Community High School

Finding the Real Roberto Clemente

In 1973, a student was stabbed at Huron High School.  A week later, another student was stabbed at Tappan.  Both victims were white.  Both assailants were black.

The next year, the Ann Arbor Public School System decided to set up the Alternative School for Disruptive Youth.  To run it, they called on Joe Dulin, the principal of a high school in Detroit, a man with a bold, forceful personality and a past steeped in controversy.

Throughout his life he had struggled against racial injustice, from segregated swimming and eating facilities in the South to racism in the Catholic Church.  He was the first African-American principal of a Catholic school in the nation.  He also had survived multiple heart attacks.

“So, I came up here and they wanted to set the school up.  It had an elaborate program.  Twenty kids, they would all [have been] suspended,” Dulin says.

He got permission from the superintendent to implement his plan, and the school was established over at Forsythe.  However, “They really didn’t want us over there, so I sensed that, and we moved outside of the district.… Then, when we got outside of the school district, the newspapers found out.  They didn’t want us outside of the school district, so they offered several places, but I chose the little place out here [in Ypsilanti]…and said, ‘That’ll be the school.’”

Dulin quickly changed the name of the school to Roberto Clemente, in recognition of the second Hispanic American to be elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, who died while delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.  The school’s full name is Roberto Clemente Student Development Center.

Dulin and the staff were constantly struggling to get what they wanted for the school.  At one point, when the school suffered a cut in funding, Dulin organized the parents of Clemente students to disrupt a school board meeting.  Soon afterwards the money was restored.

When Clemente was comprised of several portable classrooms, Dulin advocated expanding the school, against the superintendent’s wishes.  When a new portable was delivered to the school, Dulin had had enough.  The delivery man argued, “Well, the superintendent said…” A frustrated Dulin retorted, “I don’t give a shit who said, I’m not taking it.”

Dulin continued, “So they called the superintendent and told the superintendent I’m not taking it.  So, the next day they offered me $250,000.  I turned that down.  Then they had a place [near] State Street.  I went over there and I spoke to people.  It didn’t last long.  They just didn’t want any kids there.  Shit, they had a technology center over there.  I accepted that.  And then we got this lot.  It came eleven years ago, three and a half million dollars.  I thought they didn’t have any money.”

The school has changed a lot since then.  Students no longer have to be suspended from another school to go to Clemente. At this point, says Dulin, “95-98% of our kids are not suspended.  They just come here for the smaller class size and the structure.”

*THE SAFEST SCHOOL IN THE DISTRICT*

When asked about the difference between Clemente and Community, Dulin responded, “Well, that’s for white people.” Today, Dulin says, about 85% of the student body is black.

“When this school started out, all the kids were black, because that’s who they were suspending…They don’t understand the culture, their behavior is different from white kids, so they treat it as a negative…These kids that get in trouble over there, don’t get in trouble here.”

There’s too much racism in town, Dulin says. “Look on Main Street every Saturday and Friday night.  How many black people do you see?  This community proposes itself to be a liberal community.  But shit, you’ve got to watch the liberals too.  Since we’ve had liberals, how much has changed?”

Dulin says that he taught the parents and even grandparents of many current students, and he emphasizes that it’s like a big family at Clemente. As is true at Community, everyone is on a first-name basis.

“This is probably the safest school in the district, and that includes elementary schools too.  I shake hands with every kid that comes in the school every morning.”

Dulin initiated National African-American Parent Involvement Day (NAAPID), which is observed far beyond Roberto Clemente, after the Million Man March, a march of black protest and unity in 1995.

*NOBODY”S TIME BUT YOUR OWN*

Another tradition at the school are rap sessions, which are held every Wednesday in the building’s main hall.  These are forums for teachers and students to discuss what is going on at the school, similar to Community’s Town Meetings.  The structure is much more rigid than the Town Meetings, though, and much of the talking seems to be done by Joe Dulin and the teachers at the school.  Dulin began a rap session last November by pointing at a student who had been talking and saying, “Listen now.” The entire student body became quiet.

