George Weiss gave 112 West Philadelphia students a chance to go to college. He says he’s gotten much more in return.
BY SUSAN LONKEVICH
IN THE SUMMER OF 1996, Dr. Norman Newberg sat in his office at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, interviewing a broad-shouldered young man from West Philadelphia.
“I like literature,” the student said when asked what interested him most at school. “I don’t sell those books at the end of the semester.”
He then pointed to a print of William Blake’s lithograph, “Elohim Creating Adam,” hanging on Newberg’s wall. “That guy up there. I read his stuff. I also read that poem, you know, Tintern Abbey? I liked that. I also read some stuff by that guy who was doing dope … you know, that guy who was a dope-head.”
“You mean Coleridge?”
“Yeah, that guy — Ancient Mariner.”
Several things made this conversation remarkable: Diagnosed with a learning disability, the student had been in a special-education program until his junior year of high school. He was separated in infancy from his biological mother, a drug addict. His step-mother, who raised him, had few financial resources but was determined that he would get an education. And because of his own motivation and the intervention of a multimillion-dollar program called Say Yes to Education — founded 10 years ago by George and Diane Weiss — he is now attending the University of Hartford.
Since Say Yes began, Newberg, the foundation’s executive director, and the Weisses have often been touched by the insights or talents of such students, whom a flawed educational and social system typically would have left behind. “Most of these kids needed second, third, fourth, fifth chances,” says George Weiss, W’65, “and society doesn’t give these kids these kinds of chances.” But he did. In 1987, Weiss and his then-wife, Diane, announced they would sponsor a class of 112 graduating sixth-graders at Belmont Elementary School in one of West Philadelphia’s most threadbare pockets. Working in collaboration with Penn, the Philadelphia Public School District, and the students’ families, they agreed to provide counseling and other services — and then pay for the children’s post-secondary education if they could get into college or trade school.
LONG BEFORE George Weiss became a Penn trustee, a wealthy money manager, and an educational sponsor and friend to more than 300 students in three Northeastern cities, he was a Wharton student and a member of Kappa Nu fraternity. Kappa Nu hosted a holiday party one year for some low-income, neighborhood kids, and Weiss became particularly friendly with a gang of them who went by the name of “the Twelve Apostles.” For the remainder of his college career, he would sneak them into Penn football games and advise them much as an older brother would.
Several years later, during Alumni Weekend, he called the same guys to get together for lunch. Weiss, at that time a young stockbroker, was stunned to learn that all of them had gone on to graduate from high school. When he said how proud he was, one of the men replied, “George, we couldn’t look you straight in the eye if we didn’t graduate from high school.” Right then, Weiss recalls, “I made a pact that if God ever gave me the financial wherewithal to do something in education, I would do that. I realized that if you really get involved with kids and show them that you care, then they have to look you straight in the eye and say, ‘I failed.’ It makes it much more difficult to lose them [to] the streets.”
Weiss’s vow happened to mesh with Newberg’s interest in involving Penn more in the West Philadelphia community. With the help of then-University President, Dr. Sheldon Hackney, Hon’93, Newberg, a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Education, had created an organization called the Collaborative for West Philadelphia Public Schools. As its executive director, he assessed the needs of about 25 local schools, fielding concerns about the drop-out problem, inadequate college counseling, and other issues. In response, his organization increased tutoring in local schools, created a scholarship fund, and obtained a grant to pay for more college counselors. He proposed a plan, eventually implemented, for reorganizing city schools to improve accountability as students move up the grade levels.
At Hackney’s suggestion, Newberg also met with the Weisses — Diane is now a member of the board of overseers of the Graduate School of Education — presenting a range of programs they could invest in. The one they “absolutely fell in love with” was the concept that became Say Yes to Education.
The Weisses’ announcement that they would be shepherding 112 students through school may have thrilled parents, but it meant little to students at the time, says Harold Shields, now a soft-spoken senior majoring in psychology at Penn. Shields, who used a break from his six-course study load this semester to talk, recalls that he was impatient to get out of his tie and dress shirt and off the sweltering stage so he could start summer vacation. He was sitting in the back row, talking to his best friend during their sixth-grade graduation ceremony. Suddenly, a great roar came up from the audience. “The crowd was cheering and I didn’t know what was going on, but I stood up and started cheering because everybody else was doing it. I didn’t know until later that they had offered us a college education.”
Shields initially tried to sabotage his success at school, believing it would violate his religious faith, as a Jehovah’s Witness, to spend time pursuing higher education (Church doctrine actually doesn’t address this). Allen Alexander, a classmate who lives in Hartford, Conn., says that he, too, did just “enough to get by” in school, because he felt his teachers didn’t deserve more. “I didn’t think they did a good enough job pulling it out of me,” he says, or of “relating education to life.” But the Weisses’ gift didn’t stop with money for college. What distinguishes Say Yes from similar programs is its strong association with a university and the use of its many resources. As the program has expanded to Hartford, Conn. and Cambridge, Mass., and to another class in Philadelphia, each group has been affiliated with a nearby university or college.
NO ONE THOUGHT IT was going to be easy, and it wasn’t. More than one-third of the students were in special-education classes; three-quarters of the students were being raised by a single parent; and half of the parents had dropped out of high school. Half of the parents would experience a serious drug problem while their kids were in school.
To show that it wasn’t going to accept “business as usual,” Say Yes reviewed students’ academic progress monthly with school officials, Newberg says. “We knew the kids were poor, we knew that they were stressed, we knew that they had 10 strikes against them, but we were determined to see if we could turn that around.” They recruited nearly 100 Wharton MBA students to tutor Say Yes students and their classmates. Say Yes tried to build students’ trust in adults through the project coordinators who worked directly with them, doing everything from rousting truants out of bed in the morning to organizing trips. Senior project coordinator Randall Sims, C’72, an African-American Penn graduate, “has built a very close bond with these students, and they respect him and they look up to him,” Newberg says.
