Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin
Redeeming Potentially Violent Students: One Man's Dream
Winter 1999

BY: Rea Helene Kirk, Ed D., Assistant professor of in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. She is also a member of PI Lamda Theta, Phi Delta Kappa, The Council for Exceptional Children and the Wisconsin Association for Children with Behavioral Disorders.

Businessman Kent Salveson's dream, the EEXCEL Apartment Project, has helped students who were identified as at-risk for violence and for becoming school drop-outs. Because of a partnership consisting of private business, education, and caring individuals, these students were able to beat the odds. The story of this remarkable project is told in this article.

Just within the first half of 1998:

In Springfield, Oregon, two students were killed and 22 others were injured when a freshman, age 15, went on a shooting rampage.
In Edinboro, Pennylvania, a 14 year-old shot and killed his science teacher at an eighth-grade dinner dance.
Jonesboro, Arkansas, West Paducah, Kentucky, and Pearl, Mississippi, have had fatal school shooting

However, this article is not about these juvenile murderers who were not caught in time to be redeemed. It is about students who have been identified as at-risk for acts of' violence and for becoming school drop outs. It is about how these students were caught in time to be redeemed. It is about beating the odds. It is about one man's dream.

"I feel smart."
"Cause the mentors make us smart."
"They're like a friend of 'yours, like a best friend."
"They are always there when you need help."
"Tutoring made me feel I could learn anything"

These comments were made by boys who live in a unique housing project in blight-stricken South Central Los Angeles. Personal experience and the professional literature indicate that for students like these poor youngsters growing up in urban, high-violence, and drug-infested areas-school under achievement is almost universal. These students know violence as a way of life, in and out of school. Each one of the students quoted above has been solicited by at least one gang member for recruitment. What prevented these students from joining a gang? What prevented these students from dropping out of school? What made them able to beat the odds?

These young students all know neighbors who are now in prison, who are on drugs, who are illiterate; all have neighbors who are chronically unemployed. All have been exposed to-and many have been threatened with or were the victims of-violence. These students not only have been able to avoid gangs and drugs, but also have succeeded in schools known for under achievement Once again, what made them able to beat the odds?

The Mentoring Difference

The answer is simple. It is found in the students' comments quoted above. A mentor made them feel smart. Made them realize that they had value and potential. A mentor made the difference between a bountiful or a bleak future. A mentor-just one person who believed in each one of them made it possible for these Students to be redeemable, to beat the odds. The mentors for these students were part of the EEXCEL Apartment Project, Kent Salveson's dreaming.

Real Estate developer Kent Salveson believed that success in school was the way to redeem students who had started to follow the path of violence. In 1988 Salveson conceived the idea of the EEXCEL Apartment Project based on a series of conversations he had with a single mother of five children. Mr. Salveson ate lunch at the restaurant where the woman worked, and they would talk. She wanted her children to have a better life than she had; she wanted better education and better jobs for them. She was afraid they would join gangs, do drugs, and be involved in other acts destructive to themselves and others. She was afraid that her children would drop out of school. Statistics seemed to show this would be the case.

As a new father, Mr. Salveson realized that the woman cared about her children as much as he cared about his baby daughter. He realized that although he and the woman were worlds apart socio-economically. They had the same dreams for their children. He understood he had not become a success by himself-, he owed a debt of gratitude to his parents for instilling in him the value of education. He also realized that he had lived a relatively easy life because he had the education and the concomitant norms necessary for economic success. He began wondering what lie could do as an apartment developer. He concluded that the determining factor for social and economic success is education. Mr. Salveson credits this waitress with changing his life, and for being the catalyst for creating a dream invest in a project in order to redeem potentially violent at-risk students.

Mr. Salveson believed that if children could do well in school, their academic success would be the beginning of an upward spiral, up and out of poverty, up and out of crime, up and out of the hopelessness of their lives in the South Central Los Angeles slums. It would be a way up and out of illiteracy. It would be a way up and out of violence.

The First Steps

Mr. Salveson started by buying one apartment building with twenty-six units as the beginning of the dream lie called the "EEXCEL Apartment Project." He took one of the units in the building and knocked out the closets and some walls. With some redecorating, he created a tutoring center right in the apartment building. Now the children in the EEXCEL Apartment Project had a safe, quiet place in which to study. Many of these children had never before had a quiet place to do their homework. Many never had a dictionary available except at school. Many lived in homes that held no books. Most had never owned a book of their own. Establishing the tutoring center was the beginning of changing the odds for these Young students. It was the first step.