During the beginning of the rap session, Dulin introduced new students and discussed the school’s lockdown procedure.  Teachers stood on either side of the students, intervening to stop them from talking and to confiscate ringing cell phones.

Dulin continued to talk about poverty and other obstacles facing students at Clemente: “One of the stumbling blocks, particularly for the African-American students, is when you don’t know math, you don’t do math, and you don’t do your homework and fall behind, and afterwards, you want to drop out of school,” Dulin said.  “Most kids that drop out of school in Ann Arbor are African-American.  If you drop out of school, then that means that you’re going to be making $5 an hour from there.

“I was talking with Dylan this morning.  He doesn’t want to finish high school, and he says that he can make $15 an hour.  Now, on $15 an hour a person will not survive, except to rent an apartment and get something to eat.  The majority of people have a lot of problems.  If you’re poor, you have to do twice as much.  You won’t know how to get to the resources.” Dulin illustrated this with the story of a woman to whom the students had donated Thanksgiving gift baskets.

Eden Bensen, a former Community student who now goes to Roberto Clemente, says that Dulin “gives the ‘The Man’s Coming Down on Us’ speech about every week.  Because we’re poor—well, I’m not poor, but because everyone else in the school is—we can’t get stuff.”

About halfway through the rap session, Joe Dulin left, and the school’s gym teacher, who had only recently joined Clemente’s staff, took over: “To me, a problem is that people are coming to Roberto every morning and not knowing what they’re supposed to be doing.  It’s like, what do you do?  Wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to school,’ and by the time you get to the door you forget what you were going to do?  Me myself, I wouldn’t want to get up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, come to school, and do nothing.  You’re wasting nobody’s time but your own.… But I know there are some people that came here and made a change, because I can see it.  Do I know what they were, or what they did before they came here?  Not really.  But I know there’s a lot of people who, because they came here, have made a change.”

Soon afterwards, he singled out Mohammed Thabeth, a junior originally from Huron, and asked him to stand up before the school.  Thabeth was to be an example of someone who had made a change.

He is one person in the small minority of Clemente students who actually was suspended from another school.

*THE CLASS CLOWN*

Thabeth’s troubles began early.  “I was always talking and stuff.  I was always acting like a fool, a class clown basically.  I got into fights, but I wasn’t the type of person that would go out and look for a fight. I didn’t think about what I was supposed to do, I just fought.  I didn’t try to be no badass.  You could say that in the environment I was in, there were a lot of people that did stuff.

“I didn’t even know what the hell Roberto was until I was in sixth grade,” Thabeth says.  “I was in the library and the teacher was like, ‘Yeah, Roberto’s got better seats in the library.’ And then she was like, ‘You’re gonna be there in two more years.’ It was like my first-quarter class.  She already had it made up, but, shit, I can’t blame her.  I’m here now.”

Thabeth says that the problem wasn’t with academics but with talking too much.  “Every time I talked, it was like, ‘50 points off, 50 points off.’ Sometimes I was like, ‘Take all my points, I don’t care.’ …I just make bad choices.”

For example, he says, “Last year, I made a really bad choice that messed me up real bad.  I got stung.  This girl set me up.  I don’t know why.  I guess she didn’t like seeing me making money.  I was selling weed.  They brought me down real good.… They said I was suspended for a week.  I had to lie.  Imagine you being a parent and finding out your kid sells weed.  I lied after they set me up, and after a while, my dad was like, ‘We’ve got to put you to a lie detector test.’ I did it.  I can’t lie.  He was like, ‘If you did it, you did it, you can’t change nothing about that.’ You can’t lie about that kind of stuff.  I’m sorta ashamed that I did it.”

Thabeth has been bouncing back and forth between high schools since eighth grade, when he started at Clemente.  Soon he was transferred over to Huron on good behavior.  At the beginning of the current school year, however, it was Freshmen Friday, a day on which some upperclassmen traditionally beat up incoming freshmen.  Thabeth and a group of his friends participated, attempting to haze the freshman so that he could be inducted into their crew.

“They suspended me for giving him a concussion,” Thabeth says.  “I didn’t do that.  I did hit him, but it wasn’t … Underneath the arch at Huron, they put this kid’s head into the cement, and then they accused me and my friends of doing it.”

