everyday heroes

‘Sister’ act

by Ellie Spielberg

Jun 6, 2008 5:52 PM

Teacher’s innovative program miraculously raising girls’ self-worth

“I’m fat.”

“I’m ugly.”

“The boys don’t like me.”

“My clothes are bad.”

“My hair’s too short.”

The angst-ridden musings of a college student who’s flipped through too many issues of Vogue?

No. They’re the self-deprecating thoughts of little girls who come to PS 81 every day from neighborhood family shelters or the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses right across the street.

Brooklyn’s gentrification has not reached this part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where nearby Broadway sprouts discount stores, auto parts suppliers and bodegas under the gloom of the elevated J/Z line.

According to teacher Robin Williams, by the time these girls are in 3rd grade their self-worth is below sea level and they’re already envisioning a future of poverty, early pregnancy and being stuck in the projects forever and ever.

“I’m so fat, I’m so big and fat,” says pretty Tatiana, who then starts sobbing.

To the rescue come her little contemporaries in the YESS program — Young Elegant Sisters of Substance, a group of quiet well-mannered girls who greet their elders in a melodic chorus. Now they are hugging Tatiana and telling her she’s beautiful until she stops crying. Teacher Shonelle Holder asks Tatiana to look into the mirror and see just how beautiful she is, especially with the smile now spreading across her face.

“I’m ugly, my skin is too dark,” says little Daja now, crying, one of many girls who think they have to be as light and golden as Tyra Banks in order for them to love themselves. Daja in fact is lovely, with stunning almond-shaped eyes.

“Don’t you believe that dark-skinned stuff, not for a minute. My whole family is lighter than I am, I was always the darkest one, and everyone tried to plant that seed in my mind, too, when I was a little girl. Don’t you dare believe it,” an adult voice chimes in among the affirmative chatter of girls who are hugging Daja.

The speaker is Williams, the miracle worker who created and implemented the YESS program three years ago at the school, where she works as a literacy coach. Holder, who teaches 4th grade, joined as a facilitator this year, and science teacher Laura Banks has been Williams’ co-facilitator since the beginning.

Now little Erica speaks up: “Some people don’t like the way I look but I love the way I am. You are beautiful no matter what; you are not fat, you are who you are. Whether you are black or Puerto Rican or Dominican, you are as God made you.”

Williams began creating YESS when she was a 4th-grade teacher and getting increasingly upset when former students came back to visit her. Many were on the fast track to failure and despair.

“I thought, ‘Why? What happens to them in middle school?’ We have to embrace our girls and let them know they’re beautiful,” she says.

She opened the program to 5th-graders but soon realized she had to start working with girls long before they were about to leave for middle school. Now YESS includes 3rd- to 5th-grade girls ranging from 9 to 12 years old.

“I live in Bed-Stuy and I have a lot invested in it,” Williams says. “I couldn’t stand seeing what was happening to my girls when I’d see them a few years later on the street, half of them pregnant. I said to myself, ‘This is not going to happen here, not in my neighborhood, not on this street, not with my girls.’”

YESS is about saying yes to yourself. The after-school and occasional weekend program is about self-esteem, good decision making, giving to others, becoming a young lady, venturing into the whole big world outside of the projects, and envisioning that you can live in that world when you grow up by mastering the behavior, language and etiquette that can take you there.

And it’s fun. Spend some time with Williams, Holder, Banks and their young sisters of substance and you get the feeling there’s nowhere else these girls would rather be.

Unlike similar but more regimented programs on self-esteem and etiquette for inner-city kids, YESS is holistic, with its group-therapy style of digging deep into self-defeating issues as well as giving room for children to play.

Take the table-manners segment of YESS, for one example. When Williams and her two colleagues preside over the table like the Three Graces during a pretend dinner with paper plates and plastic cutlery, they’re as exacting about etiquette as matrons at a finishing school. But then the girls are asked to demonstrate what they are not supposed to do.

