A high school student needed help with tuition, so an unlikely group stepped up: prison inmates
“You don’t know what to expect going into a prison,” he said. “You only know what you see on TV. Once I went through those gates, they were all lined up to shake my hand and meet me.”
Shortly before Sy Newson Green’s sophomore year in high school, a family health crisis ate up the money that would have paid his tuition at the private Catholic school he’d been attending for a year.
His father needed a heart transplant, his mother lost vision when a softball hit her eye — and both parents lost their jobs. Syreen was thriving and happy at the all-boys Palma School, in Salinas, Calif., and the school could provide some scholarship help, but not enough to cover the $12,900 annual tuition.
That’s when an unlikely group of people stepped up with the remainder of the tuition: inmates at the nearby Correctional Training Facility, also known as Soledad State Prison.
Inmates pooled the money they earned bit by bit from doing prison jobs, such as cleaning and clerking. They raised a total of $32,000 over about three years — a remarkable feat considering prisoners in California earn a base wage of 8 cents an hour for many of their daily jobs, such as mopping the floors.
“I broke down and started crying because I knew where it was coming from,” said Sy’s father, Frank Green, about the donation. Frank Green, 49, had recently lost his job with a limo company.
The inmates started gathering their money in fall 2016, and they collected enough to cover most of Sy Green’s high school tuition starting with his sophomore year in 2017. They raised $24,000 from their own pockets and received an $8,000 donation from outside the prison.
Green, who is now 19 and graduated from Palma School in 2020, attends the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he plays for the basketball team.
“It definitely was a surprise and a huge honor,” he said of the inmates’ donation to him. “That’s not something that happens every day.”
The idea for the scholarship was hatched in a prison-school book group called Exercises in Empathy, a Palma School program now in its seventh year. Before the pandemic, juniors and seniors, teachers, and some community members would visit the prison to read and discuss books with inmates working on self-improvement.
The program was started by Palma teacher Jim Micheletti, who said both the students and inmates found the book discussions deeply meaningful. The boys and the inmates would often become close in sharing ideas and feelings, he said. But never did he imagine the inmates would come together to support a student in this way.
“Oh gosh, I was in disbelief. I couldn’t believe it,” Micheletti said.
Former inmate Jason Bryant, one of the leaders of the scholarship fund-raising, said that of the approximately 2,000 inmates in his unit, about 1 in 3 agreed to donate twice a year. Some donations were as small as $1 and a few as big as $100, with most donations in amounts of $5 or $10, Bryant said.
He said they were motivated by wanting to contribute to the next generation.
“I think that inherently most people, even those of us who have made the worst decision in our lives, want to be a part of something good,” said Bryant, 41, who earned a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees remotely while in prison. “This idea when we started was just so good: We can help some young man get a head start that a lot of us didn’t have.”
Bryant likes to tell the story of the day in fall 2016 they came up with the scholarship idea at Soledad prison, where he served 20 years for armed robbery. Students and inmates were in the book group discussing a book they’d read about a different kind of prison — a prisoner-of-war camp, described in Ernest Gordon’s Miracle on the River Kwai — and something clicked.
“Inside the POW camp, there were attitudes and behaviors that were very similar to what you typically see in prison today, with the gangs and scarcity mind-set,” Bryant said. “A small group of men made a different decision, and they decide to look out for each other.”
In the book, the characters use the term “mucking” for having each other’s backs.
Fellow inmate Ted Gray, who was Bryant’s codefendant in a fatal robbery in 1999, leaned over to Bryant and said to him, “Jay, we need to muck for a young man to attend Palma School.”
They came up with the scholarship idea and soon asked Micheletti to recommend a student in need. He told them about Green, who seemed like a perfect fit.
Over three years, with some outside help, they raised the tuition. They sent the money to the school a few times a year to keep up with tuition bills.
Green got to join the Palma prison book group, usually reserved for upperclassmen, after receiving his first scholarship check in 2017 as a sophomore. He said the first time he met his benefactors, they were exceptionally kind and made him feel comfortable.
“You don’t know what to expect going into a prison,” he said. “You only know what you see on TV. Once I went through those gates, they were all lined up to shake my hand and meet me.”
Green is on a good path. His father got a successful heart transplant last year, and as a college freshman, Green is majoring in communications. He said the experience with the inmates taught him about humility and not judging too harshly.
“You have to have an open mind,” Green said. “If you go in there closed-minded, you’re not going to receive the wisdom they want to give to you.”