Month: June 2016

62 Years after the Brown Decision

John Merrow Uncategorized

Harry Briggs was a garage attendant, and they fired him. And they fired another man whose name was Stookes after–he was working at a filling station also. After they fired him, he attempted to try to work in his backyard, and so he was working on a car and, not having the proper things to use for the car, he had jacked the car up on a homemade shift, and the car fell on him and killed him. And James Brown was working for a trucking company. I don’t recall the trucking company. They fired him.
And they fired teachers who they thought had signed it. My husband had two sisters working in the district. They were fired. He was fired. And I was fired. And even the parents who signed the petition, they wouldn’t let them have loans to–for their crops the following year. And of course the (white) people stopped buying groceries, some of them, and they’d even go to Sumpter and Columbia and other places to buy groceries, and they would cut off everything that they thought was helping the petitioners.

That’s what Mattie de Laine, the widow of the Reverend Joseph De Laine[1] (who helped bring the lawsuit in Clarendon County, South Carolina), told me when I interviewed her in 1979, 25 years after the historic Brown v Board Supreme Court decision of 1954.

The negative reaction was not confined to the white community. All Sarah Bulah of Wilmington, Delaware wanted was to have the bus that took white children to school pick up her daughter, Shirley, and drop her at the Negro school. She recalled the neighborhood’s reaction:

They thought I was breaking up the community. One morning I went to see a sick lady. She say, ‘Mrs. Bulah, I’m surprised at you.’ Surprised at me, about what? ‘You saying that you wanted wanted Shirley to to go the white school because you didn’t want her going to the Negro school.’ I say, I didn’t say no such thing, just like that. She say, ‘You know, I’ve been living her 30 years, and we ain’t never had no stink until you come.’

Back then Sarah Bulah made her living selling fresh eggs. Before she joined the lawsuit, she told us she was selling about 100 dozen eggs a week at 75 cents per dozen to white families. She lost all her customers except one.

Two years ago, the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the historic Supreme Court decision were muted, overshadowed by the harsh reality. Although it’s no longer constitutionally permissible to segregate students by race, our public schools are more segregated today than ever in our history. As Richard Rothstein pointed out in “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since,” school segregation is a consequence of residential segregation, which means that housing policies become education policy.   This report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project has more information about the segregation of public schools: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-press-releases/ucla-report-finds-changing-u.s.-demographics-transform-school-segregation-landscape-60-years-after-brown-v-board-of-education

But in addition to bemoaning our collective failures, let’s remember the brave men and women who had the courage to challenge legal school segregation, a struggle that began with a case involving the Law School at the University of Maryland in 1935 and culminated in the Court’s unanimous decision announced on May 17, 1954.

Many of the early cases attacking ‘Separate but Equal’ focused on proving that the facilities were in fact not equal. Winning these cases forced the power structure to spend more on the Negro schools, but a victory did not directly challenge the concept of segregation. Directly challenging the constitutionality of segregation meant asking the Supreme Court to overrule itself–to admit that it had been wrong in Plessy v. Ferguson. It meant asking the Court to declare that the concepts of ‘separation’ and ‘equality’ were contradictory by definition and contrary to the US Constitution.

The attorneys were undecided on this vital point right up to the last possible moment. James Nabrit, a young attorney working on the Washington, DC, case with lead attorney Thurgood Marshall and others, recalled the day the case was argued before the Court.

You know when they settled that question? The morning when Thurgood got up to argue and stood up and started talking all this stuff, and Justice Frankfurter stopped him and said, ‘Mr. Marshall, I want to ask you a question,’ and Thurgood said, ‘Yes, sir?’, and he said, ‘Are you arguing this case on the separate but equal doctrine, or are you arguing that segregation, per se, is unconstitutional? Now I want to know.’
And Thurgood turned as pale as a ghost, and the courtroom was just as quiet as the moon. And finally he said, ‘Mr. Justice Frankfurter, we are going to argue this case on the basis that segregation per se is unconstitutional.’ (1979 interview)

Richard Kluger’s “Simple Justice” remains a must-read for anyone interested in the long struggle against school segregation. Henry Hampton’s monumental documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize,” will always be the gold standard for television reportage about the Civil Rights Movement.

The U.S. Library of Congress has a permanent exhibit of documents and photographs about the Brown cases online.

Growing up, I associated the Brown decision with Topeka, Kansas, and 7-year-old Linda Brown. From Mr. Kluger’s book I learned that “Brown” included lawsuits from four other communities: Wilmington, Delaware; Washington, DC; Prince Edward County, Virginia; and Clarendon County, South Carolina.

Reading that book inspired us to revisit all five communities in 1979, the 25th Anniversary of the decision, for my NPR radio series, “Options in Education.” We met many of the plaintiffs, the ordinary men and women who were persuaded by Thurgood Marshall, Charles Houston, James Nabrit, Jack Greenberg and others to sign their names to the lawsuits.[2]

Here, from the Library of Congress page, are quick descriptions of the cases, along with a few anecdotes from our 1979 NPR series.

CLARENDON COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA: “In 1949, the state NAACP in South Carolina sought twenty local residents in Clarendon County to sign a petition for equal education. The petition turned into a lawsuit and first name on the list was Harry Briggs. In preparation for the Briggs case, attorney Robert Carter returned to Columbia University to confer with Psychologist Otto Klineberg, who was known for his research on black students’ IQ scores. He sought Klineberg’s advice on the use of social science testimony in the pending trial to show the psychological damage segregation caused in black children. Klineberg recommended Kenneth Clark. Clark became the Legal Defense Fund’s principal expert witness.”

Dr. Clark, a sociologist, used dolls to measure children’s attitudes. Attorney Harold Boulware told me about it.

He had in his bag two dolls, both dressed just alike. Both with the same kind of clothes on. The only difference in the two dolls was one was white, the other was black. So he would take one or two students into his examining room, and he would ask one of the students, “I will show you two dolls. Which is the good doll, and which is the bad doll?’ The black students would point to the black doll as the bad doll.
He would ask, ‘Which is the dirty doll, and which is the clean doll?’ and the black student would point at the black doll as the dirty one.
He would ask, ‘Which is the smelly doll?’ The black doll.
‘Which is the smart doll, and which is the dumb doll?’ And the black student would point at the black doll as the dumb doll. And all the way down the line. Every time there was something bad, it was black. Everything that was a smart doll, a clean doll, a sweet smelling doll, a brilliant doll, that was white.

TOPEKA, KANSAS: “Brown v. Board of Education was filed in the U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas, in February 1951 and litigated concurrently with Briggs v. Elliot in South Carolina. Oliver Brown, one of thirteen plaintiffs, had agreed to participate on behalf of his seven-year-old daughter Linda, who had to walk six blocks to board a school bus that drove her to the all-black Monroe School a mile away.”

Pre-Brown, public schools were supposed to be ‘Separate but Equal.’ A parent from Topeka, Kansas, remembered what ‘Equality’ was like. “I remember they had what they called a black bell, for assemblies. The bell would ring for the children to assemble in the auditorium. So they’d ring a bell, and the white children would go to assembly. Then they’d ring the second bell, which was called the nigger bell, and our children went upstairs to a separate room.”

She said the superintendent had an assistant, a Black man, whose job it was to keep the races separate. “At the high school at lunchtime, he’d go to the cafeteria, and if the Negro children were not sitting at this table, a certain table for the colored children, then he’d yank them up. “Get on down there where you belong!’”(Lucinda Todd, from a 1979 interview)

WASHINGTON, DC: “Spottswood Thomas Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe, was one of the five school desegregation cases that comprised Brown. Because the District of Columbia was not a state but federal territory, the Fourteenth Amendment arguments used in the other cases did not apply. Therefore, the lawyers argued for “Due Process Clause” of the Fifth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection of the law. The Consolidated Parents Group initiated a boycott of the all-black Browne Junior High School in Washington. D.C., which was overcrowded and dilapidated. In 1948, Charles H. Houston was hired [4] to represent them in a lawsuit to make black schools more equal to white schools when Houston’s health began to fail. He recommended James Nabrit as his replacement.”

PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, VIRGINIA: “Spurred by a student strike, blacks in Prince Edward County, Virginia, called a lower federal court’s attention to the demonstrably unequal facilities in the county’s segregated high schools. … They convinced the U.S. District Court that facilities for blacks were “not substantially equal” to those for whites. The Court ordered the two systems to be made equal. However, it did not abolish segregation. Therefore, the plaintiffs appealed, and the Supreme Court heard their case along with Brown v. Board.”