Now comes a giggling free-for-all of slurping, burping, elbow-jabbing, plate-licking and chucking back drinks and tapping the bottom of the cup to get every last drop as if it were the last inch of lemonade on earth. Not to mention licking your knife to get that last drop of imaginary butter, as some girls are doing. They are corrected by one of their peers.

“My grandfather said never to put your knife in your mouth before he died,” she says.

“We’re practicing to get ready for a Broadway show and dinner at a fancy-shmancy restaurant as soon as we raise the money,” Williams says. Fund-raising on their own behalf and others is an important component of YESS, with the young sisters making and selling crafts such as earrings and YESS T-shirts and helping to organize dances and other events.

Recently they raised enough money to go see “Dance Africa” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“At BAM they at least got a glimpse of a country like Ghana by seeing its dancers. I tell them the world goes beyond Bedford-Stuyvesant; that those buildings across the street and what goes on there is not your life. What happens in this room and beyond — that’s your life,” Williams says.

Playfulness comes to the fore again during role-playing scenarios such as Conceited vs. Confident and one on Attitude Adjustment. First they “present,” acting out a negative scenario; then they “re-present,” which means redoing the episode with smarter behavior and better outcomes.

When they present Conceit and later Bad Attitude, which consists of two girls fighting over a pen, you couldn’t see a cast of nastier princessy snits on the Hollywood screen. Then they transform themselves into confident creatures resolving conflicts with class. Afterward, all the girls analyze what happened in each scenario.

They also learn “business-talk,” another term in the YESS lexicon. What’s that?

“When you talk socially and don’t use street language,” says Abiyon.

“When you are at the dinner table and talk appropriate,” adds Erica, “and don’t talk just how you want to talk but what everyone wants to talk about.”

“We spend an hour and a half on each topic,” Williams says. “We can spend all day on one emotion.”

Those emotions, those voices of inner critics — ugly, fat, being made fun of — are written on paper and taped to the wall by Williams and her crew, where they are externalized and ripe for intervention.

Intervention comes in the form of affirmations, clarity and coaching. “I can’t depend on someone else for my self-esteem,” says Banks, when Abiyon expresses her self-consciousness about only having school clothes because there’s “not enough money for street clothes.”

“We focus on books, not boys,” Williams says, after Tajhane says some boys were making her feel bad.

Williams chooses the issues to be covered via the three-page application that parents or guardians must fill out to get their child into YESS. The application process includes listing topics they feel their child needs to work on.

“The biggest topic — I was amazed at how badly they all felt about themselves,” Williams says.

So she and her colleagues set about doing whatever it took to transform that.

“The teachers give up their own free time to be with the sisters,” says Chapter Leader Camille Eaddy, who accepted the UFT’s Trachtenberg Award on behalf of her chapter in 2007. “They spent Memorial Day weekend taking the sisters to BAM.” Eaddy is proud of the quiet halls and the A that the once-floundering institution recently got on its school report card.

“We call our school ‘the Oasis of Bed-Stuy’ and the YESS program is part of our oasis philosophy,” she says.

There are signs that the oasis of YESS is going to spread to other schools. One of its graduates assumed that the program was everywhere and asked her middle school teacher if they could have a YESS group. That teacher called Williams and asked for help in starting one.

She’s happy to “to be able to travel with the girls to their new grades,” Williams says. And she’s pleased now when her girls come back to visit her showing leadership skills and good report cards.

Newfound self-worth is already sprouting wings in Williams’ current group.

Jahkia says sometimes people comment that she dresses “like I don’t have a mom.

“But,” she adds, “I like the way I dress. My grandmother says I dress properly, not with such short skirts and little tops.”

“I’ve seen the changes in these girls,” Banks says.

Why wouldn’t they blossom? They are, after all, in the strong, loving hands of Williams and her colleagues, three elegant educators of substance.