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School ties
After early roots in the Massachusetts foster-care system, Earl Martin Phalen went on to found BELL, an organization dedicated to the educational success of inner-city students
BY TAMARA WIEDER

EARL MARTIN PHALEN knows he’s been lucky.

Abandoned as a baby, Phalen spent his early years in the Massachusetts foster-care system, until he was adopted by a Norwood family at age two. While at the time more than 70 percent of the African-American males in the state’s foster-care system ended up involved in the penal system, Phalen thrived, attending Yale University and, later, Harvard Law School.

Intellectual success, though, wasn’t enough for Phalen. While at Harvard, he and a group of black law students began mentoring children at a Roxbury community center. After being approached by parents of students at the Agassiz Elementary School in Cambridge who were worried for their children’s educational futures, Phalen and his group founded Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL), a nonprofit academic program whose mission is to influence the educational success of African-American and Latino low-income children.

That was in 1992. A decade later, BELL has grown from serving 20 children in one city to serving 1500 students — referred to by BELL as scholars — in Boston, New York, and Washington, DC. The after-school and summer enrichment program, whose board has been chaired by Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree for 10 years, was recently awarded a $1.2 million grant. BELL has also been recognized nationally, receiving the Presidential Service Award in 1997 from former president Clinton.

Q: Why did you start BELL, originally?

A: BELL got started as a community-service project when there were a group of us at Harvard Law School. [It was] a real desire and appreciation amongst the black students at Harvard Law School at that juncture to say thank you, and to give back to those who had done for us. There was no chance we would be at Harvard Law School if it weren’t for the efforts of those ancestors known and certainly the thousands unknown. I think the second level was, we were in law school and doing the law-school thing and studying and I think a lot of us felt like, gosh, this is great, but there’s got to be more than this. And finally, for me personally, having been adopted and grown up in Norwood, Massachusetts, and just kind of understanding racism and racial dynamics.

Q: Was Harvard supportive?

A: Harvard University at the outset, I wouldn’t say they were or they weren’t; I’d say they were neutral. But individuals within Harvard were incredibly supportive. There were a lot of people in the Harvard network that were very, very supportive.

Q: Has Boston as a city and have Boston’s leaders been supportive?

A: I think that many have. It’s interesting; we’re in Boston, New York, and DC now, and I think that originally our theory was a kind of grassroots approach, and so I think just like the professors, especially the black professors, at Harvard supported us, I think the black leadership supported us. In the early days, Mel King would sit with me and say, "Hey, these are some of the things you should look for." I remember him saying, "A lot of organizations of color have struggled with financial issues and financial management, so make sure you’re thoughtful about how you outsource your payroll to a payroll company, etc., etc." And we took that advice and did that. Ruth Batson served as a board member for seven years with BELL, and I remember her sitting down and saying, "This is what you need to think about when you think about community." And she brought the historical perspective on what Boston has kind of been through. Reverend Stith, in the early days, sat and talked about what Organization for a New Equality was trying to do, but also about how to carve out a new place in Boston and things like that. And of course Hubie Jones took countless, countless hours.

Q: Has BELL always been by blacks, for blacks?

A: In the early days, it really was a lot of people of color within the Boston community. When we came out, it was really about we as a community taking responsibility for our children and their futures, and not expecting other communities to take responsibility for us or to prioritize our needs or to be responsive to or understand our needs. I think as an organization we’ve changed, whether it’s for better or worse. Originally we wanted to raise all of our money for the black community. And when I say black, I really mean black and brown, so black and Latino. At the time, we said, "We are focused on black children, and it’s not to say that we don’t love all children, but for some reason, our children always end up at the bottom of the barrel."

I think, sadly, some of those principles have been compromised over time, because we weren’t raising the revenue that we needed to grow. We’ve evolved so much as an organization that to get the resources to support this, we made choices. So now we do [have white students]. We’re an open program, we get government funding through AmeriCorps. Part of it became a non-argument anyway because the Boston public-school system is 87 percent black and Latino. We’re in the schools in the heart of Boston, in some of our poorest communities, and the vast majority in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan are black. Black and Latino. I think last year 81 percent of our scholars were black, and I think 17 percent were Latino and two percent "other."

Q: How are parents involved with BELL?