In response to the Brown Decision and a court order to enforce it, Virginia passed a law in 1956 outlawing school integration. Governor Lindsay Almond, who as the state’s Attorney General had argued Virginia’s case before the Supreme Court, ordered public schools across the state to close rather than integrate, in a policy known as “Massive Resistance.”

When he closed the schools, Governor Almond made a stirring speech warning of ‘false prophets,’ ‘token integration,’ and ‘the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality and juvenile delinquency.’ He closed with these lines: ‘We have just begun to fight. No price is too high to pay, no burden to heavy to bear.’

In 1979 I asked him about that speech. “I made a terrible mistake in making that speech, and if I’d listened to my wife I wouldn’t have made that speech. I made a mistake in making that speech.” But he added, “That’s the way I felt then.”

Defending segregation before the US Supreme Court had catapulted Mr. Almond to the State House, where, as Governor, he closed the schools across the state, but in 1959—after losing in several courts–he concluded that the state’s policy of ‘Massive Resistance” was futile and ordered schools reopened.  His defiance of the state’s political machine led by US Senator Harry Byrd effectively ended Almond’s political career.[5] Most schools reopened, but Prince Edward County kept its schools closed for five more years, until 1964!

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE: “In 1950 Louis Redding filed a lawsuit on behalf of Sarah Bulah to admit her daughter, Shirley, to a nearby white elementary school, after the Delaware Board of Education refused to allow her to board an all-white school bus that drove past their home.

In 1979, Harold Boulware, then a family court judge in Clarendon County, SC, looked back optimistically on what the Brown decision had achieved.

The Brown decision is just a drop in the bucket with regard to touching the principles of education. It touched every facet of segregation. You can get better jobs. You’ve got more money. You’ve got better facilities in every respect, not only in school facilities, but facilities we’ve got for housing, jobs. So that effort that was made back there beginning in 1938, ‘39, ‘40, was the thing that started to change the whole transition of a better day for Blacks in South Carolina and in the nation.

The last word belongs to Mattie De Laine, widow of one of the plaintiffs in South Carolina and a teacher who was fired after the lawsuit was filed:

At first I felt a little bitter when they ran us away, but when I was going on the train to New York City one morning, everybody was asleep but me. I looked out the window and it was in October and the leaves were falling and all, and it just seemed like the leaves or something were saying to me, ‘Don’t be angry with anybody, because they don’t know any better’… And believe it or not, from that time on I have had no bitterness toward anybody, not even toward those people who were shooting and who burned the house and whatnot. I don’t have any bitterness toward those people now.

  1. This photograph of Reverend and Mrs. De Laine is in the collection of his papers:http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jad/id/893↵
  2. It turned out that we had bitten off more than our 4-person operation could chew when we decided to visit the five original communities AND the nation’s most segregated school system (Chicago) AND a community that had successfully integrated its schools (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina) AND the burgeoning (largely white-only) private school industry. Our 8-part series, which we called “Race against Time,” ended up airing on NPR in 1980, 26 years after Brown, not 25 as we had planned.↵It remains an indelible memory, however. You can listen to the series here: http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/listen-race-against-time-school-desegregation-since-1954-1980/12439/
  3.  Education Week has some memories here:http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/brown-anniversary-voices.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1 ↵
  4. Gardner Bishop, a Washington barber who was one of the plaintiffs, said in 1979 that Mr. Houston did not bill for his legal work.  He donated his services, Mr. Bishop said. Mr. Bishop’s reverence for Charles Houston remains one of my strongest memories of the series, and spending time with him was a genuine privilege.↵
  5. A grateful President John Kennedy later appointed him to the Federal Bench, where he served until his death in 1986.↵
 

 

A Sad Celebration

John Merrow Uncategorized

In a few days, a  charter school organization will receive the $250,000 Prize for excellence from the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation.  Three finalists– IDEA Public Schools, Success Academy Charter Schools and YES Prep Public Schools–were announced weeks ago. The winner will be made public at the annual meeting of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in Nashville on June 27.  The four previous winners of the prize are KIPP, Noble Network, Uncommon Schools and Yes Prep.  

