“What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” Mesiter Eckhart
At the beginning of last week’s Healing Circle webcast, right after the magnificent ‘Sounds of Blackness’ belted out ‘Pay Up! Time for Reparations’, I glanced over at the Facebook Live Chat and saw a brief message from Synamon Baldwin that read, ‘in my lifetime, God’.
I thought about that request of the Divine with the world being so messy and perhaps frightening, painful. and surreal. I was reminded that a day of reckoning is at hand. In the midst of crises on top of crises, it is clear that there are many opportunities, even though we must still face tall mountains to climb. We see a future with less worrying and more faith and gratitude; with less judgment and more compassion; and with more love and less hate.
The Healing Circle focused on the impact of trauma on children, whose innocence and futures are besieged by the COVID 19 pandemic, by urban unrest and resistance to daily oppression, by witnessing the execution of George Floyd, and by experiencing the deaths of some of their young friends by the escalating gun violence. And now they have to return to school very soon.
Eric Mahmoud addressed the issue of mental health in a rich narrative that embraced and intertwined our culture, history, achievements, and needs in the context of education. Host Al McFarlane described Mahmoud as a thinker, mover & shaker, doer, builder, architect, and manager of the Harvest BEST Charter Schools.
“I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood in Philadelphia which helped shape my resilience for survival at first, and later down the road for rewards and success. I aimed at becoming the best myself that I could be. Unfortunately, it seemed like there was always a teacher strike, which meant I was missing at least a year of academics. At the time, that arrangement was just fine with me. I thought I was getting over, but I learned when I got to high school and to college that I was behind so many other students. When my college white roommate said ‘Black folks never did anything’, that belief and him saying so was the first of quite a few turning points for me. I set out to read everything I could about Black America and was so pleased that I could prove the white boy wrong though it wasn’t my job to educate him. It was for the system and for parents,” Mahmoud said.
The academic guru will tell anyone that his wife, Dr. Ella Mahmoud persuaded him to “leave his good engineering job and join her on an educational journey spanning 30 plus years.”
Together, he said, they have achieved “unprecedented goals in changing the lives and opportunities for children of color, strengthening their minds by challenging their work ethic and their will to succeed; building their confidence and pride of being who they are by teaching true history of American sins we hope will not be repeated, and gladly being responsible for the shaping future leaders from the next generation.”
In 1985, the Mahmouds set out on their quest to use education to establish sustainable community development. SEED Academy was a pre-school that began in their home. In 1992, SEED grew into Harvest Preparatory, located on Golden Valley Road. It was a private school. Charter schools had not been integrated into the academic scheme of the Minneapolis school district. In 1998, Harvest Prep became a charter school. With the creation of BEST Academy in 2008, Mahmoud and his staff wanted to address academic deficiencies in boys who to seemed surpasss girls only in the number of suspensions.
In 2018, the three schools were consolidated under the Minneapolis School District as Harvest Best Academy with a school population of 800 kindergarteners through eighth grade, 70% African American and 30% East African Somali. “It’s been a wonderful journey, he said, but I will admit at times a ‘baptism by fire’. Integrating newly arrived Africans, often with a language barrier, into the fabric and culture of America and especially the African American families and communities, has been a challenge. But we learn from each other,” Mahmoud said.
Mahmoud said he knew the impact the COVID-19 shut down was going to be felt for a very long time unless a strategy was devised to make up that lost ground. In March of 2020, he managed to get 750 Chrome books for his students to work for home. But then he found out that only 50% of the computers were turned on. “Many of the students just didn’t have conducive learning environments to utilize the equipment or understand the material to their benefit and mastery,” he said. As a solution, he created a mobile learning lab with a charter bus company providing safe spaces and the use of the internet. But it wasn’t sustainable, and the school wasn’t reaching enough students.
Next he secured funding to pay churches and the YMCA to allow approximately 500 students not just from Harvard Best but around the neighborhoods to work in learning pods and often under tents. On August 17, 2020, kindergarten opened with 75 students that were allowed to come into the building because of new air filtration units.
Tenanye Heard, a member of the AACWI’s COVID outreach team, said “There must be precise strategies put into practice to protect our children, our school staffs, and ourselves. With children under the age of 12 unable to be vaccinated, we must be consistent with the correct use of masks; put into the daily routine social distancing as much as possible; display posters about hand washing and normalizing sanitizers; and insist on facility ventilation inspections for quality air purification. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have hygiene stations secured in classrooms and throughout the school. We’re not talking about a one-time event. Establishing consistent systems and processes must become a critical component of our schools’ infrastructures. It doesn’t appear COVID19 is going away anytime soon.”
Pastor Darrell Gillespie, a mental health clinician with AACWI and dean of HOPE Academy, encourages us all to ‘encourage’ ourselves. “We’ve got to tap into our ancestors’ resilience, that way of ‘making a way out of no way’. And as a people, we’ve got to allow our children to see us do the things necessary to keep our families together in a safe and nurturing environment; be motivated and uplifting; to dream big and not limit ourselves; and to be of service to others. We’re like those seeds Brother Mahmoud talked about having everything in it that we need. We just have to tend to it routinely, care for it, protect it, teach it, and watch it grow.”
Gillespie said “as we take our rightful place as elders. our culture allows us to be in relationships with kids that look like us. We’ve got to push aside fears caused by misinformation. We also have to talk with parents about the situations that scare them and cause trauma and angst.”
Therapist Ted Thompson said parents know that children will be returning to a school that will not be business as usual. “Parents have learned a lot from being home with their kids for the past year and a half. In the past, they would defer student problems over to the schools’ administration or the teacher. I invite parents and guardians to come forward and become partners in their child’s school and in their personal academics. They will find that their communities have resources if they are willing to do the research, follow through with leads and advice, and accept that there is no shame in asking for help. People are being compelled to shift their thinking and actions, create, and circumvent obstacles. The focus should be on the health and welfare of the students,” Thompson said.
