The sinking of Sankofa

KENYATTA McKinney had 18 questions he'd ask the black and Latino boys coming into the Sankofa Passages Program. Chief among them was: Who is the male role model in your life?

"A lot of them would say their mother," McKinney said. "Sixty percent could not come up with a positive male role model."

The Sankofa Passages Program, an innovative mentorship program under the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color, targeted at-risk black and Latino boys in the city by placing male mentors, like McKinney, inside schools to meet with students three times a day, five days a week.

Last year, 14 minority, male mentors in seven traditional, vocational and alternative schools across the city worked with 352 at-risk boys on their social and emotional needs. Of the 65 seniors in Sankofa last year, 63 graduated.

Now, those 14 mentors are unemployed and the 352 boys they were to work with this year have lost their role models after the district axed Sankofa last month, a week before the start of school.

Khalifah Bennett, an English teacher at Thomas Edison High School in North Philadelphia who worked closely with the Sankofa mentors, said her students are devastated.

"When they went into that classroom and it was empty, I don't think the district understands how that can affect a child," she said. "Now Sankofa has turned into something they cared about that was important to them that just went away."

The cut, which the financially beleaguered district said was for budgetary reasons, is especially ironic given the recent national and local initiatives, many of them supported by Mayor Nutter, that target at-risk black and Latino boys.

Ron Walker, executive director of the Boston-based nonprofit Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color, said the district's decision blew him away.

"To eliminate a program that was working in the service of what the mayor was expressing and espousing is ironic to me," Walker said. "We still don't realize that the greatest investment is in the people."

Only one of the seven schools where Sankofa was in place still has a mentor, and he's been working for free since Sept. 5. That's because Marcus Delgado, the principal of One Bright Ray Community, an alternative high school in Fairhill, believes in Sankofa so much he is desperately trying to find the money for the mentor.

"I don't know how I'm going to pay for it, but I think it's important to sacrifice in other areas to maintain this program," Delgado said. "For a school like ours, where we're the last stop for students before they get put out on the street, here's a program that really contributed to the success of young men in our school."

Sankofa is a Ghanaian word meaning "to go back and get." It refers to reclaiming one's past in order to move forward. Much of the Sankofa model is built around helping black and Latino boys shake off negative stereotypes and replace them with a respect for their cultural heritage.

Sankofa mentors, known as facilitators, are minority men from varied backgrounds like coaching, music, writing and politics. They range in age from 25 to 50, and many have similar stories to the students they foster. One facilitator has never met his father, another has lost more than 30 friends to gun violence, but they have all become successes despite their adversities, and they all expect their students to surpass what they've achieved.

"The injection of a positive, affirmative male in these boys' lives who can relate but who also can expect things from them, who can push them to places they didn't want to be pushed before, that is crucial," Walker said.

Every morning before the start of class, Sankofa students met as a group with their facilitator. They talked about what happened the night before and what might happen that day, and they paid tribute to their ancestors. They then broke for classes before reconvening in the middle of the day and again at the end of the school day.

Fawaaz Fields, 25, who worked as a Sankofa facilitator at Edison High, said Sankofa was a space where boys could talk freely without judgment

"If a young man is expressing a story, whether his goldfish died or he just watched his best friend get shot, we sit in a circle and are attentive whether it takes seconds or 15 minutes," Fields said. "We're showing the value of listening. The public schooling process is missing these basic things that help people be successful."

Delgado, whose focus as an administrator is getting students to graduate, said Sankofa touches on what never gets taught in a classroom.

"A healthy mind definitely has healthy results and when they come in with an unhealthy mind, how can you even begin to teach algebra?" he said. "How do you begin to focus on biology when their focus is on what happened last night?"

Sankofa facilitators also taught life skills like hygiene, how to tie a tie, how to interact with the police and how to treat women.

McKinney, a facilitator at Philadelphia Learning Academy South, an alternative school in the Belmont section of West Philly, recalled a student who had an intense crush on a hall monitor.

"He was coming at her aggressively, so that became a topic for the group. We talked about harassment and we talked about how and why you can't come at women like that," he said.

David Bernard, 19, a student at One Bright Ray, said Sankofa taught him how to build himself up.

"This program showed us how negative thinking and cynical thoughts lead to failure, and how to overcome that with productive and positive thoughts," he said.

