by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
UNF professor Mary Baron arrived early for her Friday morning class. Before she began her weekly lessons on reading and writing, she first had to make it past the armed guards.
Baron lay her materials flat on the X-ray machine conveyer belt before stepping cautiously through the metal detector. She was cleared to enter. The white-haired teacher with the What Would Jesus Do? necklace was unarmed. Baron picked up her stack of books and bag full of pencils and waited at the elevator for her police escort to the classroom.
The high security entrance has become routine for Baron. She’s volunteered her Friday mornings since November to teach juveniles in custody at the Duval County Jail. When she started, she was told to wear closed–toe shoes, “in case we had to climb down in a lock down.” Last week, she padded comfortably to her classroom in sandals.
Baron and her assistants; Carolyn Temple, a retired copy editor, and Nancy Coyle DeCandis, a music teacher at Beaches Episcopal, mix easily with the two dozen teens in blue and brown jumpsuits who suddenly fill the room. Most of the youngsters at first carried a disinterested look as they shuffled toward their desks.
Those looks gave way to bemusement as DeCandis began bouncing around the classroom to the repetitive refrains of “Yackety Yack” by The Coasters, blaring from a boom box at the back of the room.
She encouraged them to sing along from lyric sheets she handed out before class, but she’s met mostly by slow–spreading smirks as the students looked down at the papers. Slowly the rolling beat encouraged some to bob their heads. Many of the students’ eyes darted across the pages in front of them in time with the music. Some began to mouth the words and a few barely audible murmurs emerged.
DeCandis hit the stop button and explained the value of a simple idea expressed repeatedly.
“Write simply and use repetition,” she said. “The song makes a point over and over. That creates a rhythm that can be effective.”
Next DeCandis played “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” by Billy Joel. The lyrics, which begin with “Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China Johnnie Ray . . .” and ends with “Cola Wars, I can’t take it any more,” drew some quizzical looks.
“All he did was write down his memories,” she explained. “Don’t discount the ideas you have. It’s important.”
Nobody in the room needed an explanation for the third song’s relevance. The opening notes of Kirk Franklin’s “Lean on Me,” were met immediately with shouts and hand slaps.
The chorus in the room grew until human voices drowned out the stereo when Franklin sang about “a child . . . yearning to be free.”
After the music, Baron asked each of her students to think of their lives as a book. She wanted to know how they would title their chapters.
The results evoked images of bad choices, consequences and the hope for another chance: “Lessons of the World: Cruel and Selfish”; “Friends vs. Family”; “Throw it, You Won’t Get Caught.”
The students worked separately, but most mentioned childhood innocence. One young man being held as a murder suspect titled his opening chapter, “Love at First Sight; because when your mama looks at you, she just falls in love with you, even though she doesn’t know you.”
Similarly, most of the stories closed with chapters hoping for new beginnings.
One of the program’s veterans, 17–year–old Brandon, is approaching rapidly the next chapter in his life. He will be released Sept. 3. He credits his seven months with Baron for opening his eyes to the bad choices he made and the upcoming decisions he will face. He said he rarely read, rarely wrote before he met Baron. But he feels comfortable now leading class on occasion and writes poetry in his cell to “ease my mind and sort out the thoughts and feelings going through me.” Brandon speaks softly with his eyes cast down. He responds to every question with sir or ma’am. He seems thoughtful and contemplative, and it hits like a punch in the stomach when he reveals his crime as armed robbery.