Freda Andrews - on her work as a remediation specialist (clip)

Freda Andrews (FA): Folk like me, they don’t have to pay us full salary. They hire us to come in and do remediation for a grade level to help them because many of the students don’t do well on the End of Grade tests. We are like a faux tutor in the public schools. We remediate them. I work four days a week, part-time. My job is to help them with the skills that they are weak in. That’s pretty much all it is. Sounds like a fancy thing but that’s all we do. Work with a small group in math and reading. Those are the two areas.

Interviewer: Do you ever get frustrated or feel things toward like seeing things being perpetuated or never ending?

FA: There is such a break down in education and the importance of it in the inner city. Many of our parents of the students I work with are so young that they don’t tend to value education like my parents did. The home values are broken down. We’ve got children raising children. We come from an impoverished area. Durham is supposed to be a ‘pretty good neighborhood’ but we still have children that are homeless. I work with some of those children, they live in hotels. Of course, studying is not their priority, food is, getting to school. When they come to school late every day, there’s not much we can do except reach out and make a difference with these children.

When they go home, homework? Who does homework? All they want is video games. This is what they have, this is what they do. I found that many of them are struggling. They have not mastered the kindergarten/first grade levels. They are still so weak in the academic areas because there is no one home to reinforce what we do. To encourage them first of all. That’s why I love these poems. They have to encourage them and instill that. I had one student go home and her mother was a teacher where I worked. I was giving this homework assignment and some other things and her mother was complaining that I was giving too much work.

Her daughter said, “Well mom, Ms. Andrews said….” You know what she told her. “We can do all things.” This young lady is now getting her doctorate degree, because [of] the things that I instilled in her. “You can do this. So what if you’ve got more than one assignment.” I didn’t realize at that time that I was even touching her. I was pushing another child. It just happened to fall on her shoulders what I was getting one child to do. Her mom said, “You made a difference.” I said, “I did?” I have so many stories of children when I see them.