‘Dreams and Hopes’
Lakeivion Isaac, a junior track and field star at McComb High School who hopes to be an engineer, believes the training he got when he attended a COSEBOC conference in Durham, N.C., as an eighth grader in 2012, made a difference in his life.
“I want people who know me to say ‘I went to school with the person who made that car,” said Isaac, an honor student who is on the superintendent’s advisory board.
Robert Lamkin, Isaac’s current principal, credits COSEBOC with giving students a larger worldview. At the 2012 Durham conference and again at the 2014 event in Jackson, they had a chance to meet university presidents and top professionals, while attending seminars on college admission, he said.
“For Lakeivion, and the others who went, there was a newfound awareness of who they were as African American men,” Lamkin said. “You could tell their eyes were exposed to something much larger than what McComb has traditionally been.”
The impact of COSEBOC and its standards on students who attended the conference inspired Lamkin to create Men on the Move, a college exposure and mentoring program that takes students of varying academic abilities on college tours and also introduces them to local leaders in McComb. Some 62 McComb students are in the program now, he said.
The research is mixed on whether mentoring programs effectively keep students on track for graduation. However, Isaac, who is a member of Men on the Move, believes the program will help boys like him.
“It’s not normal that you’ll see black men in such leadership positions,” Isaac said. “It’s not tradition in McComb. It gave me dreams and hopes to do what they’re doing.”
James Brown, who was Isaac’s principal at Denman Junior High when he attended the Durham conference, said he would love more of his students to have the extra support and guidance COSEBOC training provided. “Lakeivion is the exception,” Brown said. “But he shouldn’t be.”
Lamkin said he will stay focused on black boys and the obstacles they face, and keenly feels their absence from senior pictures of the district’s highest academic achievers.
“We want to set the stage of what our kids view being African American is,” he added, noting proudly that Isaac will graduate fourth in his class. “It’s only a matter of time before they break the top.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Article Appeared @http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2015/may/13/mccomb-educators-where-have-all-black-boys-gone/