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ANDREYA EARNS HER HIGH SCHOOL DEGREE: THE ROLE OF EARLY HEAD START
Jean M. Ispa and Elizabeth A. Sharp
University of Missouri at Columbia
We met Andreya1 in 1996, when she was 19 and living with her 1-year-old son, her mother, her 16-year-old brother, and her 12-year-old cousin. She had agreed to participate in our longitudinal case study research learning about the lives of nine Early Head Start families living in the inner core of a large Midwestern city. Like almost all the mothers served by this Early Head Start program, she was African American, young, and single. Shortly before she'd signed up for Early Head Start services, she'd also enrolled in Job Corps2. Though she knew very well how much her mother wanted her to finish high school, Andreya had had few models of school success to look to. Neither of the adults she was closest to, her mother and grandmother, had graduated, and by now her older brother had dropped out and was in jail. Her younger brother seemed headed in the same direction. Looking back five years later, she believes, as we do, that her Early Head Start home visitor was a central influence supporting her through the challenges that threatened to derail her as she struggled to obtain her degree. This paper describes the home visitor's pivotal role helping Andreya achieve her goal of a high school diploma.
Before Early Head Start
Andreya was 17 and in the second semester of 11(th) grade when she discovered that she was pregnant. She’d always adored babies and now she was in love with William, a man 11 years her senior. Secretly, she'd actually wanted to get pregnant. After all, her friends had been asking her for years why she was putting off having a baby. Still, when the pregnancy test registered positive, she was terrified – mostly because she anticipated her mother's disappointment and anger. “It was like, how can I tell my mama? She was like, ‘Well I got plans for you and you got dreams.’” She thought about how her mother would have felt at the high school graduation that now might not happen: “I'll be the first to graduate out of my mother's three, and she'll be happy for me and, you know, I made her satisfied; she proud of me. I thinkin' like that.” Her voice dropping, Andreya recalls, “It’s like when I got pregnant, seemed like I let everybody down.”
She tried to continue going to school, but morning sickness and doctor’s appointments added up to a lot of missed days. Finally, Andreya told the school counselor that she was pregnant. The counselor strongly recommended that she transfer to Stanton School. Andreya refers to it as “the pregnant school”. It was a change for the worse. She had to take two buses, and sometimes the second bus had come and gone before the first one arrived at the transfer spot. But even more importantly, the classes didn’t seem serious. She was taking 11(th) and 12(th) grade English and math, but the rest of the time was spent learning about parenting and money management. “Like I told my mama, that's not no kind of school." She dropped out. She figured that a year after her baby was born, she would return to school to earn bona fide high school degree. She didn't want just a GED.
She named the baby “Lavell” and loved him hugely. At first, William came over daily. As devoted as she was to her child and to William, however, Andreya felt cooped up. “It was just like William wanted me not to go back to school. He wanted me to always wait on him, depend on him.” Plus, William’s visits were becoming more and more irregular. Many evenings she didn't know where he was. “It was just like, if I wait here to wait on him, I’m gonna lose out a long life. I knew I wasn’t gonna get nowhere without a education.”
As the months wore on, other problems cropped up or became magnified. Lavell, it turned out, was seriously asthmatic. Andreya often found herself at the hospital. She feared he might die. She begged her mother to stop smoking in the living room because she was sure the cigarette smoke exacerbated the child’s breathing problems. Her mother wouldn’t stop. Andreya started staying in her bedroom with the infant, towels pressed under the door so the smoke couldn’t enter.
That wasn’t the only reason she was hiding in her room. Her younger brother, Tony, and her cousin who lived with them, Kalia, were teenagers and “they think they know everything. Can't tell 'em nothing. There's always arguin' in the house about something.” Moreover, her mother, she thought, was very unfair, blaming her for things she hadn’t done and making her do more than her fair share of chores. Deep down, of course, she understood why her mother had such a short fuse – Patricia was exhausted from her night job as a grocery store cashier, and her sons were breaking her heart. Quintus, Andreya's older brother, had just been sentenced to a 6-year term for drug dealing. It was almost a relief to have him off the streets – in the past couple of years he’d been hospitalized twice after serious fights. It seemed Tony was set to follow in his footsteps. He’d been suspended from school for assaulting a teacher, and it wasn’t clear where he was getting the money he was spending on CDs and expensive shoes.