But there’s another, more important piece of the story.  Without much publicity and for the second year in a row, the Broad Foundation is not awarding the $1,000,000 Broad Prize for Excellence in Urban Education, which has been given to a public school district. It turns out that the NAEP scores of most of the Broad Prize winners have been flat for years. These districts have been living and dying by test scores, and it’s not working, or not working well enough for the Foundation’s judges.

Ben Weider of the blog 538 deconstructed the issue in a well-reasoned piece, “The Most Important Award in Public Education Struggles to Find Winners.” Not long after, the Foundation decided to ‘pause’ the $1 million award, citing ‘sluggish’ changes in urban schools.  No prize was awarded in 2015, nor will one be this year, the Foundation’s Director of Communications told me.  As Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times has reported, billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad has shifted his focus to charter schools.

But that’s not really new news, as the Foundation’s own pie chart reveals. Since 1999, the Foundation has made $589,500,000 in education-related grants, and 24% of the money, $144,000,000, has gone directly to public charter schools.  No doubt some of the ‘leadership’ and ‘governance’ dollars have gone to public charter schools, which at best make up 5% of all schools.  Over that same time period, 3% of the money, $16,000,000, went to winners of the Urban Education Broad Prize (for college scholarships).

In other words, the Foundation’s pro-charter tilt has been evident for a long time.  Now it’s getting steeper and more pronounced.

Mr. Broad hoped that urban districts could improve “if given the right models or if political roadblocks” (such as those he believes are presented by teachers unions) “could be overcome,” said Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The suspension of the prize for urban education could signal a “highly public step” toward the view that traditional districts “are incapable of reform,” Henig said.  Mr. Broad seems to have already taken that step in his home city of Los Angeles, where he is backing an effort to greatly expand the charter sector.

Apparently it’s pretty simple for the folks administering the Broad Prize in Urban Education: Successful School Reform boils down to higher test scores.  I see no public sign that anyone at the Foundation is questioning whether living and dying by test scores is sensible pedagogy that benefits students.  And no public evidence that they’ve considered what might happen if poor urban students were exposed to a rich curriculum and veteran teachers.  If poor kids got what is the birthright of students in wealthy districts!

Just the dismal conclusion that traditional districts are incapable of reform, and doubling down on charter management organizations, despite the truly offensive record of some of them, including current nominees, of excluding special needs children and driving away students who seem likely to do poorly on standardized tests.

How sad…..

What Are Teachers Complaining About?

John Merrow Uncategorized

Can somebody explain to me why teachers are always complaining? Yes, it’s true that most states and the federal government want to use student test scores to fire teachers. Yes, many districts have embraced “Value Added Measurement” even though no respectable statistician supports that. And, yes, we expect teachers to overcome the effects of poverty, poor nutrition, substandard housing and medical conditions on their students. And, yes, tenure and other job protections are under attack. But, leaving those points aside, teachers in nearly every country have their own “Teachers Day.”  

Do plumbers and electricians have a special day set aside to honor them?  Do construction workers, politicians, lobbyists, testing company executives and security guards?  Of course they don’t. Don’t you think it’s time teachers stopped whining and enjoyed all the honors coming their way on “Teachers Day”?

For example, the 193 member nations of the United Nations celebrate “World Teachers Day” every October. About 50 countries also set aside a different day every year to celebrate their teachers.

Teachers around the globe have entire months locked up!  Ten countries–Australia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Brazil, Poland, Chile, Sri Lanka, the Ukraine and New Zealand– have chosen an October day to celebrate their teachers, and in the Ukraine, students give their teachers chocolate!

February is a good month for teachers in the Middle East. That’s when Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE and Oman set aside a day to pay their respects.

September is also a good month for teachers, with India celebrating “Teachers Day” on September 5; China and Hong Kong on the 10th; and Brunei and Taiwan on the 23rd, and Singapore on the first Friday of that month.

Six countries honor teachers on a day in May: Iran, Bhutan, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mexico, and Colombia.  June has four Teacher Days for Bolivia, El Salvador, Hungary, and Guatemala, and March has five (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Albania, Lebanon, and Iraq).  As far as I can tell, only August does not have a “Teachers Day.”

