lucky

Last year I volunteered to mentor a student at a Harlem School.  

It didn’t go so well.  The student quit halfway through the program.  I am back this year to try again.

The program is run through Fordham Law School and is called LEEAP (Legal Economic and Educational Advancement Program). Today begins the first of four spring sessions.  There are nine mentors and nine student scholars.  The mentors are there to help the school’s star juniors begin to navigate the college application process.

This school could not be more different from Horace Mann, the school Alexander attended.  There, everyone is college bound.  Everyone knows all the top schools, probably before they enter high school. And everyone ends up at a name school.

Here it’s different.

I meet a boy who wants to go to Med School and become a Sports Medicine Doctor.  But he tells he doesn’t like science. Perhaps he doesn’t know that a pre-med student must take lots of science courses.

Another girl wants to go to college so someday she’ll be able to read to her kids.  “My mom doesn’t know how to read, so I grew up with no one reading to me,” she admits to the group.

One boy is debating between going to college and entering the military.

And the lovely girl I’ll be working with tells me she wants to major in art.  She lives in a Manhattan neighborhood where her concerned mother doesn’t like her to be outside, because “the streets near my home aren’t safe.”

It is such a different world, and geographically so close to my own. It's easy to forget how lucky my son is, and all the advantages he's been given.  

I remember a picture I took today on my walk to the school.  Tulips.  I actually stopped and smelled them.