As if all this weren’t enough, Lavell was turning out to be a handful. He’d always been very active, afraid of little, and more than typically tolerant of pain. Now, as he grew into a “busybody” toddler, he was getting into everything and being more than a little aggressive. The steroids prescribed to control his asthma seemed to make matters worse. Andreya described him as “hyper” and uncontrollable after every dose. Some of the arguments in the house were over disciplinary strategies. Andreya didn’t think her brother and mother should hit him so much. The time came to make concrete plans to return to school. Andreya thought back to her elementary school years, which she had enjoyed, and then to her middle school, junior high school, and high school years, which she had not enjoyed. Her school stories starting with sixth grade feature teachers who "disrespected" her and cared little about real learning. (Her school district is in fact known for its history of poor quality). Nevertheless, finishing high school was important to her, not just for the sake of making her mother proud, but even more critically, so that she could get a steady job that would allow her to take care of herself and Lavell. She decided Job Corps would be the right choice; she could get a high school diploma plus training for a job as a certified nursing aide (CNA). At the Job Corps orientation, she told the counselor that she was very serious about getting a degree but that her son occasionally had life-threatening asthma attacks so she might have to be absent some days. Going back to school meant that she had to find child care. Lollipop Land seemed good.
The Early Head Start Years
It was soon after she’d arranged everything so she could attend Job Corps that Andreya found out about Early Head Start. The program was recruiting at a required meeting for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients about the new welfare reform rules. While standing in line to sign in, she was approached by Rickie, an Early Head Start home visitor. “How you doin’?” he asked. She answered that she was fine. “What’s your name?” he asked. She didn’t know many White men, but he seemed nice, so she told him her name. “That’s a cute name,” he noted. “Have you heard about Early Head Start?” “No,” she answered. “Are you interested in early childhood?” he asked. Of course she was. “And he was like, ‘Is it OK if I come do home visits?’” She said, “I don't mind.” She thought she knew a lot about children from having babysat for seven years, but she also figured there was a lot more to know. Maybe he could help her learn how to handle Lavell better.
Rickie came over a week later for the first home visit. They chatted as he helped her prepare dinner. Watching a man cook put her in a very good mood. It was so odd yet so wonderful that she couldn’t help laughing. She told him about her life–about the fact that she was “a dedicated mother” and a “homebody,” about her strong desire to move into her own apartment so she could get away from the conflicts with her mother and younger brother and cousin, and about her plans to return to school. Over the course of the next several months of weekly home visits, they established a warm relationship. He understood that he should go easy, never pushing her to talk but being ready when she was ready. As she opened up, he was charmed by her sincerity and insightfulness, by her great love for Lavell, and by how appreciative she was of the child development ideas and explanations he shared. She was so open to new ideas, so reflective and willing to reexamine habitual ways of doing things.
She started telling him about interactions she’d had with people who “disrespected” her. In Andreya’s stories Rickie heard about real wrongs, but he also thought her tendency to react strongly to every slight was counterproductive. He thought she would be happier and more successful if she could control her temper, let some things go, and speak politely even to people who upset her – especially if they were people in positions of authority. It would also help her as a mother.
As was characteristic of him, he approached the issue directly and with humor. “You know,” Andreya told us one day, “I used to get an attitude about everything, the way people do me, the way they talk to me and I actually would go off on you.” Quoting Rickie, she explained how he’d helped her see a better way. “Andreya,” he’d told her, “I'm not trying to be in your business but you need to just let it ride sometimes; let it go.” Smiling, she recalled how she started to get mad at his comment. “And then I kind of eased up off of it. He's like, ‘See, you about to get mad at me, wasn't you?!’ I was! I was. I was about to tell him off and it's like, hold your tongue, Andreya. And he's like, ‘Just cope with it.’ He said, ‘You need to just lighten up a little bit.’ And I started doin' that.” Sometimes Rickie used teasing to check on how she was doing. "Have you got in any fights at school?" he asked her one day. “And I was like, ‘Nooo!’ And he's like, ‘Are you sure?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah! Why you ask me that?’ He said, ‘Because you got a baaad attitude.’"
Going to school was very, very difficult. Just getting there on time was a challenge. William had told her he would give her a ride every morning, but many days he didn’t show up. That meant she had to take one bus to the child care center to drop Lavell off, then two more to get to Job Corps. Sometimes, even though she managed to get to the child care center on time, it was hard to leave in time for the next bus because Lavell would cry when he realized she was about to go. She took to waiting until he was focused on a toy or activity, and then sneaking out.
