Organizer goes door to door to recruit parents
By Daniel Allen
dantallen@gmail.com
Photos by Dan Allen
Jenise Harrell on her way to call on Hunt Point residents, asking them to participate in the Hunts Point Alliance for Children’s parent coaching program.
If it really does take a village to raise a child, then Jenise Harrell wants to make sure the village is ready to do its part.Each day, Harrell, 20, goes door-to-door recruiting families for a “parent coaching program,” which aims at bridging the gap between parents and schools.
The parent coordinator for the Hunts Point Alliance for Children, a coalition of community organizations and schools formed last year to improve children’s health and educational achievement on the peninsula, Harrell, 20, grew up in the neighborhood and attended local schools herself.
Teachers complain to Harrell that parents aren’t helping their children, and won’t come to school to talk to them unless they’re warned that their child is going to be held back. What the teachers may not realize, says Harell, is that many parents don’t speak English. In addition, she says, often parents can’t help their children with their school work because they don’t have “any real education themselves.”
Hunts Point residents also have issues with local schools. “The problem is that teachers just want to get paid and go home,” said Tony Rubio, a janitor at PS 48, who has lived in Hunts Point for 15 years with his wife.
Instead of grousing, HPAC wants to get parents and teachers talking. The parent coaching program, set to launch in September, offers a $100 monthly stipend for parents who will organize discussion groups to identify problems and exchange ideas for solving them.
“I hope to teach the parents that we have how to be better parents and how to be better community activists,” said Harrell. “From there I hope to create a larger network so I can use the two parents per school that we do have and from there four parents per school, until we just get a whole big group of parents together and tackle these issues.”
Mounting the stairs at 754 Coster Street on a recent afternoon, Harrell explained that she always begins at the top floor of a building, working her way down. Neither the bad knees she said she inherited from her father nor the textbooks she carries in her purse seem to slow her climb.
Feet shuffle behind a fourth-floor apartment’s heavy door. A gruff female voice shouts: “Who is it?”
Can you spare a few minutes to discuss the welfare of children in Hunts Point? Harrell replies.
On a good day, the locks on several apartments will click open and she’ll be invited in; but this time she’s told to move along.
Having grown up on Faile Street, where she lived for 18 years with her grandmother and two cousins, Harrell is familiar with the neighborhood and its schools. She graduated from PS 48, IS 74, CS 152 and Cardinal Spellman High School, and now lives in Harlem with her boyfriend while finishing her degree at George Washington University.
She knows her efforts face many obstacles.
“This is sad,” said Harrell, pointing to an empty hole where the peephole in a door should be. A vicious-sounding dog barked inside.
Asked if she feels safe performing her rounds, she shrugged. Her greatest fear is encountering someone high on methamphetamine. “They can spaz out at any moment,”
she said. She looks for sores around the mouth to identify meth users.
Hunts Point residents are younger and more likely to be from another country than city residents as a whole. In 2003, according to the latest census figures available, 9.8 percent of Hunts Point residents were five years old or younger, compared to 8.3 percent in the Bronx overall. Foreign-born residents comprised 27.3 percent of Hunts Point’s residents. The citywide average is 20 percent.
Of those who answered their doors, many were new arrivals from other countries, and many had children too young to be in school.
“I clock demographics in my mind of recent immigrants,”
said Harrell as she added a check mark to her list. On this day, she encountered two Puerto Ricans who had recently moved to the mainland and two people she guessed to be African immigrants.
The long hours recent arrivals spend at work and their lack of familiarity with the neighborhood create barriers to their getting involved in community affairs. Overcoming these barriers is part of Harrell’s mission.
At another apartment, Harrell speaks with William, who moved to Hunts Point in 2000 with his wife and two young children. Although he complained that his son was unable to get help in second-grade math because after-school programs at PS 48 were full, he was reluctant to sign up for the parent-coaching program.
“This is a good idea, but my schedule,” he said, “I work at night.”
Harrell trudges on with dogged determination. “Somebody has to make the conscious effort to talk to these people or the problem will just continue,” she says.
And Harrell’s outreach efforts have begun to take hold.
Tracy Bellamy, a mother of four, said she decided to become a parent coach when she found a flier in her son’s book bag. Two of her children attend the Bronx Charter School for the Arts and another attends Monroe High School.
“I’m one of those hands-on moms,” said Bellamy in the kitchen of her Garrison Avenue apartment. “To me, education is everything. I tell my kids ‘If you don’t get an education, you gonna be in a factory somewhere putting logos on hats in a hot, hot room.”
Bellamy criticized the lack of after-school programs and the cost of summer programs in Hunts Point. One eight-week summer camp charges $2,850 per child, she said.
Problems are only solved when people talk about them, said Bellamy. She described recent community efforts to install a traffic light at the intersection of Longfellow Avenue and Garrison Avenue, near the Bronx Charter School for the Arts.
“If it was Riverdale, there would be a crossing guard,” she said.