A rebirth of hope in Mantua

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sunday, June 11, 1995

Suzanne Sataline  

In a season of violence, youth programs were among the casualties. Activities are returning.  The rules of Mantua dictate that you do not go walking by yourself at supper time, down the wide-open, glass-strewn streets of this neighborhood, past the shells of houses with their insides jagged like eggs cracked open.

Still, this is almost summer; it is steamy warm, and Michael Summers, 9, has an appointment with Macaulay Culkin.  The guy working the VCR has already rolled the FBI warnings when Michael heaves open the front door of McMichael School, dollar in hand, and is met by a bevy of youngsters surrounding the little table marked “Movie 50¢.” Everyone is calling to “Miss Kim” – Kim Glodek – who is trying to distribute potato chips and small plastic bottles of blue liquid while collecting quarters and hugs from the kids.  “Sit in the front two rows!” she calls, as Michael and the other kids clamber inside the auditorium.  

By the time Richie Rich starts, 19 youngsters have plunked down, gotten up, and moved around again, in the hard wooden seats of the McMichael auditorium. The rambunctious group is not large enough to fill the front row. And yet, it seems like a huge crowd, especially to Glodek and the other workers in the fledgling AmeriCorps program.  With little money, in a neighborhood facing monumental problems, they worked hard to bring Movie Night and a host of other programs to McMichael, only to watch them be threatened by this spring’s spasm of violence in the tiny West Philadelphia neighborhood.  

It’s only in the last couple of weeks that the activities began going strong again. It’s taken most of the spring for parents to feel at ease allowing their kids to stay after school or letting them walk back to McMichael at night.  “We couldn’t do anything for a while,” said AmeriCorps worker Carla Mitchell, who was raised in Mantua. “The whole school, the whole neighborhood, was in shock. It was like post-traumatic stress.”  

Even Michael Summers will explain how everything is different. And then again, nothing is. His mother, like most of the school’s parents, kept him close to home these last few weeks. When residents started gathering outside, marching to protest violence, it did nothing to calm the fears of a somber child. Like those who have lived through war, he always awaits the next bomb.  

“I said it will only get worsen,” Michael says, remembering a few weeks back. He sits in the McMichael office, pulling his shorts over his knees. “What happens if they come and try to break into school and start shooting? That’s when I started getting scared.”  

It is an hour or so after school has let out, and McMichael is buzzing. Three kids are socking away basketballs in the gym. A group of parents is by planning a drug- and alcohol-awareness program in a classroom. Another group is in the auditorium, working with a student on her lines in a play. And the Homework Club, which meets in the cafeteria, is in full swing.  A dozen third and fourth graders are pouring over arithmetic problems and what the kids call “word scrabbles”, words they have to decode and then make sentences with. Lisa Hoggard, though, is troubled by the concept of time. Or, rather, how many minutes go into it.  “It’s 4:53,” AmeriCorps worker Jane Sigda tries again. “How many minutes until it’s 5 o’clock?”  “Nine minutes!” Lisa, 8, pipes up. She senses something is amiss. “Ten!” Another girl suggests the answer, and Lisa tells her to mind her own business.  

The scene, more or less, is what the McMichael community envisioned when it sent in a proposal to have President Clinton’s national corps of young Americans help the strapped school. Seven corps workers – most of whom are recent college graduates – and a site manager are paid to run athletic programs, devise crafts projects, and welcome people like the “Zoo Club Lady”, who brings animals to show the kids.  But many of the children talk about the homework help.  “I couldn’t divide,” said Yalonda Dennis, 8. “My mom couldn’t help me with my homework. She’s got two jobs.” Now Yalonda is starting to do rudimentary algebra equations, and she shows off the solutions proudly.  

McMichael’s program was designed to work on a variety of fronts: to help youngsters get the education and guidance they need to keep them in school; to help their parents receive special training and assistance in everything from fitness to job skills; and to help rebuild a troubled community; using the school as a jumping-off point.  But the happy symmetry of the McMichael world turned over this spring when the shootings happened. Four young men - all believed by the police to be involved in drugs – were gunned down. Some of the killings happened in daylight. No one was arrested immediately.

Parents and children were frightened to leave their homes, even to go to school. People stopped doing errands in the daytime. There was no way they were going to let the youngsters linger for Zoo Club. At one point, McMichael’s principal, Rose Shambourger, suspended the program. After a week they resumed, but attendance plummeted. The after-school program, which normally draws 30 children, dropped to 10 or 15. The AmeriCorps workers tried to have Movie Night. Instead, they got phone calls from parents complaining that they could not possibly let their children out of the house after 6 at night.  

“I think that it was better that they were home,” said Samirah Abdul-Fattah, the program’s site manager. What made things worse was that the children know the people who had been killed. Gregory “Kidd” Martinez and his cousin, Walter Williams, were well-known around the neighborhood. They had attended McMichael School as youngsters and used to drop by to play basketball there. Michael, the 9-year-old, can offer a fuzzy, but accurate, description of who got killed in what order, relating it in his raspy, Louis Armstrong voice.  The discouragement and fright in the kids were palpable, said Joe Hale, an AmeriCorps worker. At one point, the workers decided to sit down and just talk with them. They discovered that some of the men who had been arrested in the slayings were related to eighth graders at the school. Kids broke into tears. It didn’t help when police announced their belief that Martinez had murdered others.  

Corps workers were encouraged to keep plugging. The ultimate goal of the program is to change these communities, said Martin Friedman, director of the National School and Community Corps, which administers AmeriCorps. The school programs were chosen, in part, exactly because they exist in high-crime, high-poverty areas.  “We’ve got to create safe corridors, safe passageways, so parents feel comfortable letting their children come back at night,” said Friedman, whose office is in Princeton. “This doesn’t happen overnight.”  

In recent weeks, the longer days have drawn confidence and hope. The weeks between the murders seem like another time, and parents say they are more comfortable letting the children stay after school. First one hour, then two. Ten children had shown up for the previous Movie Night; Thursday night’s attendance was almost doubled.  No one doubts that the people who suffered the most during the standoff were the children. But it was not just the activities they missed.  Nine-year-old Nathan McWilliams, a wiry youth who gets fidgety writing sentences, wasn’t happy about having to stay inside and not play basketball this spring.  But what did he miss the most? “Mr. Joe,” he says, referring to Hale. “’Cause he helps me with my homework – and he makes me laugh.”  

On the big screen in the airless auditorium, Macaulay Culkin is getting baseball tips from former New York Yankees at his daddy’s castle. Only a couple of youngsters pay attention. Some of the others have begun kicking the front-row seats. And that causes a general rearrangement of bodies and a round of protests about who was sitting in whose seat.  Hardly anyone is paying attention during Maccaulay’s chemistry class, when a scientist shows off his inventions. The talk and the laughter continue through the mention of bullet-proof clothing, and no one notices the movie character whip out a semi-automatic pistol – until the pumps a mannequin full of lead.  The room falls silent.