Joe Smith, center, with Civitans Neal Thompson and Fielding Atchley
photo by Gail Perry
Joe Smith, chairman of the Hamilton County School Board, on Friday at the Civitan Club spoke a little about the schools but mostly about other ways to make an impact on children. Mr. Smith and his sister were adopted when he was two weeks old into a loving family that always let him know they had picked him out because he was special, he said.
When he was 12, he and his sister were introduced to their biological father, and even then, realized he did not want to be like that man. Even so, for the next four years the father tried to establish a relationship but those attempts failed when he repeatedly failed to show up for events. Mr. Smith attributed that to alcohol. Likewise when the siblings met their mother when Mr. Smith was 18, they left saying “I’m never going to be like her.” But for a period of time, he ended up being like both his birth mother and father. Beginning in college and from the ages of 22-32, he moved from one addiction to another. From beer to weed, to cocaine and he said, “I ended up like that decrepit old man that was my biological father.” At that point he said, “I lived to use and used to live.”
By 1987, he said he was “ready to leave “ and his family was about to leave him. He said cocaine no longer was working and he carried a pistol in his pocket. One day he ran out of gas and got out of his truck with the gun, and a man pulled up and asked if he was OK. And he asked why he was carrying that gun in his pocket. Mr. Smith told him the reason. That stranger took him to talk to Dr. Charles Clay in Soddy Daisy for help. The doctor told him all the right things and got him into a drug rehab program.
When Mr. Smith got out, he said, to make amends, he tried to find the name of the man who had taken him to Soddy Daisy. The answer was that the doctor did not know the stranger. Mr. Smith considers that stranger to be an angel.
“This ain’t home, we’re just passing through,” was the message to the audience at the Civitan Club. Mr. Smith said to just imagine if every person took the care to support just one child, what an impact there would be. He speaks from experience. He and his wife have two children of their own and have fostered 19 children.
There are 45,000 children in the Hamilton County School system the fourth largest in Tennessee, he said. And the students are all races, creeds and ideologies. He believes that there is a lot of misplaced blame on the schools. “The problem is with the house, not the schools,” he said. All the kids that passed through his home in Hixson were given the choice of going to school in Hixson or staying at their previous school. They all chose to stay at their own school. But every child’s grades and behavior improved. The schools did not change, he said, the only change was the house.
For 25 years, Mr. Smith was the executive director of the Y-CAP program at the YMCA, which is an early intervention and prevention program for at-risk youth. He is respected in all different communities in Chattanooga, said Civitan member Neal Thompson in his introduction. Now Mr. Smith is active in prison ministries that help inmates find a place to live and a job when they are released. And because of his son’s interest, he became involved in coaching children in boxing. That sport is incredible, he said, it teaches discipline, hard work and interpersonal relationships. In the role as a boxing coach, he escorted a team to the Olympics in Beijing China. He said when he entered the stadium with his team, everything went into slow motion. He looked up and saw his father in the stands and grandmother and his third-grade teacher. They were people in his life that he said loved him and didn’t give up on him. He said he saw person after person who had impacted his life, and Jesus Christ in the bleachers.
“You are here for a reason and if all of us would identify one person to love and help, it would make a tremendous impact,” he told the club members.
Joe Smith
photo by Gail Perry