While students assume responsibility for instruction on “Teachers Day” in India, teachers really have it easy in Vietnam on November 20th. That day is set aside to allow students “to express their respect” for their teachers. Students begin preparing a week in advance, and many classes prepare literature and art to welcome “Teachers Day,” while other students prepare foods and flowers for the parties held at their schools. Students usually visit their teachers at their homes to offer flowers and small gifts, or organize trips with their teachers and classmates. Even former students pay respect to their teachers on this day.

But I’m proud to say that the United States is number one when it comes to honoring teachers.  We have at least two “Teachers Days” and an entire “Teachers Week.” The first full week of May is “Teacher Appreciation Week,” with that particular Tuesday being designated as “Teacher Appreciation Day.” This official celebration is the result of hard work by the National Education Association and the National PTA, but the credit for the first U.S. “Teachers Day” goes to teachers Mattye Whyte Woodridge in Arkansas and Ryan Krug in Wisconsin. Both began writing to political leaders as early as 1944 about the need for a national day honoring teachers. Eleanor Roosevelt responded; she persuaded the 81st Congress to proclaim a “National Teacher Day” in 1953.  One state, Massachusetts, has gotten into the act, with its own “Teachers Day” on the first Sunday in June.

Maybe US teachers are upset because teachers in Canada have their own postage stamp? I mean, what else could teachers be complaining about?

Some people worry that the professions of honor and respect for teachers begin and end on that particular day. We could prove them wrong by adopting my modest proposal. In addition to the celebrations, how about a concerted effort to end the dishonoring of teachers and teaching that goes on for most of the year? I’m thinking of the Fox News commentators who rattle on about overpaid teachers; school principals who treat teachers as interchangeable parts; union reps who bargain for rigid work rules that hamstring dedicated teachers; curriculum designers who labor to create ‘teacher-proof’ curricula; education school leaders with low standards and undemanding programs; cheap-shot politicians who demand more testing, and so on.

If those critics had to spend just one day doing what most teachers do every day, year in and year out, that might shut them up. 

So thank you, teachers, for today and every day.  

 

David Wald, 1955-2016

John Merrow Uncategorized

David Wald died of throat and neck cancer on May 27th, after a 9-year battle with the disease.  He was only 61 years old.

One of the bravest people I’ve ever known, David was a wonderful colleague and friend. Gentle and smart, David mentored everyone in the Learning Matters office, leading by example and encouragement. Television is a team sport, and David always put the team first.  While he often came up with the best ideas for how to tell a particular story or figured out a solution to problems we were wrestling with, he never, ever took credit, preferring to see the team keep its eye on the ball.

Although David was 13 years younger than I am, he taught me so much about television, life, and human relationships.  For this, I will always be grateful.

When cancer struck, David expressed his determination to keep on contributing to Learning Matters and our work for the NewsHour.  And he did, often editing video and scripts from home.  He endured a number of regimens and trials, some of which worked for a while, but inevitably the cancer returned, usually in a new place in his body.  He never complained.

At one point about 18 months ago, David came into my office, smiling broadly.  His last three CAT scans had been completely clear, and his doctors were saying that his cancer was gone.  As his wife, Betsy, said, it was the first time in years that they had gone to sleep without the heavy rock of cancer on their chests, and awakened without that rock still pressing on them.  They had a blessed six months of stress-free life, and then the damn cancer returned, as he said “with a vengeance.”  

I hired David to help us produce a major film about higher education. Although he’d never dug deeply into education, what mattered was that he knew how to find stories. We had decided to spend a year on four college campuses: Amherst, the University of Arizona, the Community College of Denver, and Western Kentucky University.  David was in his element.  He found students and faculty eager to reveal their innermost thoughts, which they did on camera. Most remarkably, a senior at Arizona chose to tell–and show–a national audience how he was cheating and drinking his way through college.  A (tenured) faculty member admitted–on camera–that she and her students had an unspoken contract: if they didn’t expect too much from her (so she could do research), she would not expect much from them–and they’d get good grades.  

The film, Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, caused a stir, to put it mildly.

David was full of energy, a Renaissance man who jumped from airplanes, ran marathons, went to Burning Man, and quoted Plato.  He also had a sly sense of humor.  Here’s David’s wit at work. He orchestrated this entire piece, under my nose no less. It was a complete surprise at our holiday party in December 2004.