Jajuan Young, 18, who also attends One Bright Ray, said Sankofa taught him that he doesn't have to retaliate for every perceived slight or injustice.

"Your pride doesn't have to mean everything to you. Sometimes you have to put it to the side," he said.

Malik Williams, 17, a One Bright Ray student, said he learned to take responsibility for his actions.

"When we're overwhelmed by everything, Sankofa is a way to get away and learn how to deal with our problems," he said. "We saw that it's in our hands. We control our own futures."

For many of the students, just having a stable male role model was key.

Single mom Shiree Russell said her 17-year-old son was always looking for male role models, until he found them in Sankofa.

"As a single mother, I can't teach a boy to be a man," she said. "I could trust they'd instill things in my child to become a productive citizen."

Not only did Sankofa students come to respect and trust their facilitators, they also grew to respect and trust their fellow students and hold them accountable for their actions.

Richard Monegro-Gonzalez's father was hospitalized and his friend was shot to death last week, but the 16-year-old still showed up for school at One Bright Ray every single day because of Sankofa.

"I'm going through it, but due to one of my friends that's part of the program telling me, 'Just keep your head up and come to school,' that's the only way I'm focusing," he said. "Basically, that's telling me, like, to not give up on myself because other people see potential in me."

After reading about the Sankofa program in a previous Daily News article this spring, Rick Ketterer, 67, of Society Hill, was moved to donate money toward a scholarship for a graduating Sankofa senior.

"The fact that I'm white and the program is for boys of color, it's inconsequential to me," he said. "The fact is, in the environment they're in, the circumstances are wired against them, and I saw this program as trying to level the playing field and I wanted to help."

Only 57 percent of black boys in Philadelphia graduated from high school on time in 2013. In 2010, the year before the Sankofa model debuted, a task force commissioned by the district to study dropout issues affecting black and Latino boys recommended that the district provide mentors. It also noted that when students turned to teachers for help, they often felt ignored.

Sankofa not only provided that mentorship, it also provided the boys in the program with someone who gave a damn about whether they showed up to class and how they were doing.

Daequan Marquis McKinney, no relation to Kenyatta, is a student at One Bright Ray who's struggling with his mother's illness. He said having a mentor who cared about his life made all the difference.

"At other schools, these teachers don't even ask us how your day is going. I feel they don't really care about you," said McKinney, 18. "But with Sankofa, it's 'How is your day going? Can I help you with this?' You really feel like you have somebody in your corner, you've got somebody to talk to."

This year, several initiatives targeting young men of color have made headlines, including President Obama's My Brother's Keeper Initiative, which is aimed at addressing opportunity gaps faced by young black and Latino men.

Nutter is the co-chairman of the U.S Conference of Mayors My Brother's Keeper Task Force and is also co-founder of Cities United, a partnership whose goal is to curb the violent slayings of black men across the country.

Desmond Baker, a Sankofa facilitator at Randolph Career Academy in Nicetown, said that when Obama first announced his initiative, he showed the announcement on video to his Sankofa students.

"I asked them, 'So what is this?' They said, 'This sound like the program we already a part of,' " Baker said. "I swear, someone took binoculars, saw Sankofa and said, 'This works.' "

Sankofa, which debuted in the district in 2011, was receiving $1.2 million a year and was in the second year of a three-year contract when staffers were notified on Aug. 28 that they had a week to pack up.

"I don't know if they knew about us. That's the only reason I can think they'd stop a program like this," Kenyatta McKinney said. "Maybe they just didn't know the work we were doing."

According to information provided by the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color, Sankofa had a 98 percent graduation rate for seniors last year, a 94 percent promotion rate, and those in the program had 89 percent fewer violent incidents.

The district was not able to provide statistics on the success of the Sankofa program. District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the contract, which contained a clause that it could be canceled due to the unavailability of funds, was canceled for just that reason.

Nutter's chief education officer, Lori Shorr, provided an emailed statement regarding the closure of Sankofa.

"Clearly, this is a population we believe needs additional supports to succeed in school," she wrote. "We hope that when the District has sufficient funding, programs like Sankofa are the types of investments we will see return."

But for the boys who were to be in Sankofa this year, that offers little comfort.

"Those boys had so many barriers and so many walls up, and it took so much to break through to get them to buy in and say, 'I can rely on you,' " said Edison High's Bennett. "If another program comes around, why should they care? Why should they let their guard down now?"

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