shirt and says: “Man, fuck off.”

The next time he tells us his name is Shit.

Jamar/Jamal/Man fuck off/Shit doesn’t know how to write any of his names. Or find the letters on the alphabet board or hold scissors or talk, really, except to say “Fuck off, go away, I’m hungry” in his soft, slurred speech. Sometimes he threatens to beat the ass of his classmates or his imaginary friends, Guy and Knucklehead, whose invisible-air faces he punches when he gets angry.

We show him pictures on laminated plastic cards and ask him to name them. The other kids say “sink,” “chair,” “banana,” “phone,” but when we ask Jamal, he doesn’t say a thing; he just sits and stares. Except when it comes to the picture of the big black belt that Juan thought was a snake, then he starts to cry, and when I try to hug him he says his name again: “Fuck off.”

Two months pass and all we know about him is his four names and that his sister Brianna drops him off at our low, blue building each morning and that he wears the same two shirts on alternating days, both of them with sagging, chewed collars that show a triangle of his light brown chest. He is five years old and he can’t write, can’t talk, can’t tell us his name, but he knows to be scared of that big black belt.

I don’t know what his mom looks like, all I know is that she keeps him up so late he falls asleep on the rug during storytime and calls him “Shit” more than whatever his real name is. See this is what pisses me off, yeah we don’t have enough money to buy each kid a box of crayons and all the Berenstain Bear books are frayed at the spines but this, this is why so many kids fail.

Ivy, who has been teaching at Head Start for eighteen years, takes one look at JamalJamarFuckoffmanShit and says: “That boy’s going to jail.” And I think maybe, probably he is. And it isn’t because we don’t have enough money for his crayons. It’s because his sister Brianna takes him to school on the way to working at Arby’s and not his mom, who we’ve never met, and because nobody took the time to tell him: “This is your name. This is a chair. This is a sink.”

This is a belt and I’m going to beat your ass, Shit.

There are things we can do. We ask him about Guy and Knucklehead even though he can’t say much, when he starts to hit them we give him crackers to eat. Sometimes he lets us hold him when he cries and once he let me put my hands on his while he tried to cut a circle out of construction paper. But there is only so much, only so much teachers and funding and books can do.

This is Jamal and if his mom or dad don’t start teaching him, talking to him, telling him his name, then he is going to fail.