They also lined up mentors for the students and tried to arrange opportunities that would spark a desire to learn. When Alexander was a high-school sophomore, for instance, he was paired with an African-American finance student and football player at Penn. They hit it off, and Alexander began spending time at his mentor’s fraternity, astutely observing “how the sisters responded [better] to the brothers who were serious about their education and self-growth.” That sold him on college, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Hartford last spring. He plans to look for a job in social work once he relocates with his wife to North Carolina.
What changed Shields’s mind about college was another student admiring his math and science abilities in a summer enrichment program at Penn. “I kind of just shrugged it off,” he says. “But I started to think more about what I was doing with myself and the options that I was cutting short.” Shields enrolled at Wharton, but couldn’t find the right fit during his first three years. “I started to look at myself in terms of where I wanted to be in the world, and not just in terms of having a job or getting a paycheck.” He considered history, education, and religious studies before deciding to major in psychology. Now Shields hopes to earn his Ph.D. and “to stay around academia, because I think that’s one way you stay young — staying around students and learning.” He may take a year off between degrees to do independent research and to help his younger sister improve her study skills in preparation for college.
As excited as he is about the program’s successes, Newberg speaks frankly about some of its shortfalls. Say Yes sometimes met bureaucratic resistance as it tried to change aspects of a school system which he felt gave too little to — and demanded too little from — its students. Despite the help of an SAT preparation specialist, for instance, the group did not do well on the exams, earning an average combined score of 654 out of 1600 points. “If you do not have a rigorous curriculum, well taught, you can’t make it up in SAT prep,” Newberg says. The students who went on to college are also taking an average of five years to complete a four-year curriculum. Janine Spruill, who expects to graduate from Temple University in May, was dismayed at having to take remedial courses because she “couldn’t even write a paragraph. At first I thought I was stupid; then I realized that I had never been taught that stuff.”
Even so, the Say Yes group has fared much better than students who didn’t have the program’s academic and emotional supports. “If you compare our [high school] graduation rates with the students before and after, we do 100 percent better,” Newberg says. “For the kids who went through the system without the intervention, the drop-out rate was around 75 percent; our drop-out rate was about 35 percent.” In addition, 56 of the high-school graduates are pursuing further education at — or already have received their diplomas from — four-or two-year colleges, or trade schools.
DESPITE THE PROGRAM’S exhaustive prevention efforts, 22 of the 45 females had delivered one or more babies by age 18. Newberg speaks slowly and thoughtfully as he ponders the reasons for this troubling statistic. He doesn’t believe these pregnancies were accidents — “They all know about contraception, and condoms are widely available” — but a function of poverty. “Part of it has to do with having very little,” Newberg says, looking down at his desk as if the elusive answers were scratched into the surface. “I think when you have more, then you want more, and you’re willing to hold off … The irony of all of this is that very quickly, the male is out of the scene and the woman is the one left raising the child.”
One female student who has avoided that fate is Spruill. Funny, opinionated, and as creative as the mock-Bill Cosby message she created for her answering machine, she acts as if having a baby right now would be preposterous. “I have a cat, and I forget to feed her sometimes,” she says. “Now if I had a human walking around here, something would be wrong. I’ve always had goals for myself, and I wouldn’t allow other things to hinder that.” Those ambitions include a career in filmmaking. “I’ve always considered myself an artist, and I figured with film I could do whatever it is I want to do. I’m really a verbal person and with film I can convey my messages.” Spruill is filming a documentary about Say Yes using equipment that Weiss purchased for one of her classes. Given the attention that the program has drawn, “I thought it was important for the students to actually express themselves,” she says. But she’s one tough-minded artist, requiring everyone in the film — even Newberg — to sign a contract. Should it ever make money, she explains, “I don’t want anybody knocking on my door with their hand out, please.”
To Say Yes students, Weiss has not just been a distant benefactor writing checks and buying camera equipment on their behalf, but someone who “genuinely cares.” Spruill admits she didn’t know what to make of him at first. “I thought it was a big bet. He probably wanted to see how many black kids would go to college.” But when reporters wanted to interview him at one Say Yes reunion, she noticed that he told them, “‘Wait a minute. Let me talk to my kids first.’ I thought, ‘He really does care.'” Weiss has invited students to spend weekends at his Hartford home and has taught them in summer school. He even turned SAT words like corpulent and facade into a rap, which he performed for students in the Hartford program. “I was up until 4 A.M.,” he confesses, “trying to get the right beat.” Students often phone Weiss on his 800-number, sometimes to thank him, sometimes to ask for money, and often just to talk. “Literally, Say Yes is a family,” he says. “Every kid is important.”
Weiss keeps three photographs on his desk — two of his daughters and one of a Say Yes student who died at age 13 in a stolen-car accident — an event that deeply pained him. “He was a super young man. He was a philosopher who taught me about love,” says Weiss, choking up a little. Unfortunately, “he made a choice and he made a bad choice.”
“I think he’s a very beautiful person,” Alexander says of Weiss. “He’s also forward about what he feels is right and wrong; he doesn’t hold anything back. That’s really why I can trust somebody [like him]. He isn’t just ‘love, love, love, poor children, poor children, poor children.’ He tells us we’re an investment.”
So far, Weiss has spent a total of about $5 million on all four Say Yes programs. Other major Penn alumni contributors are Robert, L’66, and Jane Toll, and Morton, C’56, and Irma Handel.
But actually, says Weiss, the real beneficiaries of the program “are people like me, because these kids make us better human beings. We receive the gift.”
