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Starting Young

Murals on downtown stores. Field trips to Washington. Early college prep. Who wouldn't want to be a Greenville Renaissance Scholar?

With Photo: JOSEPH

Cutline: Margaret Carter Joseph wanted to do something for her community and came up with Renaissance Scholars, an early college preparatory program for middle schoolers. Photo By Elizabeth Beaver.

 

By CHELSEA CAVENY

Spencer Davis just finished a grueling mock trial competition. Some days, he practiced for five hours. But you never saw him sweat.

He is cool, calm, with a steady voice like a baseball announcer on television. He says he is going to be a lawyer. Not that he wants to be a lawyer, but he will be a lawyer. He is only a high school sophomore but focused and mature beyond his years. He is confident, driven, a proud product of the Greenville Renaissance Scholars.

Mary Hardy, a retired public school teacher and now executive director of GRS, brags about Spencer as she calls him to see if he is interested in talking with a journalist. She says Spencer is always in the local news for his school projects and competitions.

Spencer likes GRS because more than anything else, he wants to succeed. “It seemed like GRS was a level or two above the level we were on in school,” he says. Then, dead serious, he asks, “Is it too early to apply for college during my junior year?”

Hardy is explaining how GRS operates. She is calm and professional as she discusses programs, curriculum, student recruitment. But as soon as she begins to talk about the students, this veteran educator grows giddy, almost childlike in her excitement over their work.

The eager, driven students of Greenville Renaissance Scholars will do that to you.

The program offers intensive after-school and summer instruction to promising middle school students. It’s designed to broaden their education, expose them to new things and new ideas, and give them an early advantage on the road to college.

It is the brainchild of Margaret Carter Joseph, who wanted desperately to do something for the youth of her embattled hometown, where the poverty rate is roughly 30 percent and public schools are struggling. She is part of a small community working within Greenville to fight an uphill battle for the future of Greenville’s young people.

Joseph’s father, Hodding Carter III, ran the city’s newspaper for years but eventually moved away, and so did Joseph. 

After a stint in the Peace Corps, a degree in urban education from Harvard, and time spent teaching in the ghettos of Boston, Margaret Joseph eventually returned to Greenville and married a native son of the city, Barthell Joseph.

After she had lived in Greenville for a few years, Margaret Joseph says, “I knew I wanted to be involved in education, and in kids’ lives and ensuring more kids went to college, but I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it.”

Fortunately, the lessons she learned in her time away from Mississippi stayed with her. While teaching in Boston she became friends with a student who had benefited from an after-school and summer program known as Urban Scholars.

Joseph liked what she saw.

Over the years she also had become good friends with Jay Aultman, who ran an after-school and summer program in New Orleans that eventually developed into a series of popular charter schools.

The models from Boston and New Orleans, along with an after-school and summer program much closer to home in the Mississippi Delta, the Sunflower County Freedom Project, fascinated Joseph. By the summer of 2006 she was asking founders of those programs how to make something similar happen in Greenville.

While they helped form her vision, her own hometown helped make it a reality.

She began meeting with school administrators, teachers, students and parents to see what kind of program they wanted. Joseph says she “really turned to a lot of great people in the community and said 'what do you think about this?' and they were excited.”

Those first people she turned to formed the first board of advisers in January 2007. That summer, the first Camp Renaissance was under way. Held in donated space at Greenville Higher Education Center, it was open to middle school students and functioned much like a regular school day. For five weeks, rising seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders spent their mornings in advanced writing, reading, research skills and leadership classes. After a lunch break, the creative arts took over with dance, choral and drama classes.

The first summer followed a theme that drew from the program’s namesake, renaissance. At the end of every Camp Renaissance, the students put on a large drama production and invited the community.

Greenville has a long history of strong support for arts and culture. Joseph saw the arts as a unique selling point and a way to encourage people to see the youth as “a rebirth for the community.”

