{"id":2729,"date":"2009-03-15T13:40:43","date_gmt":"2009-03-15T19:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testbanksouthern-ada.aceone.io\/?p=2729"},"modified":"2009-03-15T13:40:43","modified_gmt":"2009-03-15T19:40:43","slug":"una-diferencia-en-el-delta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/a-difference-in-the-delta\/","title":{"rendered":"Una diferencia en el Delta"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you start a profile of Scott Shirey, the founder and force behind the Delta College Prep <\/a>charter school in the historic ruins of Helena, a once-hopping river town?<\/p>\n

You could start with Shirey the teacher. Picture him in his small classroom of 11th-graders, their desks arranged in a loose circle, their attention on the day\u2019s assignment, an interpretive look at Arc of Justice, a book about a civil-rights trial in 1920s Detroit by Kevin Boyle.<\/p>\n

Delta College Prep is a member of the successful Knowledge is Power Program<\/a> (KIPP) charter system. The 11th-graders are on schedule to becoming the school\u2019s first graduating class. Twelve of the 13 students in Shirey\u2019s classroom are black, one is white, an only slightly skewed representation of the demographic breakdown of this Phillips County seat. Then there is Shirey, the fish-out-of-water instructor, the 6-foot-3-inch white guy in the suit, 32 years old with the face of a choir boy. He was born in Worcester, Mass., naht fah from Bah-stawn, raised in Holden, Mass., and came of age in North Andover, Mass. He then headed farther north to Colby College, a private liberal arts school in Waterville, Maine, that\u2019s ranked by the Forbeses and Kiplingers as one of the nation\u2019s best. Despite a top-notch education, he probably couldn\u2019t have found Helena on the map before he moved here seven years ago.<\/p>\n

Like a law professor, Shirey peppers his students with questions. There\u2019s no doubt they\u2019ve all read the material. The problem is that some students have read ahead and, since today\u2019s lesson doesn\u2019t extend to the end of the book, there\u2019s a danger that somebody might give away the ending.<\/p>\n

The debate goes on, heats up. You can almost see the minds at work.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one way to start the profile. The whole To Sir, With Love business in reverse. But that\u2019s too clich\u00e9, the inspiring teacher in his classroom.<\/p>\n

How about this? There\u2019s Shirey the builder. He wears a hard hat at a construction site near Helena\u2019s downtown, watching the rise of the school gymnasium. It is the first new construction in the immediate area since, well, since the last project by Delta College Prep. Back then, Shirey & Co., with money and moral support from Southern Financial Bancorp, oversaw the construction of a new middle school along Cherry Street \u2014 the main drag known for its proximity to the Mississippi River, its musical fame as ground zero for the annual blues festival and its boarded-up buildings.<\/p>\n

The new $3-million gym will be about 20,000 square feet and is scheduled to open this month, weather and Murphy\u2019s Law permitting. It will double as an assembly hall for proms and graduations and could provide space for the public, too.<\/p>\n

\u201dWhen we started this project, I had two non-negotiables,\u201d Shirey says, \u201chardwood floors and brick exterior. It\u2019s important for kids to see examples of quality. I don\u2019t buy the argument that you can\u2019t put quality here.\u201d
\nAll told, Delta Prep owns about six acres of downtown Helena, including an open field near the gym that Shirey sees as a future athletic field. Some day.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of this is done on faith,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of it is done on faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, Shirey the builder?<\/p>\n

Nah. Too confining. Especially for a man who backed into the business part of this thing, a man whose singular dream is to chuck all the blueprints and \u201cjust teach history, nothing but history.\u201d<\/p>\n

How, then, about this? There\u2019s Shirey the father figure. He\u2019s walking from the new gym to his office. It\u2019s a little past 3 o\u2019clock on a Wednesday afternoon in January. On a typical day, school wouldn\u2019t be out for another couple hours \u2014 full days and occasional weekends being one of the secrets to KIPP\u2019s success. But today is Parent-Teacher Report Card Day, when a student\u2019s progress is chewed over by mom, dad and instructor. At length. The three-hour get-together starts at 4 p.m., so the kids are out \u201cearly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirey spies a student walking with his shirttail out. The 11th grader has been a student of his for years, and he remains a frustration.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s one of those kids who cares,\u201d says Shirey, \u201cbut doesn\u2019t want anybody to think he cares.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he acts like a teenage boy. Given a research assignment, the young man mailed it in, handing over a paper that Shirey deciphered as the work of Wikipedia. Yet the kid is smart enough to stand before the class and recite the first and last names of every U.S. president in chronological order. Which he did. Effortlessly.<\/p>\n

When the student first arrived at Delta Prep as a fifth-grader, his scores on standardized tests were below the 50th percentile. College is now in his future \u2014 if he buckles down.<\/p>\n