However, the children still had no one to help them with their homework and they had no positive role models to inspire them. Mr. Salveson returned to the University of Southern California (USC), his alma mater, where Gilbert Hentschke, dean of the School of Education, agreed with the need for a program to redeem potentially violent students who also were at-risk of becoming school dropouts Dean Hentschke understood Mr. Salveson's vision, and he agreed with Salveson's drive, his need, his compulsion to do what he knew was right-to offer a humane yet practical solution for children like those of the waitress who inspired him. They also agreed that, despite the tutoring center Mr. Salveson had established, the odds were still against these young students.

Julie Barber-a graduate student-was hired to be the Education Director. Other ideas serendipitously occurred. Because of a housing shortage for graduate students at USC, the university made housing scholarships available to these students in exchange for their living at and working in the EEXCEL Apartment Project. Students earned college credit and valuable experience as mentor in the project. And young at-risk students living in this housing project had people to look up to who valued education. These people were now their neighbors! They saw them carrying books and studying. They heard them talking about buying books, decrying drugs, denouncing violence. For many of these young students, this was a new way to look at life. And the chances of beating the odds changed a little more.

Just One Person

Kunjufu tells us that by age eight, children who will become at-risk already have begun to develop negative attitudes toward school. By age nine, they have learned to challenge authority. Kent Salveson, Julie Barber and Gilbert Hentschke believed that it would take just one person who genuinely cared about a child and that child's academic performance to make the child turn away from violence and school failure.

Although the project started as a tutoring program, it was soon realized that the education of these at-risk students must be addressed holistically. Therefore, self-esteem and goal-setting became essential facets of the program. The project followed the teachings of Winfield, who said that resilience is not a fixed attribute but a process which, when generated in daily activities, emerges over time. Winfield stressed the importance of high quality, early school experiences in order to reduce the risk of a child developing behaviors and attitudes that are anti-education and anti-authority. She also stressed the need for self-esteem and self-efficacy, which develop through interpersonal relations and feelings of success with tasks. The EEXCEL Apartment Project was developed around these principles for developing resiliency in at-risk students.

Program organizers agreed that self-esteem comes from having, success with difficult tasks; that it comes from knowing one has done a hard job, done it right, and done it well. Consequently, Ms. Barber first focused on the subject in which each needed the most academic redemption. If the students could be convinced that they could succeed, perhaps they would start to think of education rather than violence as a way to survive in life.

Beating the Odds

The students who live in the EEXCEL Apartment Project are defined as "at risk" because they live in poverty or in single-parent families. Most of these children are witnesses to brutal and continuous violence, the ravages of alcohol and other drug abuse, intimidation by gangs, and a culture of despair. Given the Multiplicity of strikes against them, how could they beat the odds?"

Ms. Barber's beliefs fit in with the work of Clark and Lee who described the influence of home. Family and environmental stress (e.g., poverty, crime, and unemployment) on children's school success. According to their research, many low-income children are brought Up in homes emanating powerlessness and despair where most all of the adults' efforts are directed toward survival. The adults in the home want the children to be academically successful, but they lack the skills and the energy to foster school achievement. Overburdened with social and economic problems, and constrained by limited awareness of their role in the school process, these parents provide only minimal and sporadic cognitive nuturance.

Ms. Barber understood the importance of personalization. Because of' this, she secured a mentor for each EEXCEL child. The mentors were college students in various disciplines who had a strong desire to give a child hope. Students received mentors who affirmed them, who told them that they had value, who said in essence, "I Will listen to you; I will believe in you; I will help you have a dream.

Students did an art project in which they dipped their feet in tempera paint and walked across a long sheet of paper creating paths to goals and symbols stressing the need to take small, consistent steps to reach their goals. The students identified and labeled the steps (footprints) they would take to reach their goals. Thus, they created a visual reminder of their future to display on the walls of the tutoring center.

The students who live in the EEXCEL Apartment Project are those who statistics, society and our schools have said are most at risk to drop out of school and are most at risk to commit acts of violence. They are the students we expect to read about in our morning newspapers, like those from Jonesboro, Arkansas and Springfield, Oregon. But, the EEXCEL Apartment Project, Kent Salveson's dream, made the difference.

Before and After

Through the project, these students now have a clean, safe place in which to study. They have books. And, most importantly, they each have a personal mentor. They receive love, attention and a sense that they have potential

A student-painted mural best demonstrates the difference the EEXCEL Apartment Project has made in the lives of these children. The "Before EEXCEL side shows dead bodies, used needles, graffiti and shootings. The "Since EEXCEL side shows a bright sun in the corner, happy, smiling people and books!

Today over 700 units in various locales serve low and very low income families, 75 percent with single women as heads of household. It seems too simple, too obvious. The critical factor in changing the path of these Students was personalization, having one person care about them, listen to them, and believe in them. The combination of private business, education and caring individuals demonstrates how easy it is to give hope, to give a future to our at-risk students, to give them an opportunity to beat the odds.

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