In addition, it was hard to keep up with all the assignments. Though Andreya loved reading to Lavell and she enjoyed magazines such as Jet, the reading level of the school books was higher. “It's kinda hard. The books be this thick and there be five of them. And it's a whole bunch of work. You gotta do the chapter, remember all the stuff and then turn around and take a test. Some of the stuff you do forget 'cause it's a lot of stuff. It's like chapters, and it goes all the way to number 53, one of 'em. Turn around-take a test. If you miss it you have to pay for your next one.” To make matters worse, for several months the school could not provide books for everyone and students were not allowed to use the photocopying machine.
Coping with schoolwork on top of the demands of caring for an active and often-sick child (not to mention her unhappy interactions with her mother and brother and her growing anxiety about William’s on-and-off attentiveness) made her exhausted. “I’m working my tail off,” she told us after detailing her daily routine of rising early, dressing, readying a reluctant Lavell for child care, rushing to be on time to school, running to pick Lavell up in the afternoon, making time to play with him at home, doing the housework her mother required, completing school work, and getting Lavell’s things prepared for the next day. Some days studying in the evening when she was so tired gave her migraines.
Then there were all the forms she needed to fill out on time so that she could keep Lavell in child care and get the public and charity assistance she so needed. Without a car and with full days committed to Job Corps and Lavell, it was hard to get to the places where she needed to go to make the proper applications. Rickie stepped in to help. When Lollipop Land required a health form signed by a doctor, he dropped by the community health center and picked it up, saving her from having to miss hours at school. When he learned of assistance for which he thought she would qualify, he did what he could (including giving her rides) so that she could apply.
Her teachers and counselors at Job Corps, on the other hand, were not very helpful. There was one teacher who urged students to ask for help when they needed it, but when Andreya asked for additional explanation, the teacher was likely to tell her to wait and she’d get back to her. Then she would forget. Andreya understood that the teacher was overworked with too many students, but a lot of the material was hard for her, and she really needed some assistance. One time when she got stuck she asked a student who was a chapter ahead of her for help. The teacher told her not to talk during class.
What made things most difficult, however, was that the Job Corps faculty really didn’t seem to understand what it meant to have an asthmatic child. Andreya didn’t like to miss school, but sometimes she didn’t have a choice – she had to take Lavell to the hospital. She had a breathing machine for him at home, so she only took Lavell in when it was a true emergency. Unfortunately, that was fairly often. Sometimes while in class she would get a note from the office that someone from the child care center had called to say Lavell was having trouble breathing. When that happened, she ran out of the school as fast as she could. She didn’t always stop to tell someone where she was going. One day the director called her to the office to talk about her attendance. The school counselor, Ms. Moore, was also present. She started the conversation in a sarcastic tone of voice. “It’s really starting to be a bother because it’s like every week you’re at the hospital. This is like an everyday thing for you, huh?” Andreya tried to explain, “I said, 'Well if I could stop my son from getting sick, I would. You know, my son has asthma.'” The director told her she should find a family member who could take him to the doctor so she could come to school whether or not he was ill. “It’s not that easy,” Andreya told her. Her mother could take him some days, but not always, and all her aunties worked during the day. There really was no one else who could take him.
A few comments later, Andreya realized that the director and the counselor didn’t understand what a child’s asthma means to a mother. “I said, Wait a minute. When I first started Job Corps and I was just in orientation, I made it clear to everybody that the only reason why I wasn't going to be here if I had some important business to take care of or if my son is sick. I cannot stop him from getting sick. I can give him all the medicine in America – that don't mean he going to be well. My son's life is nothing to play with, and when they say his asthma is acting up, I'm running. What I supposed to do? I supposed to be, 'Oh while I was at school, my son died.' No. ‘I was waiting on my counselor to give me a pass and my son died.’ No."
Ms. Moore interjected, “‘Andreya, girl, you act like you’re real upset.’ I said, ‘I am.’ I took like a deep breath, and I said, 'I'm going to tell you something.' I said, 'My son is more important than Job Corps could ever be to me in life.' I said, ' I can always come back to school, but I can't always have a son like the one I got. Can't nobody give me back the same little boy I had at first.' And she's, ‘Well, you really...,' I said, 'No, wait a minute, listen to me,’ I said, 'And you don't think me staying up; running back and forth to the hospital and they keep telling you the same old thing, but every time you take your son home, it get worser and worser; you don't know when you fall asleep, you don't know if he's going to stop breathing in his sleep.'” She got up to leave. At the door, she turned around. “’Job Corps will play a big part in my life. I'm not going to say it's not, but my son plays a more bigger role in my life than anything. I know I need my education. But right now my son, he's my first and main priority. I can't be here when he’s sick. That's all.' And I just walked out.”
There were many days when she seriously considered dropping out. Rickie talked her out of it. When she brought up the possibility of calling it quits, he reminded her how big the stakes were. After each home visit, she would resolve to stick it out.
