A Day of Growing at Hiatt Middle School, Both Inside and Out
Tony Beccera, one of the original Freedom Writers of literary and cinematic fame, was inside planting seeds of self-confidence, pride and determination with students, who also joined staff and community volunteers outside planting seeds of melons, sweet corn and herbs.
It was a special day of sowing at Hiatt Middle School that’s certain to bear not only fruit, but vegetables and bright futures in the months and years to come.
Hiatt received a $500 Youth Garden Grant Award sponsored by The Home Depot and presented by The National Gardening Association to help start their garden on a fallow plot of school property across the street from the main campus. This morning, Colette Green (yes, Green) and Linda Koch traveled from Harlan and Sioux City, respectively, to coordinate the planting. They’re both avid gardeners and they both have daughters who teach at Hiatt. Colette arranged for Stan the Tillerman to show up this morning to turn the soil before the students arrived. “Take care of this garden now and you can eat it this summer,” she told the green-thumbed apprentices when they began reporting for duty.
The students in charge of the garden are participating in the Breaking Bounds project at Hiatt. They spent six weeks going through extensive leadership and employability training in order to receive a free week of leadership camp this summer at Camp Foster YMCA in Spirit Lake, Iowa. The camp expenses will be funded by a Community Betterment Grant from Prairie Meadows.
Breaking Bounds is designed to support a group of students with hardships in common that put them at-risk for dropping out of school. Their six-week training included learning how to work as a team, developing a respect for students of all backgrounds, improving academic achievement, developing a vision for the future that includes additional education and/or career training, and building experiences that students can draw from in social, educational, or business settings. Students also committed to participating in afterhours programming, academic counseling, and behavior support as needed.
The kids actually thought it was a garden they were planting this morning, and it was that, too, among other things with longer growing seasons than 50-80 days. Just like the kids who were inside listening to Beccera thought they were listening to a funny young man who came from a background of hard knocks similar to their own.
Becerra doesn’t lecture, he relates. “I kind of sneak up on them with stories that start out sounding like stand-up comedy,” he explained. “I get them laughing at things that happened to me that maybe have happened to them too so they’ll pay attention when I talk about what else happened.”
Like how whenever anything bad occurred it was no big deal in his family because whatever it was had already happened to the rest of them. But when he graduated from high school it was a really big deal because that had never happened to any of them. He starts out recalling the poor, pudgy little brown kid with big teeth from the perspective of a happy, accomplished young man with a radiant, irrepressible grin.
When he was finished and took a few minutes for questions one of the first ones was whether or not he’s still friends with the other Freedom Writers. “We’re all still close friends,” he said, “and you know why? Because when you hang around positive people, positive things tend to result.”
The Freedom Writers Diary is a collective journal written by a group of troubled students from Long Beach, California in 1999 about all the obstacles they faced just to complete high school. It was ultimately published and later adapted into a major motion picture in 2007.
Beccera made it all the way from the wrong side of the tracks in Long Beach to the red carpet in Hollywood so when he told the kids in the auditorium at Amos Hiatt Middle School in Des Moines, Iowa that if they combine the strength their tribulations will give them with the smarts that are theirs for the taking (“your brains are muscles too – think of education as a sport”) their lives will become unstoppable, maybe they believed him. You could tell they wanted to. Because when they stopped laughing, they kept right on listening.
Today especially, Hiatt was growing – inside and out.