As Shirey walks along, a woman behind the wheel of an SUV slows and rolls down the window to chat. Her daughter, the KIPP student, sits in back. Mom sounds concerned, involved. Not all parents buy in. When Shirey and three other teachers were starting the school, selling parents on the concept was often harder than selling the kids.<\/p>\n

He remembers sitting in the living room of a potential student, a young girl, when her father said that he didn\u2019t see the need for his daughter to change schools. Not when the public school she already attended offered the same grade. Wasn\u2019t one school just as good as the next?<\/p>\n

Somehow, Shirey rounded up 65 fifth-graders to open Delta College Prep in the fall of 2002. Some 365 students are now KIPP kids. Next year, for grades K-1 and 5-12, enrollment should top 500. By the fall of 2012, Delta College Prep will be K-12. And by then, as director of KIPP Delta, Shirey could have opened as many as 12 more KIPP schools in four more towns.<\/p>\n

This is the rarest kind of news out of the Delta: good. For the results of Delta College Prep are astounding. In 2008, almost 90 percent of the eighth-graders scored proficient or advanced on the Arkansas Benchmark Exam in math, which compares to 23 percent of the students in the Helena-West Helena School District.<\/p>\n

It seems like magic. Kids enroll in KIPP, and their scores go up. They start talking about college and taking the ACT. The magic? Commitment. Class days start at 7:30 a.m. and end at 5 p.m. School is in every other Saturday and three weeks over the summer. Parents, students and teachers sign a commitment contract. Visitors notice the discipline, uniforms and courtesy of the students. And the teachers tend toward young, fresh-from-college wanna-be world-changers.<\/p>\n

According to Luke Van De Walle, the director (read principal) of the still-new high school, he has teachers from Illinois, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Nebraska, New Jersey, Washington state and, yes, Arkansas.<\/p>\n

In 2002, Van De Walle was already in Helena, teaching at the public middle school through the Teach for America program, when he met Shirey at a Taco Bell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere had been kind of a buzz about the KIPP school,\u201d says Van De Walle, 28. \u201cI wanted to see it. I was impressed. I turned my classroom into a KIPP classroom even though I wasn\u2019t here. I copied what I saw working on Cherry Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the tall, lanky 25-year-old running the place at the time, Van De Walle says, \u201cI was 21 at the time, so Scott still seemed older. But I do remember thinking how impressive it was that someone under 30 could be doing something with so much potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he signed on. Seven years later, Van De Walle is settled here, married, with three kids and a This Old House of a historic home that he\u2019s restoring.<\/p>\n

But, again, you flirt with clich\u00e9 when you start off with the father-figure business. For which great principal or school leader isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s try this instead. There\u2019s Shirey the Helena homeboy. The man from Massachusetts now owns a house in town. He married a local girl, Angela, a loan officer, and now parents a daughter in the third grade. (Not quite KIPP age.) They also have a dog, an Australian Shepherd-Collie mix named Keys. Her coat is black and white, like the keys on a piano.<\/p>\n

\u201cGet back. Get back. Get back.\u201d Shirey has opened the door to his house and faces his biggest challenge of the day \u2014 corralling the hyper-energetic Keys for a walk up nearby Graveyard Hill, a Civil War site.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t usually do this,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

What? Give Keys a walk?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. Come home in the middle of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s good for the story, he\u2019s told. We\u2019ll walk and he can provide details of his migration to the Delta.<\/p>\n

It goes something like this: After graduating from Colby College, Shirey applied to the KIPP Foundation. He wanted to live in the Delta, the better to sate his interest in black history. He\u2019d train as a Teach For America member in Baton Rouge, then, he thought, settle into a KIPP school there.<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t happen. Shirey was ready. KIPP was ready. Baton Rouge wasn\u2019t. Not all cities welcome school competition, or even tolerate it.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, some members of Arkansas\u2019 Department of Education had become intrigued by KIPP. They\u2019d seen a bit on CBS\u2019 60 Minutes about its success in Houston. Janinne Riggs of the education department called some folks in Helena who were looking to jump-start their city. A meeting here, a visit there, and the Helena folks were in.<\/p>\n

After committing to a KIPP school for the city, local leaders like Cathy and Ernest Cunningham and then-Mayor Robert Miller zeroed in on getting Shirey to commit to Helena-West Helena.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe came to Helena and we escorted him around town,\u201d Cathy Cunningham writes in an e-mail. \u201c[We] showed him buildings which were available (the City offered the Depot for 10 years at $1 per year at Mayor Miller\u2019s request). We invited people for dinner in our home to meet him (he said our chili was what sold him). We also had a large meeting at City Hall where he presented himself and the program. He was emotional, as you may have experienced, when he talked about his desire to start this school. We were all sold on him and his passion immediately and hoped he felt the same about us.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t remember if he told us before he left, or in the next day or two, but we were soon putting all the plans together to open in July 2002.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sold because of the chili? There are certainly worse motivations for a relocation. But why has he stayed? Surely there have been offers, not to mention the pull toward home way up East.<\/p>\n

