By Lee Landor
[Note: This article and its accompanying photos and videos originally appeared on LIHerald.com on March 30, 2011. This content is the rightful property of Richner Communications, Inc.]
This article is the first in a series of nine written throughout the course of a year as part of an investigative series, which won first place for best in-depth series in the New York Press Association’s 2011 Better Newspaper Contest. Read the next article.
It’s time to act. This was the message Sherwyn Besson and Gary Preston delivered last Friday night at the first of what they hope to be many “Men of Lakeview” community meetings.
Sitting in a small room at the Harold A. Walker Memorial Park in Lakeview last week, the two men spoke about the spike in crime in their 1.2-square-mile community. They discussed the lack of mentorship for young black men in Lakeview, the inadequate education they receive in the Malverne school district and how, together, these problems create “homegrown” criminals and “mediocre” adults.
Besson and Preston called the meeting — with the help of NAACP Lakeview President Bea Bayley — to bring the matter to light and to develop a plan of action with community members. “We never had crime,” Bayley said at the start of meeting, “and all of a sudden we’re having an epidemic.”
She stood beside a poster board covered in newspaper clippings reporting crimes committed in Lakeview or by Lakeview men and boys. There were some 13 reports of crimes since January alone.
“[The problem is] growing,” Besson said, “and we want to head it off before it gets a whole lot worse and this becomes just another black impoverished community.”
The education situation Besson, a 12-year resident of Lakeview, is a business teacher at Malverne High School. He said he has a firsthand view of the development of boys in the district, and it alarms him. “I am not confident,” he told meeting attendees. “I cannot sell you on the education our boys are receiving.”
In the school district, boys from Lakeview have the highest rates of suspension and expulsion and some of the lowest scores on standardized tests, Besson said. They are being pushed through each year, he added, and are not prepared for the grades they are in. Part of the problem, according to Besson, is that they have no role models in the district, no mentors, no one to whom they can relate — no one who looks like them.
They see more black men sweeping the floors than teaching them,” said Besson, the only black male teacher at the high school. “We need teachers who are culturally sensitive, sensitive to black male pathology.”
Schools Superintendent Dr. James Hunderfund expressed disappointment when he heard about the sentiments expressed at the meeting. “The academics are up,” he said. “I measure it by how children do every day and … the grades are up, the honor rolls are up, they keep continuing to rise. We have a lot of celebrations of excellence.”
Hunderfund said that the district lowered suspension rates for all students by nearly 50 percent last year, and that more students in secondary grades are making honor roll and high honor roll. There is virtually no disruption in the classroom and fighting is almost “nonexistent,” according to the superintendent. The district graduates 99 percent of its students, he added, and sends 90 percent of them to college.
As for hiring practices, Hunderfund said there is recruitment for minority staff members. “We do the best possible recruitment and screening that we can,” he said, “and hire as many as we can when we have openings and when we have qualified candidates.”
But the district can only hire teachers who have been recommended by a committee made up of parents, staff members and administrators, he said. Each school building has its own hiring committee, which interviews potential teachers and conducts teaching observations.
A community changed
Aside from teachers, Besson said, the district’s “insensitive” Board of Education plays a role in the problem, and that the Village of Malverne has two-thirds of the voting power when it comes time to vote on the school budget and other matters, which leaves Lakeview residents with little opportunity to make an impact.
Besson also called on men to be parents. “Men, stand up and be men in the community,” he said, adding that he formed the Men of Lakeview group to encourage men to get involved.
Preston said he was eager to get involved when Besson approached him with the idea for the group. The 25-year-old business analyst grew up in Lakeview. His mother raised him and his two brothers alone after their father was killed in street violence in South Jamaica, Queens. She moved the family to Lakeview, and for Preston it was a safe haven. Years later, seeing the community declining pains him.
“It hurts to have to walk these streets and be worried,” Preston said. “It hurts to see that they’re criminals.” (“They,” he explained, are the teens and young men who, as children, watched Preston and his friends play basketball and begged to join them.)
Preston compared Lakeview to Atlantic City, where nightfall brings drinking, drug use and fighting. “It turns into the devil’s playground at night,” he said. The community, he added, can no longer turn a blind eye: “One crime is one too many.”
“When you live in a 1.2-square-mile community, crime anywhere is a problem,” Besson added.
The solutions
Lakeview’s children need to develop values at home first, according to Preston, which is why mentorship is critical. But they also need guidance at school.
“We left [high school] ill-prepared,” said Preston, who graduated from Malverne High in 2004. “We had a false sense of reality.”
This created obstacles for him after graduation. “It’s like running a race and everyone’s in a different lane,” he said, “and in my lane there are hurdles.”
Preston made it over those hurdles and found success. He credited his mother for her indefatigable support, and his own desire to get ahead. Now, he said, it is time to help Lakeview boys generate that desire to learn and improve. “I think we need to start taking the steps to turn our boys into men,” he said.
Besson presented several first-step suggestions to the attendees of the meeting, among them nine men and two boys. More men have to begin attending Board of Education meetings, he said. They have to work together to build a men’s network to mentor boys and create opportunities for them to express themselves. Boys need more than sports, Besson said — they need positive activity, like community service and jobs. He added that parents need to start demanding more of their children because they have become comfortable with mediocrity.
“What kind of adults are we expecting to create when the bar is set this low?” Besson said. “Our children are being set up for lives of mediocrity and destitution.”
Besson plans to hold another Men of Lakeview meeting next month.
Read the next article in the series: ‘It’s always been a black-and-white issue’