Roy Exum
Let’s suppose you are 19 years old, already in life’s rut with a minimum-wage job. For the last five months, you’ve been stacking bricks, this in either the hot sun or freezing rain, and one day after work you and Lebron slip off and go get drunk. The next day you lose your job because you can’t get out of the clink in time and now you are standing before a judge on the misdemeanor.
Let’s further suppose the judge gets to prying and finds out you dropped out of high school for fighting over some never-to-be-seen-again darling named Wanda. Oh, I know, this probably never happens but, "just suppose" the judge gives you a choice – get back in school or spend 30 days inside our now notorious County Jail.
Your one and only choice is to attend Hamilton County High – the county’s adult high school -- so when you walk out of the Justice Center downtown and ask a sheriff’s deputy how to get there, the officer is going to point towards the freeway. If he has time, he may or may not give you directions to 9050 Career Lane.
But only so you’ll know, it’s 27 miles and 35 minutes away from the downtown Justice Building, way up in Ooltewah and, nope, if you ain’t gotta’ car you best rent one ‘cause no friend you got is willing to make a one-hour haul every day for a fledging drunk. Think about $2 in gas one way, $4 a day, $20 a week in just gas alone to attend adult high school.
The bad news here is that anybody who reads this can recognize failure. Rent a car? Are you kidding? So, you go to jail, spent a month wearing the-new-color-is-orange and dodging fists, and then you try to find another job. The Man finds out you just got off a month’s stay in jail for being drunk --- the jailhouse tan is the give-away -- and now the only folks who want to hire you are the heroin merchants. That is very bad news indeed.
But the good news here is that the moon and the stars are aligning with some exciting people moving the pieces. Late last week I had a fun lunch with the newest School Board member, "Jabbin’ Joe" Smith. He’s easily one of the most electrifying people in our city, this after dropping out of UT, spending seven years on alcohol and drugs and coming only a gallon of gas away from suicide.
I call him "Jabbin’ Joe" because he has used boxing as a fabulous tool for the 20-odd foster children he and his wife have raised, his dazzling Y-CAP program, and so much else he has done. He ain’t punchy, either.
I know less than 50 human beings in the history of Chattanooga – seriously -- who have saved more young people in our city than Joe. That is why was I not surprised at all to hear he’s gotten Teddy Alling to provide a building at the old Tennessee Temple site to open a new branch of our county’s adult high school. Hamilton County High principal Gary Kuehn, very much another giant in our midst, promises Joe he’ll make it work. The cost will be minimal and can you imagine what this means to hundreds of inner city people?
We can get all types of business involved, let the Chamber help with job interviews and groom these students because they represent an "instant" work force. One day after they get their diploma they can be working. And now adult school is in walking distance and within a block of the CARTA line.
I fully believe nurturing our young adults will be the biggest moment in our county’s weave out of the education wilderness in the last 20 years. Principal Kuehn has produced winners regularly 27 miles away so why not bring the show downtown? This is aces, baby! If we can equip those who are desperate, now with no way out, with a new pathway towards a diploma, a job, and a life, it’s win-win. Watch these players – Teddy Alling, Joe Smith, Gary Kuehn – and, lord help, if one of them calls you, make sure you answer on the first ring.
Now, while we are on the subject, here’s a bit of a bonus:
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When International Women’s Day was held this time last year, a very enterprising man came up with a novel idea to allow a certain set of women to "earn respect," which is first and foremost in the poverty-stricken Maharashtra state in India. Yogendra Bangar, who has become quite a guy at age 41, opened a school for grandmothers. Yep, women between the ages of 60 and 90 who had never been to school.
The oldest student, Ansuya Deshmukh, is ten years shy of 100. Her parents only peasants, she was married off at the age of 10. "There was no money to buy slate and books, no money to buy clothes," she told the BBC, so for the next 80 years Ansuya didn’t get much higher on life’s ladder.
Yet it is never too late to learn. "It is said that women have to be respected on Women's Day, so we thought that our grandmothers, who until now have not received respect, shall finally get the respect they deserve," the delighted Bangar told reporters this week on the school’s first birthday
Today the 90-year-old Ansuya, who attends the school every day with 30 other women, brings her abacus and her slate board to school and, today, she has learned enough to sign her name, say the alphabet and count to 21. "If a woman is educated, the entire house becomes educated as she brings knowledge and light to the house," reasoned Mr. Bangar.
As one of the women said, "When we die and go to God and He asks us 'What have you done in your life?' we will tell him that we didn't do much but we went to school and at least learnt to sign our own name."
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In Chattanooga, all and any form of public education ends around age 22. Chattanooga State? Not without a high school diploma. GED? Closest place is Athens, Tn. What I am saying is if you are 24 years old and living in the projects or a nice neighborhood in Hixson, you have nowhere to turn – yet. Without a high school diploma, there is no next step. I believe there is somebody like Teddy Alling, Jabbin’ Joe Smith, principal Gary Kuehn or India’s Mr. Bangar, in Chattanooga who can see that on the field of opportunity, it’s plowin’ time again. No one is ever, not ever, too old to learn.
And when you die and go to God and He asks you ‘What have you done in your life?’ I hope each of us will show up with the very best we’ve got for "the least of them," even if it is only a 90-year-old voice – bursting with respect – as she recites her ABCs.
Let’s start teaching our grandmothers, too.
royexum@aol.com