\u201cA friend from the Northeast was asking me, \u2018Why Helena? Why Helena?\u2019\u201d Shirey says. \u201cAnd I told her that I had moved to North Andover from Holden when I was in sixth grade. Holden was a small town. When she heard I was from Holden, she understood. I was teased in my new environment [in North Andover]. I\u2019ll always have a soft spot for kids who are picked on. I guess that\u2019s the pain that drives me. I asked Luke once, \u2018What\u2019s the pain that drives you?\u2019 And I think it was something similar. He grew up in a small town in Illinois and when he went to college at Purdue, he probably experienced some teasing and low expectations because of where he was from.\u201d<\/p>\n

From atop Graveyard Hill, we can see Van De Walle\u2019s house, that historic beauty under restoration. There are lots of historic beauties in Helena that need restoring. Lots of possibilities.<\/p>\n

Shirey nods toward Cherry Street. \u201cLook at the potential,\u201d says the man who doesn\u2019t buy the argument that you can\u2019t put quality here.<\/p>\n

Alas, that\u2019s not a proper start to a profile of Scott Shirey, either. Too serious. Nobody is driven all the time. That way lies burnout and a very dull boy. To start with, we must introduce Shirey the buddy to have a beer with. He\u2019s in there, too, you know.<\/p>\n

Running a half-hour late for dinner and a few cold ones at Oliver\u2019s, a restaurant that\u2019s beating the downtown odds, Shirey finally approaches, stops at the table and makes a display of reading his Blackberry. \u201cHey. Man. Where. You. At?\u201d he reads aloud flatly, turning the awful techno-prose into a one-liner as he recites the e-mail from a dinner partner now looking at him from behind a half-empty bottle of Coors Light.<\/p>\n

The brand is important. Like his dinner partner, Shirey is a Coors Light man \u2014 Coors Light in a bottle! \u2014 which is notable for a couple of reasons: (1) Despite some evidence to the contrary, a fella who\u2019s developed a fierce loyalty to his suds is not just some fuddy-duddy who lives in the office, mainlining coffee to squeeze in that extra hour of workaholism, and (2) Shirey hails from the Nor\u2019east, land of the micro-brews and a long history of hops that has bred generations of beer snobs. He\u2019s not supposed to fancy a beer that prices at 11 bucks for an 18-pack at the corner gas station.<\/p>\n

And it doesn\u2019t end there.<\/p>\n

He orders fried pickles and fried catfish and sounds disappointed that you can\u2019t get the cole slaw fried, too. He discusses the merits of bottles over cans in one breath and the frustrations of inflexible education edicts in the next. He defends himself against the charge that he and the KIPPsters aren\u2019t visible enough in the community, that they stick to their own, seem elitist. Baloney, he says. He\u2019s heard that before. He provides examples of community involvement, of parades and clean ups. He could simply point to the economic impact of KIPP, of all the land the school has purchased and cleared, of that new gym and plans for an expanded campus.<\/p>\n

He argues without raising his voice, between bites of fried pickles dipped in ranch dressing, between laughs and \u201chow are ya\u2019s\u201d from other customers. As he loosens up, he never loosens his tie.<\/p>\n

Lesson learned after spending a day with the director of Delta KIPP: He\u2019s not pigeonhole-able enough to lend himself to a perfect, yep-that\u2019s-Scott lead on a magazine profile. By the time you\u2019ve played all the angles, by the time you\u2019ve finally gotten started on figuring out this Yankee who\u2019s changing the education game in the Arkansas Delta, which is the one game that must change if there is to be any real progress, you discover that the fried pickles are gone, that the Coors Lights are empty \u2026 and you\u2019re at the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00bfC\u00f3mo empezar un perfil de Scott Shirey, el fundador y fuerza detr\u00e1s de la Delta College Prep <\/a>\u00bfun colegio concertado en las ruinas hist\u00f3ricas de Helena, una ciudad fluvial anta\u00f1o?<\/p>\n

Se podr\u00eda empezar por Shirey, el profesor. Imag\u00ednatelo en su peque\u00f1a clase de und\u00e9cimo curso, con los pupitres dispuestos en un c\u00edrculo poco compacto y la atenci\u00f3n puesta en la tarea del d\u00eda: una lectura interpretativa de Arc of Justice (El arco de la justicia), un libro de Kevin Boyle sobre un juicio por los derechos civiles en el Detroit de los a\u00f1os veinte.<\/p>\n

Delta College Prep es miembro de la exitosa Programa Saber es Poder<\/a> (KIPP). Los alumnos de 11\u00ba curso se convertir\u00e1n en la primera promoci\u00f3n de la escuela. Doce de los trece alumnos de la clase de Shirey son negros y uno blanco, una representaci\u00f3n s\u00f3lo ligeramente sesgada del desglose demogr\u00e1fico de esta localidad del condado de Phillips.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banksouthern.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}