His home town newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ran this obituary about the Emmy-winning producer who was in many ways the heart and soul of Learning Matters. 

One more point about David.  This letter from Lisa Hannah, the assistant principal of a school in Belmar, NJ, arrived after David and our colleague John Tulenko produced a memorable piece about how the school and its staff responded after Hurricane Sandy hit the town of Belmar hard. The segment ran on the NewsHour.  In the piece, Ms. Hannah related her conversation with one child — “A little girl, when we opened up the school for lunch today, she’s walking in the dark because the lights were not on. She said, ‘oh, I’m so happy to be back at school. I feel so safe.”

The kids got books too because, as Ms. Hannah told David and John, she was always looking for ways to “sneak in a little bit of education.”  Watching those teachers and the assistant principal delivering food and blankets to stricken families, and later welcoming them into the school (still without power) and feeding them is deeply moving.

 

I reprint the letter  because it demonstrates David’s commitment to reporting that makes a difference.  David wasn’t content to simply tell the story. He wanted to move our audience, and he often did.

In the wake of one of the most devastating natural disasters the small shore town of Belmar, New Jersey had suffered in decades, school administrators knew that the school community of 577 students would suffer tremendous challenges in recovering and restoring a sense of normalcy and order in school. The population of students included more than 50% from economically disadvantaged homes, many of whom hailed from non-native English speaking backgrounds. These families were financially fragile even prior to the storm, and the wrath wrought by Superstorm Sandy shifted the imbalance into even more dire circumstances for many families.

When approached by Learning Matters producers David Wald and John Tulenko about following school administrators during the early days after the storm in coordinating relief efforts for our families, we had no idea what to expect. The resulting piece, which featured the plight of our district in identifying and meeting the needs of our families without the the aid of electricity or phone communication, produced a powerful response from around the country.

Immediately following the airing of the segment on November 12th, we were inundated with phone calls, emails, and donations of school supplies, clothing, and financial gifts from other school districts, community members, businesses, and private citizens. These donations were immediately channeled to students, families, and staff members most in need, including 43 displaced students and several staff members unable to return to their destroyed homes.

Some of the most poignant outreach efforts included a school district from Olney, Maryland who traveled in caravan up to Belmar one cold Saturday afternoon with hundreds of new toys for the holidays, school supplies for students and teachers, and gift bags for school leaders who were working continually to meet the needs of the students. As the NewsHour piece gained momentum in social networking circles and the Internet, thousands of dollars in gift cards and donations arrived each day offering continual relief and support to families as they tried to provide a semblance of the holiday season for their families. Young students from other schools around the country traveled to the school to personally present checks resulting from the hard work of lemonade stands and other industrious efforts designed to raise funds for the students of our school.

The stories go on and on and on…..folks stopping by saying they had seen the segment and wished to anonymously drop off hundreds of warm blankets, book bags, or other helpful donations, warm words of encouragement received via email, phone messages and in the mail.

As a result of the response from the News Hour, we were invited to share our story with the local and national media, as well as to testify before the State Assembly Education Committee to describe the impact of the storm upon our district and in our community. And each time, the same thing would be heard…”We saw that incredible piece on PBS NewsHour and we were so moved….”

As we look toward the upcoming months of this challenging school year, we look forward to a very special day that will be a direct result of the generous donations to our school, much of which was in response to viewers seeing the segment…. a day of healing called “Belmar Strong” beach celebration. On this special day in May 2013, our students will walk in numbers the few blocks to the beach wearing Belmar Strong t-shirts to participate in a ribbon-cutting ceremony with food and music that will mark the official opening of one of the most treasured and memorable landmarks in our town, the beach! The Mayor and Council will join us in welcoming not only the students of Belmar, but the many students and staff members of other schools who stood by us during this difficult time and provided hope, inspiration, and a bit of comfort and fellowship.

Thank you again for the beautiful piece you produced for our district and the dignified manner in which you portrayed our families and their plight. We have all benefited from the outpouring of generosity, compassion, and unity so many others have shown as a result of watching.

Lisa Hannah
Assistant Principal/Director of Curriculum
Belmar School District

Thank you, David, for sharing your gifts with us.  Rest in peace, my friend.