Andreya was 19 and Lavell was 20 months old when she realized she was pregnant again. Out of loneliness and wishful thinking that the relationship was righting itself, she'd succumbed again to William's overtures. Like the first time, more than anything, she was afraid to tell her mother. Maybe she should take Lavell with her and move to another state. Deeply distressed, she asked Rickie what he thought she should do. Rickie offered four pieces of advice: (a) she should tell her mother right away because she was probably hurting her more by not telling her than she would be if she told her the truth. Her mother no doubt knew but was waiting to hear it from her; (b) She shouldn’t move away because there were too many people in town who loved her, even if she couldn’t see it now, and she needed their support; (c) She should keep going to Job Corps because she really needed her education; and (d) She should carefully examine her willingness to be with William. Did she really think he’d be there for her in a year? In two years? In four?
That evening, Andreya confessed to her mother, “I’m pregnant.” To her surprise, her mother’s reaction was nothing like her reaction had been to the first pregnancy. ‘‘You went back to school which I didn't think you was gonna go back to school,” she said. “You in a job training that guarantees you a job. So I ain't mad at ya’.”
She returned to school three months after Keon was born. The baby’s illnesses (he too was asthmatic) made it impossible to return after two months, as she’d planned, but at least she hadn’t taken the full six months Job Corps allowed. She’d actually finished the requirements for the high school diploma before she'd had Keon. She’d wanted so much to graduate then, but the rules were that you had to finish both the high school requirements and “the trade” (CNA requirements, in her case), before you could get your diploma. So now she took CNA classes.
As before, going to school was very hard – harder, actually, now that she had two frequently ill children. Twice in one month Keon was diagnosed with pneumonia. That was on top of both boys’ asthma attacks. Even when both children were healthy, mornings were a scramble getting them to child care and herself to Job Corps on time. Every school morning she’d wake up at 5:30 and quickly get herself ready. Then she’d change and dress Keon and give him a bottle so he wouldn’t be fussy before he was fed at the child care center. At 6:00 she’d wake Lavell up. Often he was sleepy and didn’t want to get up; she’d have to struggle with him. Then she’d fill the diaper bag with bottles and baby food and give Lavell breakfast. Some days she was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open.
Evenings were also hectic. Rickie once commented to us that he couldn’t imagine coming home to all the hubbub in that house and having to get children fed and settled down. (The hubbub was from Tony and Patricia and their various friends and relatives.) Andreya didn’t have a choice. Every weekday she’d come home, prepare and eat dinner, feed the children, wash dishes and mop the kitchen floor, wash soiled clothes, pack clothing changes and diapers for the boys to have at the center the next day, watch some TV, study, read to the boys and play with them, and put them to bed. Lavell’s bedtime was unpredictable–if he hadn’t slept during naptime that day, he’d be ready for bed at 7:00. If he had slept, it might be 10:00.
Frequently she stayed up until 1:00 a.m. finishing chores and catching a few moments to herself. Rickie suggested ways to manage her evenings so she could get the sleep she needed. He brought her some recipes for quick dinners. Simplifying meal preparation and cleanup would surely help. She agreed that setting an earlier bedtime for herself should be a goal. Rickie had taught her the value of short-term, attainable, “everyday” goals. Before, she used to set herself grand goals and then never meet them.
She felt like she deserved some acknowledgment at school for the fact that she was “running here, running there, don't hardly get no sleep.” Instead, she said, her counselor and the teachers “had an attitude” toward her. They wouldn’t believe her when she told them that the buses weren’t following their posted schedules – not until the counselor called the bus company and found out it was true. Worse, yet, they still didn’t understand her situation as the mother of two asthmatic children. There were even financial repercussions. Bus tokens were given out first thing in the morning on Wednesdays. If she was late or absent on a Wednesday because either she or one of her children was sick, she didn’t get her tokens at all. She couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t hold her tokens for her.
Then things came to a head. One morning Andreya woke up to Lavell’s heavy wheezing and high fever. She called Job Corps to say she’d have to miss school again. At the hospital, the diagnosis was asthma and bronchitis. They had just returned home when Ms. Moore knocked on the door. Andreya let her in. Ms. Moore told her she was about to give her five more penalty points and proceed with a meeting to have her expelled if it weren’t true that Lavell was sick. Andreya gave her the hospital papers and showed her the tag around Lavell’s wrist. Both had that day’s date on them. Ms. Moore seemed unconvinced; she continued talking about what she was going to do to have Andreya permanently dismissed for poor attendance.