A: Another important part of our program is parental involvement. It’s required in a few respects. Parents have to come to an orientation and training, which is important to us because we talk about what the program is and isn’t — we’re not a homework center. We don’t think that’s the most productive or valuable use of time, especially because the vast majority of scholars who come to our program are performing an average of a year below grade level in reading, writing, and math, so we say, "We’ll help with homework, but we have to give individualized time for scholars to master the basic skills and concepts that they’ve missed and that they won’t get unless someone takes the time to do that." A parent or a guardian also has to pick up their child at the end of every program day. That one’s a key one for us. It’s important because it gives us daily communication with our families. I believe our parents really respond to the environment that we create.

Q: How do you find these kids, or how do they find you?

A: Three different ways. Principals will look at their rosters ... and will make references. Teachers will get a note that says here’s this great enrichment program for children. And then parents will get something. We’ve been here in Boston for 10 years, so word of mouth is a huge way in which families hear about our program. Generally we get three applications for every one child that we’re able to serve, so once we get applications, we do two things: one is we screen based on academic criteria, and then economic. So two children, one with a C average, one with a B average, we’re going to take the child with the C average. And then if it’s two children with C averages, one from a family of $15,000, the other from a family of $25,000, unfortunately, as ugly as it is, we’re going to take the scholar from the $15,000 family. Every year we’ve grown, every year we serve more children, and we’re always pushing to find the financial resources so that we don’t have waiting lists, so we can meet the demand.

Q: Do you ever worry that leaders will continue to ignore these communities because they see that organizations like BELL will pick up the slack?

A: I don’t think they do it because of that. I think they do it because we as communities don’t hold them accountable. But they don’t do it because BELL is there. BELL is a drop in Boston’s bucket. I think folks have agendas, and if there’s not somebody there to be loud about what their agenda is, which we have not been — the black community is not present; we’re not represented on the school committee, we’re not represented in any of the key decision-making positions about what happens in terms of resources within the schools, and we don’t voice our opinion, i.e., we don’t vote. And when we do vote, we don’t hold folks accountable when they’re in office. So I think that’s the why. I don’t think our existence is the why.

Q: From your standpoint, in the time that you’ve been working with these communities, are things getting better or worse for these kids?

A: Things are getting worse. Part of me feels like they’re getting worse in school, and they’re getting worse in society. Clearly, children are affected by the morals in society. I’m not old school; I’m 36, I like all sorts of music, but I’m also conscious about what our children are exposed to now. The images that our children are exposed to are just so inappropriate. And that is what we feed most of our children mentally. Secondly, there was an economic boom, but it missed communities. A lot of people got wealthy in the last decade, but the vast majority weren’t the families that we’re serving. It missed our communities. We’ve been in schools for years that do not have books, that do not have workbooks that children can take home. That’s not equity. There are just some warrior teachers that continue to remain in the Boston public-school system, but the best teachers, at a certain juncture, tend to choose the best jobs. And so you have a lot of teachers within the school system that don’t love children and don’t love teaching. Our parents should be outraged, should be screaming. If they were in Dover or in Westwood, those teachers would not be in those classrooms. But that’s not the level of mobilization that we’re demonstrating, so they get to stay in our classrooms and teach our children.

Q: How did your experience in the foster-care system in Massachusetts affect your decision to start BELL?

A: I think being adopted into a white family — all my seven older brothers and sisters are white, and my mom and dad are white — and growing up in Norwood profoundly impacted me in a few respects. On the one hand, I had my family, loving, supportive, everyone in the family had gone to college, so I was always exposed to that. Norwood is very much a blue-collar type of town, so you have a neighborhood base where everybody knows everybody. So that was really positive. That was juxtaposed with, there were 1100 students in my high school and there were two black students; I was one of them. So it was juxtaposed against the dynamic of being a minority, of sometimes feeling isolated, of there being racists, and there being teachers and others who did not like me because of [my race].

Why did I make it through? While others were going to jail, I was going to Yale, and I was working at a homeless shelter in DC, and I was going to Harvard Law School. Why did I have these opportunities? And less the why, because that answer one may never know. But what’s my obligation, or what choices will I make because I had those opportunities? And my parents had already helped me answer that question.

Q: Do you think you might ever run for office?

A: Sometimes I think so. But I honestly believe that if we can do BELL at the scale that I believe we can, which is one day educating 100,000 children throughout the country and helping them achieve high standards and helping them believe in who they are and who they can become, and tied into that helping our parents understand their tremendous power, and their ability to affect change within their lives, within their children’s lives, and within the community — if we do that, then I won’t need to run for elected office, because we’ll be making the changes that I believe that I was placed here to make.

For more information on BELL, call (617) 282-1567 or visit www.bellnational.org. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com



A complete archive of our weekly Q&As
Issue Date: February 20 - 27, 2003
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