Rainbow Mennonite sponsors a CDF Freedom School:
A soulful celebration for congregation and neighborhood children
By Debra Sapp-Yarwood for Mennonite Church USA
KANSAS CITY, Kan. For six weeks this summer, the halls of Rainbow Mennonite Church came alive weekday mornings with the songs of “Harambee!,” a Kiswahili word meaning “let’s pull together.” This joyful noise emanated from the fellowship hall and signaled the gathering of roughly 70 kindergarten- through middle-school aged children from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. These were the scholars of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom SchoolSM. Their songs, which they punctuated with exuberant improvised dance moves, included Quincy Jones’s lively adaptation of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, also known as Soulful Celebration.
In another moment each day the building would grow silent as those same scholars stilled within their classrooms, holding books and sitting in various positions of attentiveness for “D.E.A.R. Time,” which stands for Drop Everything and Read.
Audreniek King, a young scholar, expresses the intense desire of the children to learn, “Freedom School is the best place because you have lots of things to do and especially have work. All the time. Sometimes you have ‘Read Aloud.’ Actually, I love Freedom School, because I’m all about school.”
The CDF Freedom School program, founded in the early 1990s, advances literacy, promotes cultural enrichment and empowers children and their families. The program immerses its young scholars in an integrated reading curriculum that features vast multicultural titles. One parent of a first-grade scholar estimated that his son was exposed to more than 100 books either having them read to him or reading them himself. A middle school scholar on the final day boasted reading five “chapter books” in six weeks.
“Freedom School is much funner, unlike regular school. We get to go outside two times. And we get to go back a second time (at meals). We get two plates,” says a wiry first grader, Tony Davis. “At regular school they just fight and they do bad stuff when the teacher’s not looking. And at Freedom School when they fight, they (the teachers) break them up.”
To sponsor a Freedom School, Rainbow Mennonite Church was responsible for 10 percent of the operating budget of roughly $77,000, acknowledging with gratitude that a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City covered the other 90 percent. The church also had to hire 15 staffers (mostly college-aged) and train roughly 45 volunteers to accomplish the activities of the six-week program.
Rainbow Mennonite Pastor Robert Kaufman says that sponsoring a Freedom School advances the priorities of Mennonite Church USA of denouncing racism and advancing healing and hope. But more importantly, the program fits the personality of Rainbow Mennonite’s urban congregation. “We are a well-educated congregation; we understand the value of education. Yet we worship and serve in a neighborhood in which the schools are struggling. We see this (Freedom School) as a way to help the children who are attending those schools to have a better chance of succeeding. The other piece of this program that resonates with the mission of the Mennonite church is its emphasis on building relationships and on nonviolent conflict resolution, which is a constant issue for these children.”
Project coordinator Joel Goering said many of the Mennonite volunteers were comfortable with the Freedom School model, which stresses conflict resolution. “We may deal with scholars who have made a poor choice in responding to a verbal comment, or even physical pushing, that kind of thing, and we talk to them about alternatives and nonviolent ways to deal with their conflicts. We are really using many of the concepts of restorative justice in our discipline policy.”
The program’s site coordinator, John Morris, said the Mennonites’ natural sense of shared responsibility for the community and understanding of nonviolent strategies served the Freedom School’s model. At other sites he had seen discipline sometimes become the province of “the person who seems to know the best how to deal with children, somebody who’s taken a matriarchal or patriarchal role in the program … And with this group here, everybody’s kind of stepping up to the challenge, and it seems to work well.”
Various directors and supervisors of the Freedom School program complimented Rainbow Mennonite on how well it was able to implement the Freedom School model, and despite the congregation’s largely white cultural orientation. Mignon Wilkins, a mentor intern who provides assistance to several sites, said, “We’re not trying to go black or white. It does not matter. The kids function very well whether their teacher is black or white. As long as the site sticks to the model, it works. Now, as far as the church being more active in the community, this (Freedom School) is your way in the door.”
With the exception of having to remove a pint of spilled paint from the carpet, the program took little physical toll on the church. Pastor Kaufman stresses that Rainbow Mennonite’s participation in the program was entirely a blessing: “… The way this has pulled the neighborhood together, the way that new partners have come in, the way that people who have not had any affiliation with the church have volunteered to help. We already see new relationships being built, both within the congregation and within the neighborhood.”
Rajad Sandhir, father of Eshaan, lauds the school for its influence on his son, and incidentally alludes to its success in outreach for the church. “Eshaan’s more confident and he has developed a positive attitude about a lot of things. And he loves coming here, I can say for sure, because on weekends he brings us here to the Freedom School to play in the park.”
Kansas City Freedom School Director Michael Charles, DSM, spent 33 years in public education. He says the Freedom School model is better equipped to address the special challenges of teaching children whose lives are chaotic. In the public schools, he says “you approach the learning experience from the cognitive and then get to the affective. In other words, if you’re smart I love you. We (Freedom School) love you, and then you become smart, because we love you. And that’s something that a lot of people don’t understand, and they ask, ‘Why does Freedom School work?’ It’s that love, because if somebody knows it’s genuine love, then they’ll do anything you want them to do, even learn.”
Other congregations interested in sponsoring a Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School should contact Dr. Jeanne Middleton Hairston, the national director, in Washington, D.C. at 202/628-8787.
Photos courtesy Rainbow Mennonite CDF Freedom School
Frank Jones, Ryan Curtiss and Elias Garcia enjoy a fun moment together during the summer session of the Rainbow Mennonite CDF Freedom School. Eighty-five percent of the scholars who attended the program live in the church’s immediate neighborhood.
Enrique Gill (left), a Freedom School scholar, and Shenya Vanoy, a Servant-Leader Intern, work together on an art-and-craft project. Servant-Leader Interns are the teachers for the Freedom School program. Most of them are college students interested in education or social work, so the program allows them to gain valuable classroom experience in an urban setting.
Scholars at the Rainbow Mennonite CDF Freedom School sing and do the motions to “Something Inside So Strong,” the Freedom School’s theme song which comes from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The theme song is sung every morning at Freedom School during Harambee, a time for the entire school to gather and prepare for the day.