Andreya looked Ms. Moore in the eye, “Well Ms. Moore, I ain't got no reason to lie and I wouldn't lie on my kid anyway if he wasn't sick.” “When are you coming back to school?” Ms. Moore asked. “When my son get better,” Andreya replied. And then she conveyed what she’d conveyed before: “I can always come back to Job Corps but I can't always have another son, not like this one. So therefore Job Corps ain’t important to me right now.”
Lavelle recovered and Andreya went back to school, but the staff’s suspiciousness toward her weighed on her. Again she told Rickie she wanted to drop out. He asked if she’d mind if he called Ms. Moore. She told him to go ahead. We know that in the phone call he made the next day, he explained his role in Andreya’s life, told Ms. Moore that it was absolutely true that Andreya’s children suffered from fragile health, and assured her that Andreya was doing everything in her power to complete the CNA training–that she was serious about earning the diploma and was not making up excuses.
Suddenly (or so it seemed to Andreya), Ms. Moore started giving Andreya her bus tokens even if she couldn’t come in on a Wednesday. She told her not to worry if she had to be at the hospital, and made efforts to buoy up her spirits. Andreya’s account reflects her own commitment to school, her stress, and Ms. Moore’s new support: “And I just keep on thinking about what it was gonna be like if I didn't get up and go to school everyday. It really irked me when my kids got sick and I couldn't go to school and it was like it put me more behind. And I felt like the more and more I try to go forward, I'm being pushed back, or I'm going in a circle and Ms. Moore was like, ‘You need to stop putting yourself down like that. If you stop telling yourself that, you can get ahead.’”
The next time we saw Andreya, about five months later, she was the happiest we have ever seen her. She and the boys had moved into their own apartment, a two-story, two-bedroom townhouse in a clean, attractive new public housing project. She’d also graduated. Her description of graduation day stands out in its animation and joy. Because of all the missed days, it had taken a couple months longer than originally planned to complete all the CNA requirements. But she’d done it and she’d walked across that stage. She’d gotten her hair and nails done and worn her best dress and high heels. When her friends saw her, they’d teased, “We thought you was going to come to the graduation in some jeans and t-shirt!” She’d shot back, “Yeah, right! This is the NEW IMPROVED ANDREYA!!”
To our question, “Is your mother really proud?” Andreya nodded, “She is. That's all she tells me, ‘I'm so proud of you and that day at graduation.’” Lavell was also proud. When he saw his mother approach the stage, he ran up, too. The two walked across hand-in-hand while the audience chuckled and cameras flashed. Everyone’s excitement over his mother’s accomplishment was infectious. “Lavell was happy hisself and he kept on saying, ‘Mama, I love you! I love you, Mama!”
Reflections
In one of our conversations two years later, Andreya reminisced, “There’s a lot of times I wanted to quit Job Corps, but Rickie talked me out of it.” Looking back, we know that the barriers were huge. For sure, her mothers' and grandmother's unflinching pressure and support had served as positive motivators, yet they themselves were models of teenage motherhood and school failure. Many days, distress over her failing relationship with William, irritation with ongoing family conflict and noise at home, and worry over Lavell’s behavior and both children's health made it more than difficult for her to study. Economic hardship exacerbated all of these problems by creating heightened tensions among all family members. Moreover, academic work just did not come easily to Andreya – a predictable fact given her family conditions and what we suspect about the quality of her prior schooling. Perhaps it was for these reasons that she was especially vulnerable to the hostility she initially perceived from her Job Corps counselor and teachers.
Andreya understood, as we did, that Rickie's contributions to her graduation went well beyond his words warning her of the consequences of dropping out. Over the two years she’d been in Early Head Start, he’d taught her how to manage her temper and her time, encouraged her to set and work toward attainable goals, helped her navigate the social service system, served as her advocate, bolstered her self-confidence when it flagged dangerously, and provided gentle advice regarding her relationships with her children, her mother, her brothers, and her children’s father. All of these approaches had had direct or indirect impacts on her eventual success in becoming the only one in her family to graduate.
Andreya remembers once getting teary during a home visit. It was shortly before Lavell "aged-out" of Early Head Start. She was thinking how grateful she was to Rickie. Rickie noticed her eyes watering, and asked if something was bothering her. "I ain't never had nobody before who helped me out like this," she said quietly. His reply shared the credit with her, "Andreya, I help those who help themselves."
1All names are fictitious.(back)
2Job Corps is a federally funded program that provides high school education plus job training. To earn the high school degree, students must complete all high school requirements plus all requirements for their “trade” – the job-specific training.(back)
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