After the summer program, Greenville Renaissance Scholars continued during the school year. Writing workshops, offered during the afternoons and on Saturday mornings, sharpened skills the students would need to complete college admission essays. The school year also was filled with field trips to such places as the art museum in Jackson and even to Washington, D.C., for a drama production. It was the first time many of the students had traveled outside the Delta.

The kids took to it eagerly. Spencer loved the challenge, loved the T-shirts they were given, loved how other kids would come up to them and ask about the program, as if it was an honor.

The original plan was to begin with middle school students and add grades all the way through high school. To house its year-round programming, GRS found a home on the second floor of the E.E. Bass Cultural Center, once a public school on the edge of downtown.

In the midst of empty former classrooms, GRS marked a class door with a gold plaque, filled bookshelves with copies of "Hamlet" and covered the walls with college banners from across the country. After a year of after-school programming, GRS returned to its mainstay, Camp Renaissance.

The second year of Camp Renaissance saw a special focus on the arts. The scholars painted a mural about black migration to the North on the side of an empty building in downtown Greenville.

Camp Renaissance has continued for the past three years, but like many of the upstart nonprofits dotting the Delta, it has seen some tough times. The past three years have seen shifts in its mission, and at GRS, hard times are often connected to funding.

The initial start-up money came from local donations. Within four months, Joseph had raised $25,000. After that, GRS began to look for grants to help keep running. But even then it kept its focus very local, pulling from local organizations to help pay for things.

Joseph smiles when she thinks about the financial support from Greenville.

“Really, our base support has always been the community, which is pretty amazing, because we’re a pretty strapped community.”

As Americans across the country tightened spending during the recession, GRS was forced to re-examine its mission. After about two years, Joseph says, “we kind of decided at that point that we had bitten off too much, for us, in terms of resources and what we could really do. So we refocused primarily on just middle school, making sure that after three summers of Camp Renaissance and some college readiness programming during the school year, they would be on the right track in high school.”

The shift in mission is still something very much on her mind. She’d like to do more, to figure ways to help the kids long after they leave the Bass classrooms.

“We’re not doing well by our former scholars, I don’t think. I think we get them through middle school really well, but …” Joseph pauses to think about what to say next, and as she does you can see her processing the last three years in her head.

“I don’t think we’re doing enough for them once they get out of middle school.”

Money is still tight. Maybe it is the honesty in Joseph’s voice, or something more, a kind of uneasiness about the future, as she says, “I think that’s our biggest headache year to year is how to raise money. We’re still sort of at the point of year-to-year survival. And it may always just be that way.”

The students don’t seem to notice all the fretting over mission statements, programming and funding. They are used to inconsistency and constant change in the schools. For the most part, GRS seems stable to them, a place apart, a sort of intoxicating oasis where they can go to challenge themselves and dare to think about college and a career much earlier than the average middle schooler.

Like Kennedy Wellington. She loves GRS. On a free morning during her spring break, the spunky eighth-grader skips up the stairs at E.E. Bass.

As Kennedy walks around the shelves filled with copies of "Romeo and Juliet," she drags her hand along different books, or any sheet of paper that might get caught in her path. She rattles on, nonstop, about the recent earthquake in Japan, mystery books, the virtues of Shipley’s Donuts and how if she were in charge she would improve the Greenville school system.

She loves learning about new stuff. She loves a challenge. She wants to do more. She keeps a long list of colleges she might attend, and the list seems to change by the hour.

What happens to Kennedy if money runs out?

Faces like Kennedy’s and Spencer’s are on the mind of Margaret Joseph when she talks about how to measure the impact of the program. Joseph has built bonds with the students, and GRS is as much a part of her as it is Kennedy or Spencer. When she talks about them, her eyes light up the same way Mary Hardy’s lit up. At these moments, Joseph and Hardy aren’t thinking about mission statements and programming.

They’re thinking about the kids. The future.

Produced by the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.

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