Say Yes to Education founder's strategy for helping kids: Tutoring, tuition and someone who cares
Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey bases her confidence in Say Yes to Education’s eventual success in Syracuse on her two decades of experience in education policy and on Say Yes’ 24-year track record.
But the Say Yes CEO acknowledges that track record doesn’t include anything near the size and scope of the Syracuse project.
Say Yes was founded in 1987 by George Weiss, a multimillionaire money manager who remains the organization’s chairman. He adapted the name from a popular mantra of the time.
“Nancy Reagan says no to drugs,” he said to a friend. “Why don’t we say yes to education?”
When he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Weiss’ fraternity hosted a Christmas party for area youths. He grew close to several of the 12-year-olds and began to realize how distant the prospect of college seemed to them. That realization eventually led him to a personal crusade to open up the college dream for low-income children. Over the years, he has offered free tuition, along with tutoring, mentoring and a growing list of other services, to small groups of children in four cities.
In his first venture, he took on 112 fifth-graders at desperately poor Belmont Elementary in Philadelphia, where he had attended the University of Pennsylvania and is now a trustee. The results were decidedly mixed: As many students went to prison or died violently as went to four-year colleges, and most of the girls had children before they turned 18. But overall, the children did significantly better than others in their neighborhood.
Weiss went on to commit tens of millions of dollars to two more groups in Philadelphia and others in Hartford, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass., adding more services and starting with younger children — and getting better results — as he went along. By far his biggest project before Syracuse began in 2004, when he took on 400 kindergartners in five schools in Harlem.
Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey is CEO of Say Yes to Education.Especially early on, he became deeply involved with many of the children, visiting their families, hiring tutors and personally mentoring some of them. He set up an 800 number so they could call him when they needed help — and years later, some still do. Occasionally, he says, he ventured into inner city streets late at night to shepherd kids home.
In Hartford, he taught a weekly vocabulary class. When the students honored his demand that they work hard, he followed through on his pledge to write and perform a rap song for them, adopting the persona “Vanilla Weiss.”
His message, always, was that someone cared deeply about them and wanted them to succeed in school and in life.
To a large extent, the approach has been successful, with significantly more Say Yes kids graduating from high school and attending college than others in similar circumstances. Say Yes says that across all its schools, more than 75 percent of participating students end up earning a high school diploma or a GED, and about half earn some kind of post-secondary degree or credential.
In 2006, two years after he began the Harlem project, he hired Schmitt-Carey as national CEO. Within a year, she came to Weiss with a proposal to bring the program to all 20,000 children in the Syracuse school district.
“If I had false teeth, they would have fallen out of my face,” Weiss said. “I was absolutely stunned by the proposal.”
He realized it would be impossible to bring the same personal approach to Syracuse as he had in the other cities, but he said he recognized the need to create a system that could help far more children.
That’s a task he has left largely to Schmitt-Carey and her deputy, Gene Chasin, a former schools superintendent in Massachusetts and director of the Institute for Urban School Improvement at the University of Connecticut.
In essence, Schmitt-Carey says, Say Yes is trying something new: an effort to scale up and institutionalize Weiss’ intensely personal approach.
“What we’re doing is trying to get a whole community to put their arms together around these kids and help them really be able to walk across the stage and make a difference in their lives, their families, this community,” she said.
Contact Paul Riede at priede@syracuse.com or 470-3260.
