We’re Better Together: Who are you standing up for?

Mike Tenbusch Vice President of Education United Way for Southeastern Michigan

One of the simple solutions to dramatically improving graduation rates is to ask each teacher in a high school to be an "advisor" for 20 kids for four years, guiding them from freshmen orientation in high school to freshmen orientation in college.

Oftentimes, this means that a teacher is the only one standing up for a wayward student. We all need someone like that in our lives at one time or another.

Michelle Parker, a leader at one of the small high schools at the Cody campus in Detroit, has had a first-hand experience of how powerful this is.

Michelle's sister, Tara Fuller, needed more than 40 surgeries to correct numerous life-threatening birth defects, including surgeries to her nonfunctioning kidneys. Tara's prognosis wasn't good. When she was born, doctors told her parents she wouldn't make it through the night. She did. They told her she wouldn't make it through the week, or then to the age of twelve or through school. She did all of these things. When Michelle invited her sisters on a whale-watching trip to Hawaii during Christmas break, doctors told Tara not to go. She went anyway.

Michelle said, "Nobody wanted to touch my sister. They had never seen anyone like her. They had no experience with anyone like her and didn't know what to do." There were two exceptions: Children's Hospital and Dr. Eric Ayers.

Tara spent the first four years of her life at Children's Hospital. She is now 36. And while she still needs hospitalizations and dialysis treatments three days a week, she lives a full life. Dr. Ayers is still her primary advocate. He encourages her to do things other doctors told her not to do, such as attending school, the symphony and the trip to Hawaii. "Whenever everyone else had given up on my sister, Dr. Ayers rescued her," Michelle says.

Michelle knows something about rescuing people others have given up on. She is the principal of the Academy of Medicine and Community Health at Cody in a neighborhood where many have given up on the children who reside there.

Not Michelle. She fights for her students like Dr. Ayers fights for her sister.

When the Skillman Foundation hosted its board meeting at Cody High School's campus last year, Michelle zeroed in on Dr. Herman Gray, the CEO of Children's Hospital.

She asked him to adopt her school, and he did. He became the founding chair of its Champion's Council.

He also organized a health fair at the school later that spring to expose students to the various career options in the health field. One of the doctors leading the event was none other than Dr. Eric Ayers. Dr. Gray and his team are now recruiting other partners and businesses in the health industry to help Cody students, too.

All of these people mirror the resilient and generous spirit of Tara, Michelle and Dr. Ayers, and that spirit is being passed along to the students of Medicine and Community Health.

We can accomplish things others think are impossible, but it's a lot easier when others are standing in our corner. This is why our mission is built on the caring power of people making a difference. Ordinary people do extraordinary things every day.

It's how we get better all the time.

Mike

This blog post is a reprint from "We're Better Together," a weekly newsletter, authored by Michael Tenbusch, that discusses the current state of education in metro Detroit and beyond. United Way for Southeastern Michigan distributes "We're Better Together" without charge to people with an interest in education. If you are interested in subscribing to We're Better Together, please visit www.LiveUnitedSEM.org/BetterTogether.