Over this school year, Lincoln High School’s community liaison, Dan Medina, made 150 visits to student homes. Their names landed on his desk because the students had been AWOL. Most said they were transferring to other schools, but no record request ever arrived, and a student unaccounted for is a student who will be classified as a dropout.
The system has a way of handling this: Find the students, and return them to school or get them enrolled in another school. Responsibility transferred elsewhere. This task, it must be said, is not performed simply because it’s in a student’s best interest to be in school but because it is in the bureaucracy’s best interest. Students accounted for. Status quo protected.
This makes unusual Medina’s regular visits to LifeSkills Center charter school. He doesn’t just steer Lincoln students who weren’t succeeding in conventional high school there; he keeps visiting them after they’ve enrolled.
When they hear Medina is in the building, they come out to greet him. “Hey, Mr. Medina!” “How’s it going, Mr. Medina?”
“How are you doing? You’ve been coming to class?” he asks, knowing the answer will be yes because when a student goes missing, the school doesn’t just call parents. It calls Medina. Just as he asks.
“He’s always checking on us,” a 17-year-old named Kaylen tells me before turning to Medina: “I’m doing good now, Mr. Medina.”
In his office at Lincoln, I tell him: “You don’t have to do that.” As in, “They’re not Lincoln’s responsibility anymore.” As in: “They and their state funding are not coming back to Lincoln.”
“I know,” he says. “And maybe I wouldn’t if I got in my car at the end of the day and drove to another neighborhood. But 80219 is my neighborhood. It’s my principal’s neighborhood, and we made a commitment to their parents to help get their kids through school. You’re right about the bureaucracy. It’s building prisons five, 10 years out. It knows the numbers.”
As I mentioned Monday, Medina was among those who wrote in response to the columns in which some of the men of the Hispanic Public Affairs committee noted that many of the same questions and issues raised around the high Latino dropout rate were being raised 25, 30 years ago.
The complaint was that on this particular issue, the Latino community is progressing in fits and starts, pushing forward, then falling backward and ultimately behind.
Medina wanted the men to know the younger generation has, in fact, picked up the torch. “We’re not in 1969,” he told me, “but we are carrying on the fight. We’re just doing it in a different way.”
What becomes clear in a conversation with Medina is that the fight is personal. It is not only about being a truant officer or about peer mentoring. It is not about the attendance board in his office.
It is about a single idea: It’s not enough to build bridges to the neighborhood. One must become one. That’s what he means by commitment. That’s a lot of commitment, I say. Yeah, he says, my wife makes me stay in the car when she has to run into the grocery store. Chances are he’ll run into a parent or a student, and the next thing you know a conference is underway in Aisle 4.
The neighborhood. 80219. You know this ZIP code. I have written of it in the past. Southwest Denver. It is the Denver unknown to outsiders, unseen, unacknowledged. It is where Medina was raised, where he attended and then dropped out of school, where he started running with gangs, where his father, a minister, kicked him out of the house, where he became a husband and father of six, a man with a ministry of his own.
A school does not exist in isolation from its community, Medina keeps telling me. “Heal the community, and you heal the school.” I am skeptical of such expressions. Not because they are false but because they suggest one cannot be done without the other.
But Medina says this: “I don’t accept excuses. I don’t buy into that ‘pobrecito, oh, look how hard your life is.’ I came out of this neighborhood. I made it. And if I made it, I tell my kids, you can.”
He tells me a story. He had a tagger in his office, and this tagger drew a picture of his neighborhood. He drew the broken-down couch on the front porch and the windows with bars and the vatos on the corner and the tennis shoes hanging over the telephone wires and the empty beer bottles and trash and graffiti.
Medina scanned the drawing and edited out the trash, the graffiti, the bars, the vatos. What do you think, he asked the kid. Nice neighborhood, the kid said, where is it? It’s your neighborhood, Medina said. And the kid stared and laughed and stared again. He spent a year with Medina cleaning up graffiti. It works both ways, Medina’s formula. Heal a kid, and you heal a community.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