The whole incident was caught on camera and the school officials identified Thabeth, using the jersey he was wearing at the time.  The kid was sent to the hospital later that day by another group of students, and Thabeth was sent back to Clemente.

“It’s not like I don’t want to improve; I want to improve, I want to be better.  They’re trying to see me improve.”

He wants to go to Washtenaw Community College, where he will try to get a business degree so that he can produce rap music.

Victor Davis was one of the students who got in trouble with Thabeth for beating up the freshman
at Huron. They both got sent to Clemente around the same time.

“I know I’m here because I got in too many fights and got in too much trouble,” Davis says, “but a lot of people here probably don’t know what else to do, so they just start hanging out with their friends and everything, so then they fall into a category that’s different, and they end up in trouble.”

Ashley, another Clemente student, came for different reasons.  “I’m an eighth grader, and I used to go to Clague.  I wasn’t really doing anything at Clague.  There was no motivation for me to do anything.  Like, I didn’t have the motivation to want to do my work …not even go to high school.... My mom ended up sending me to Roberto so I can succeed and want to finish high school and then college.”

Rama Aiyer dual enrolls at Clemente and Community.  He used to go to Pioneer, but, he says, “Pioneer wasn’t working out for me, so I decided to go to Roberto.… I was skipping a lot, and I didn’t really have that many friends.  I wasn’t having any fun, so I just skipped.”

*THIS IS A CHANCE...*

At Roberto Clemente, the kids tend to get along with each other.  “If there was ever a gang fight in Roberto, I’d be the first person to leave,” Thabeth says.  “That’s funny.  This is a friendly school, no matter what you hear about Roberto.... The only time there’s a problem is when two girls are arguing about something stupid and then there’s a problem the same day.”

Dulin emphasizes that the structure is an integral part of the school: “The kids like it here, because it is structured.  They need it.  I always tell every kid that’s ever been here … that I don’t take no shit.  This is a chance, this is an opportunity.  When I first came here, nobody wanted to come.  Today, we get about 60% of the kids to go to college.  We only have about 12 or 13 seniors, but they can go to Pioneer, Huron, or Community split schedule, and they can play on the varsity football team or basketball team, or hockey.”

“I think it’s a good school,” Ashley says, “but I don’t think you should go here all four years.  I think you should go here, get caught up on what you’ve got to do, and go back to a normal high school environment.”

Erica, another Clemente student, is halfway between that environment and Clemente.  “I got kicked out of Pioneer … I wasn’t going to school … I know it [going to Clemente] helped me out.  I got all A’s and a C at Pioneer.  I have three classes out of six here.  So now I’m passing all my classes.  People think that Roberto’s a bad school, but it’s not at all.  I mean, I think it’s one of the best schools in Michigan, because you have a lot of people turning their lives around.  When they say it’s for dummies or bad kids, it’s just not that way at all.”

As Aiyer notes, “At Roberto, it’s easier to make credits up. It’s a very family-oriented school.… There’s a lot more restrictions. Like, you can’t go to the bathroom as often. Here [at Community], you don’t really even have to ask, you just go. But there, even when you do ask, sometimes they won’t let you go.”

Thabeth can come to terms with these restrictions, however. “You get used to the discipline they try to instill, the teachers.… Basically, you learn all the back roads. You get used to everything, you know, what you can do in here, how you can get away with things, it’s easy.”

One of the major complaints at Clemente is the food. “The only bad part about this school is our lunches,” Ashley says. “I think we should have a better lunch program like the other high schools and stuff like that…. There’s a guy that comes in and asks us questions about our lunch or about Roberto, like what we should change.… That guy came here last year, and he didn’t do anything. We still have the same lunch and we still have Domino’s pizza every day.”

Still, Thabeth says he would rather stay at Clemente. “Last Friday I went out to Huron, but they don’t want you there. They don’t give a shit about you. They don’t give a shit about you or me.… I hate to say it, but the only school that gives a damn about you in this whole school district is Roberto Clemente. Because look, I’ve walked out of this school so many damn times saying I was gonna leave, and I’m back again.”