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Community Collaboration: Jeremiah Newell

Six weeks into the Ed.L.D. Program, Jeremiah Newell admits his thinking has changed some, especially when he envisions where he’ll eventually make the biggest impact in education. What hasn’t changed is his strong belief that the work has to be at the nexus between public schools and communities. Everyone, he says, has to take responsibility for the problems in education. And finding ways to get everyone to work together makes all the difference in the lives of young people.

Newell saw it firsthand before joining the Ed.L.D. Program when, as a program director at an education nonprofit in Mobile, Ala., he mobilized his community — not just those already working in schools — to tackle together a persistent problem: a too-high dropout rate. (Within three years, graduation rates increased nine percentage points.)

And he lived it much earlier when people in his community recognized his potential. Even as a little boy, he started to realized that not everyone could follow his or her potential. His single mother, for example, worked long hours at a job that was too easy for her. Going to work with her sometimes, Newell watched as she sorted garments at a uniform rental company during the day.

“I realized that all you needed to know for her job was odd and even numbers,” he says. “I knew my mom was so much smarter than that.”

By middle school, issues of inequity became even clearer when he started helping his mom at her second job as a night janitor at a wealthy private school.

“We cleaned and I saw the very different outcomes based on access. I knew, even then, that access was critical,” he says. “I also knew I didn’t have the luxury of playing around. I needed to be fairly decisive about my future. I sensed that I didn’t have a lot of do-overs.”

What he did have was a community, a team of people who took responsibility for his potential. They told him he could do better. They told him he could succeed. They told him to put his name into a lottery for a good school.

“My mom told me that; my teachers told me that,” he says. In kindergarten, he got into a high-performing magnet school — an opportunity he didn’t waste. “I had an urge to learn. And although I lived below the poverty line, I believed I wouldn’t stay poor. Even though I didn’t have a father figure, I never believed I’d one day be a bad dad. I did not connect my disadvantage with my future success and I knew I’d keep going.”

By the time he started working as a director at the Mobile Area Education Foundation, where he tackled the dropout rate, he wondered: how do we help other disadvantaged students make the same positive connections he had made?

“How do you turn on that light bulb?” he says. “My whole thing is, education shouldn’t be a miracle.”

Which brings him back to his theory that the only way to make this happen is for everyone to work together.

“I came to the Ed.L.D. with the strong belief that working at the nexus between schools and communities is the key to making an impact that is sustainable,” he says. “These problems are not just school problems — they are community problems, too. There has to be collaboration. The problems have to be co-owned.”

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