Ronnie Polaneczky: Have a lunch, get along
POOR VERONICA Joyner. All she wants is to get kids together to have lunch, so that they'll get to know each other enough to maybe become friends and spread the good feelings after school.
POOR VERONICA Joyner.
All she wants is to get kids together to have lunch, so that they'll get to know each other enough to maybe become friends and spread the good feelings after school.
But she says she can't get buy-in from some school principals to make the kumbaya happen.
"My invitations have been ignored," says Joyner, founder and chief administrative officer of The Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School of Philadelphia. "I don't get it. Students learn from us. If we show them how to come together in friendship, that's what they'll do."
MCSCS is located at 447 N. Broad St., and many of its students commute via SEPTA. So do thousands of students from six other schools, located just steps from MCSCS, who flood the street and subway every day.
Joyner is as unnerved as anyone by recent violent clashes on public transit, so she's become fierce about making sure her first- through twelfth-graders are safe on their commute.
But it's not enough for her and her staff to go into the subway or onto the corners before and after school, to shepherd students onto the trains - or to scold them when they act in ways that will only lead to trouble.
Nor is it enough for her to know that other principals are doing the same, which they are.
What she thinks the kids need are a couple of lunches. Together. At her school. Alongside their principals. Where they'll see that they're all the same, despite the different uniforms they wear.
Especially if they've had prior clashes that no one wants to see escalate.
"Our children need to learn each others' names, to see that the principals are united with them. If they see us after school on that subway, it won't matter that we're from a different school. We'll be able to say, 'Don't go acting up - I know your principal and I will call him' Or, 'How was your day today?' "
Would she want other principals taking the same liberties with her own students?
"Of course!" she says, exasperated by the question. "These children belong to all of us!"
Joyner is brash and outspoken in a way that parents love and that some principals call narcissistic and grandstanding. The principals would have my sympathy if Joyner weren't such a credible character.
A former Philly public-school teacher, she founded Parents United for Better Schools when she saw how little regard the school district had for parental input. She fought against district policies that nobly aimed at desegregating schools but wound up sidelining kids of color. She pushed for hot lunches in schools that weren't getting any.
Then she opened her own well-regarded charter school.
So Joyner has learned some things. One thing she's learned is that getting students together for meals forges bonds that help keep the peace. She learned this after she held a few joint lunches of students from her school and from Community Education Partners following an incident involving kids from both schools.
Things have been peaceful between them ever since.
"We talked about how to resolve differences, how to walk away from a fight," Joyner says. "They talked, the adults heard them, they had a meal. It worked. There's no mystery."
Catherine Blunt is principal of Parkway Center City High School, Christopher Johnson heads Benjamin Franklin High School - both located near MCSCS. In February, Joyner says, altercations occurred among her students and some from Parkway and Franklin.
Since then, Joyner says, she's tried to arrange one of her lunches, to no avail, to make sure they don't recur. "No one will get back to me," she says.
So I called to ask why.
Blunt was as to-the-point as her name suggests: "There is no issue for us to get together about," she said.
Johnson says a coalition of high-school principals already meets regularly to discuss student safety and things are going well. So lunch isn't necessary.
"We don't need the media to guide this," he said.
No, the schools don't need to the media to guide something as simple as a lunch. They don't need the media to help students, under the supervision of collaborating adults, work out their differences in creative and meaningful ways.
They need people like Joyner to do it.
If only it weren't so hard. *
E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns: