One woman's journey to fight HIV/AIDS

For much of her life, Christin Norris has been making strides to end the disease that took her uncle’s life.

When she was eight years old, Norris lost her uncle to HIV/AIDs. Even then, she recognized the need for advocacy and support.

“My grandmother and Uncle John walked in the Boston AIDS Walk together in 1993. The very next year, he was taken from our family,” said Norris.

When Norris was in middle school, she found her own voice in the fight against HIV/AIDS when she struggled with finding a topic for a writing assignment.

“I finally thought of my uncle and the words began to flow onto a tear-stained paper. After that poem, I began to write more and speak more about my family’s loss,” said Norris.

Norris eventually grew up to become a language arts teacher at Mayport Middle School, where she is sharing her own passion for reading, writing and understanding.

“I tend to surprise myself with the passion I have for promoting awareness,” said Norris, who each year presents an age-appropriate lesson for World AIDS Day on December 1.

“I want my students to be aware of the epidemic. Yet, I don’t want to scare or astound their parents with a full-blown lesson,” she explained in light of varying sensitivities to the subject. In another annual ritual, Norris has taken up her uncle’s torch in raising funds through Boston’s AIDS Walk. Her goal this year is to raise $1,000 in advance of her taking part in this year’s event on Sunday, June 2.

For Norris, this work continues to be a family affair.

“My grandmother, who is now 79, has been busy with her advocacy efforts for 20 years and does an amazing job organizing ‘John’s Team’ and getting an incredible outpouring of support from friends and family,” said Norris.

As for Norris’ late uncle and best friend, she said, “I know he’s laughing his big and hearty laugh with a smile that spreads ear to ear as he watches my friends and family fight in his memory.”

To contribute to Norris’ team effort, please visit the following web page: John's Team

One by One, we can help our students and our future

We are the brain trust for improving our public schools for all of our children.

During the years of depression and war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled some of the greatest minds of his time to coordinate efforts to create a better nation. Today, our elected and appointed leaders have a broad and deep reservoir of ideas and solutions in our community.

Mayor Alvin Brown was right when he said that the key to reducing crime lies in our efforts to transform education to prepare us for the future. Our economy and our quality of life depend on the students of today who will be entering careers and jobs that will form the foundation of our community.

This is why I support the Jacksonville Public Education Fund (JPEF). They are working with the best existing resources in our community to seek consensus for constructive change in how we educate our children. We can either take a greater interest in building strong minds or we can continue to squabble and argue while more of our youngest citizens fall behind.

I know that we can all agree that we can passively lament the crime and poverty that plague Duval County. I, too, have been guilty of turning the channel when the latest tragedy unfolds on the evening news. In our provincialism, we tend to relegate these incidents to the back of our minds as they are supposedly limited to one neighborhood or section of town.

What JPEF accomplishes in their work is to open our eyes to the fact that we can only save a generation by addressing the needs of all of our children, one by one. On a personal level, I took great interest in JPEF as I observed their outreach to all stakeholders in our education system. The school board, educators, education support professionals, parents, students and businesses each have a voice, but we have been weakened by the lack of a unified mission. Through their community meetings, JPEF has succeeded in creating an honest and positive environment for all to be part of the change we sorely need.

I recently ratified the One by One Community Agreement, drafted by a convention of concerned citizens because I endorse their goals, drafted by the grassroots and the foot soldiers in our war against poverty and ignorance. The fact that JPEF actively and openly solicited buy-in from all comers is why I support their consensus-based goals.

Educate the whole child: It is essential that we foster a love for learning in all of our students. The problem with today’s education system is that we have become one dimensional in our zeal to make the basics (e.g. reading, writing and arithmetic) the central theme of educating our students. I believe that we should balance the cognitive and the affective needs of our children in a way that encourages them to appreciate the kind of creativity that fostered a spirit of invention and innovation that led the world in culture, technology and commerce. The whole child requires that we move away from one-size-fits-all learning that neglects the beauty of the world that we want to instill in our students. We also wish not to relegate education to merely bubbling in Scantron sheets and teaching them how to be better test takers.

Great teachers and leaders: The trouble with attracting men and women into the field of education has been that we have been focused on filling vacancies and positions. The gravity of the work that educators do requires a change in our consciousness. More than just mere parts of a large machine, educators are integral parts of an education system that should inspire the best and the brightest citizens to become teachers. Not only is learning a lifelong process, so is teaching. The recruiting of good teachers is only half the battle. It is necessary for us to continually train and develop strong teachers after they are hired. It is also necessary for us to treat these professionals with respect and dignity that we would afford to any other career field.

Policy and political reform: For as long as I remember, politics has been a battlefield that has left many good men and women scarred. The rough and tumble of the political debate has discouraged the very people to whom we should turn for support and solutions. I am grateful that JPEF is encouraging us to take a united front on behalf of our children and to let our elected and appointed leaders know that we will not give up until they listen to our concerns.

Family and caregiver involvement: At a recent town hall meeting with the new superintendent of schools, I heard Dr. Nikolai Vitti talk about the creation of programs to involve families in the education of their children. The bureaucracy and jargon of education speak is enough to scare away the most hardened of administrators and faculty. Imagine how a single parent might feel about having to deal with a labyrinth of paperwork and meetings that confound their attempts to do right by their sons and daughters. We cannot be afraid to adapt our schools and their norms to include more families rather than alienate them.

In closing, I dedicate my heart and my mind to helping to make these priorities a reality. I invite all interested parties to join me in doing so. Thank you, JPEF, for all that you do!

Backpage Editorial (FOLIO WEEKLY)

Time to re-evaluate

Teachers are victims of negative typecasting

Folio Weekly, December 25, 2012-January 1, 2013

Every day is judgment day in our public schools. This sounds like hyperbole on my part, but there is a kernel of truth to what I am saying on behalf of educators who are responsible for shaping our future.

At a time when administrators are being trained to nitpick teachers over the most minute of details, such as whether their students are in single-file line, paying perfect attention during lessons or are prepared for class, we overlook the items that fall outside of the rubric with which we judge and ultimately will decide how to pay the troops in the war against ignorance and poverty.

It will never be reflected in the evaluations, observations, or feedback that I receive, but I wish to advocate for one seemingly small experience that I had in the classroom. It has to do with a student who came close to leaving Duval County Public Schools because he feared for his own safety.

Once it came to my attention that this sixth-grade boy was being bullied on a regular basis by a classmate who appeared to be more interested in terrorizing than learning, I worked with administrators and counselors to help this victim overcome the challenge to his own education.

I took the time to listen to the boy's parents as they expressed frustration with what they felt was the glacial pace of a system that had to maintain low disciplinary statistics and pressured its schools into under-reporting incidents for the sake of not losing face in the community. The unintended consequence was an atmosphere where the victims were fleeing for greener pastures such as private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling. The inmates, however, continued to run the asylum. Incidentally, the student who was doing the bullying ended up being arrested for assaulting another schoolmate with a knife later in the year.

Because there was no metric or data to gauge efforts to cooperate with the boy's family and to listen to their concerns, it went overlooked. The state-mandated evaluation system focused more on the superficial aspects of what could be considered "poor" teaching on my part. For example, many teachers get low marks on their evaluations for petty points such as students talking about something other than their work during a lesson. Yes, off-task conversation may reflect negatively on a teacher's ability to keep the focus on the lesson, but we must never lose sight of the fact that there are indeed factors that even the most firm and focused pedagogy cannot deter.

Do not get me wrong here: I did not seek to save a child from chronic bullying and harassment because I wanted to earn a medal or praise for what I was doing. I merely wanted to serve my fellow human being in a way that I would have expected to be helped if I had been a student in the same situation.

On the last day of school before spring break last year, I stayed after work to grade the last of my papers and decided to have a brief meeting with the student's family on my way home from work. Even though I was off the clock, I knew that my vacation could wait until I handled what was a more important matter than packing my suitcases for a week down in Naples with my goddaughter and her family.

I explained to the parent that I was willing to be his child's advocate and that I didn't mind being contacted at any hour, by email or telephone, to remedy their child's situation. After all, he wasn't just a source of funding for our school system; he was a talented young man who had the potential perhaps one day to play major league baseball, report on sports for the media or coach a team when he realized his bright future.

The parents were grateful for the work that our school did on their behalf and they ultimately kept their son enrolled in Duval County Public Schools. They even left a message with my school, thanking us for the work we did for them. Somewhere along the line, the gratitude was ignored and lost in the maelstrom of criticism and stereotyping of rank-and-file teachers as being selfish, lazy bureaucrats who were only in the field of education to collect a paycheck and spend their summers off.

Contrary to popular belief and demonizing, we teachers truly do care. We do what we do because we are giving back to the community that inspired us to answer a higher calling. We have teachers, coaches, administrators and counselors who believed in us and we believe that we can pay it forward.

I should know, because I was a "late talker" in my younger years. My parents feared that I would be mute for the rest of my life. Thanks to speech therapy at W.E. Cherry Elementary School in Orange Park, I learned to become confident in verbally communicating what I had been thinking all along. I learned to express myself thanks to people who didn't give up on me. I, in return, cannot give up on the young people whom I serve every day.

In my own junior high school years, I faced problems that I was able to solve with support from an educational community that helped this introvert learn how to make friends, in spite of losing so many peers to military relocations, and an educational community that helped me to overcome insecurity over my short stature in the shadow of peers who seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds over a child like me who seemed destined never to reach 5 feet tall.

I understand that not all will appreciate with work that we do, because there will always be students who resist our attempts to help them grow academically. But, thanks to remediation, interventions and other methods, we are learning to serve every student who enters our schoolhouse doors.

Bean-counters and micromanagers aside, I continue to soldier on because it is more than a profession for me; it's a moral duty that I must fulfill to justify my continued existence on this earth. It is an obligation that allows us to bear the slings and arrows of "reformers" who wish to visit upon us so-called improvements that are aimed more at punishing us than enriching us. It is something of which we should all be proud, because we keep going in spite of it all.

This is why I continue to do what I do when it's not reflected in the judgment that we receive. The days when I have guest speakers, like the supervisor of elections, the state attorney and members of city council, are days that my former students remember. The times when we have international food days, mock elections and trips to New York are times on which my former students reflect fondly. The memories of students whose funerals I attended, and one where I served as pallbearer, are what I believe to be the true indicators of our dedication.

Perhaps our friends in Tallahassee will never recognize our true value in our work, but I continue to teach not for them, but for the future.

Meeks has been teaching social studies in Duval County since 2002. He is a 1998 graduate of the University of North Florida.