by

Dianne Anderson //–

Out shopping with his two toddlers for clothes and shoes, Trevon Harris always makes sure to bring the bags back to the car before heading out to the next store.

“I don’t like shopping with bags, people look at me funny,” he said. “They don’t understand Black man problems.”

Profiling is the Black man norm, but in some ways, Harris is outside of the norm.

He is an Emergency Medical Technician, ambulance driver and a nurse, despite getting consistently kicked out of class through his high school years. It wasn’t that he was a poor student, only that he didn’t stick to traditional formulas of math or studying.

His teachers didn’t quite understand his style. Usually, he worked backward through math equations, and seldom wrote down how he got the answers.

“That was a problem in school,” he said. “I could see the answers in my head, but I couldn’t show my work. I’d have a higher grade than everyone around me and it would confuse the teachers.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Harris started acting out in sixth grade when he moved from Los Angeles to Rialto. Classes were too easy and he was bored. Still, by graduation, he missed college completely. Like a lot of his graduating class about 15 years ago, he didn’t hear much about the importance of taking SAT’s, even though he had a 3.4 GPA.

No one reached out to him about accessing free scholarships. Two years later, he learned about Calgrant through the Precinct Reporter.

Teachers should be more supportive of students that have their own approach to navigating the learning process, he said. He never studied “well” either, but passed his Licensed Vocational Nursing test on the first try without studying.

Looking around his field, he sees how few African Americans are getting into nursing or related careers.

“There’s none of us there, nursing wise. We have like two CNA’s,” he said. “There are a couple of RTs {respiratory therapists], but I’m the only Black male nurse at night.”

Maybe it’s because he’s a nurse, or that his “dad ears” are more primed, but he thinks the culture has taken a turn for the worse since he was a teen. The drug-based songs he hears today don’t require a medical degree to understand.

“Molly Percocet is literally a mainstream song. It’s talking about popping a molly” he said. “It’s more blatant than what it used to be.”

Some of his high school peers have done well. He always tried to keep good company, and he knows a few nurses and a social worker.

“But for the most part, I run into people and [ask] what you been up to? They’re like, I just got out of jail,” he said.

Gaps in education abound.

According to the United Negro College Fund, K-12 disparities in math and reading is wide for several reasons. The organization reports that only 57 percent of Black students had access at last their last count to a full range of college readiness, math and science courses, compared to 81 percent of Asian American students and 71 percent of white students.

Among other hurdles, the organization cites that Black students are 3.8 times as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions as white students. Non-black teachers were found to have lower expectations of black students than black teachers.

“Eighty-two percent of public school educators are white, compared to 18% teachers of color. In addition, Black male teachers only constitute 2% of the teaching workforce,” the UNCF reports.

More recently, another study shows that Black boys are falling far behind in reading. The Sacramento-based nonprofit CALmatters culled date from the California Department of Education, finding that 75 percent of Black boys are behind all ethnic groups for reading. The girls beat out the boys in every ethnic group.

Long time educator of local at-risk kids, Dr. Mildred Henry at the PAL Center in Muscoy, said that the gender disparities gap across all groups is interesting. Especially for African-American boys, she feels parents need to look more closely at their own roles in reading to kids during those early years.

Most often, she said cultural norms are environmentally inspired, and girls may be encouraged to read in their formative years more than boys. Girls are also more likely to play inside and read to their dolls.

“At Christmas, parents give little girls dolls to dress, cooking toys, books, and gifts to be used inside with low mobility. Boys are given trucks and toys that require high mobility and outdoor use. Girls are usually the teachers reading to children in a circle or play classroom,” she said.

She thinks that dads must take extra time to read to their sons.

At the PAL Center, she notices that students are easily drawn to all areas of education as long as class material relates to real life experiences.

“We are closing the identified gap between female and male performance in math, science, and mechanics,” she said.

Equally important is the need to have a give and take of respect from students, but also their teachers, she said.

“Teachers could teach without over-reaching, overbearing administrations,” she said. “Today, too often, we have the lack of encouraging, nurturing communities. To rectify some of our problems we must get back to some of the old-fashioned values that we have lost.”