Education for minority boys is in ‘crisis.’ Bradenton charter school aims to change that

An education is more than textbooks and grades. At Visible Men Academy, it also means learning how to be a good citizen, 9-year-old Jonathan Williams said, stepping away from a summer basketball game.

“It means helping out your community, picking up trash,” said Jonathan, an upcoming fourth-grader. “If you see bullying, you should try to stop it.”

After moving to Florida and joining the public charter school, Jonathan said he made strides in math and reading. He also described himself as a “proper young man,” thanks in large part to the program at Visible Men Academy.

In August, the start of the 2021-22 school year, Jonathan is sure to see new faces at the campus on 63rd Avenue East, where big leadership changes are taking place.

Co-founder and longtime CEO Neil Phillips stepped down in February. After some public confusion about his reasoning, Phillips issued a statement in early June, omitting the details of his resignation and asking for continued support of the school.

The school, he said, would continue focusing on its “Suns,” a nickname for the K-5 students at Visible Men Academy.

“This is the story — it’s the only one that matters,” the former CEO wrote. “The team provides unwavering dedication, commitment and expertise. The Suns provide open-heartedness, brilliance, and a willingness to learn and grow. Their families share their trust in the mission and the caring approach.”

Co-founder A. Louis Parker, the school’s new chief executive officer, said that Visible Men was also working to build a 15-member governing board. As of last week, the board included eight members, including six new arrivals.

“They are all community leaders,” Parker said. “That’s one thing we’re certainly looking for: people that are known and recognized in the Bradenton and Sarasota communities.”

‘A crisis in education’

When the school was established in 2012, its four co-founders set out to educate students of color and boys from low-income families.

Parker was adamant that recent leadership changes would help Visible Men Academy continue its mission. The changes, he said, were not a sign that Visible Men was moving in a new direction.

“We started this all because of the crisis in education of Black and brown boys, which I think has gotten worse, not better,” Parker said.

Students of color are sometimes mislabeled in traditional school settings, he said. Without the same support and opportunities as their peers, the students might be deemed “problems” or students with learning disabilities, landing them in stagnant alternative programs.

Parker said he cringes when people compliment Visible Men Academy for keeping its minority students “out of jail,” a bar that was “way too low,” the CEO continued.

The school has made progress in the last several years, overcoming the F grade it earned in both 2015 and 2016. Since that time, the school achieved a C grade in 2017, followed by an A in 2018 and then a B the following year, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.

Data was unavailable for 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to canceled state assessments and school grades.

“We’re not a place for troubled boys,” he said. “That’s not who we are. We’re about academic excellence and developing leaders in the community.”

Citing a 2015 publication by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the United Negro College Fund reported that non-Black teachers had lower expectations for their African American students when compared to Black educators.

The college fund also reported that Black students were more likely to face discipline or legal action when compared to their white counterparts, and that Black and Latino students had less access to resources, gifted programs or qualified teachers.

“People don’t see the value in these boys,” Parker said. “You can go back to the George Floyd situation. That cop did not see any value in that man, period. And a lot of people — more than you’d think — feel that way.”

A place to SHINE

Approximately 45% of the students at Visible Men Academy are Black, while 45% are Latino and 10% are white. And all of the students struggle with poverty, the CEO continued.

From their first day at the school, every student is guided by a program called SHINE: Selflessness, honesty, integrity, niceness and excellence.

Visible Men students are treated like the intelligent and capable boys they are, Parker said, describing how the students learn to walk and talk with confidence.

“They come here feeling like they have no control and no power,” he said. “Everything is being done to them. What we teach them with SHINE is that you control this. You can control your honesty. You can control your integrity. You can control your excellence.”

The pandemic also forced Visible Men to halt its parent programs. Ensuring the students have support outside of campus, the school holds weekly programs for families, offering parenting lessons, English classes, finance tips and other topics.

Parker said those programs will resume in the new school year.

“A lot of them don’t have high school diplomas and such,” he said of the parents. “Their requirements are just as important as the boys. They’ll come here with kind of a skepticism about the school because of experiences they’ve had with education. We have to break down that barrier.”

New Faces

According to a news release, Visible Men’s new board members include:

• Gerald Bruce, the executive vice president for commercial operations at Virpax Pharmaceuticals. Bruce also serves as chair-elect for the Board of Trustees at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, and as a member of the Board of Directors for A Different Path Inc. in Sarasota.

• Naiema Frieson, the co-owner of Frieson Vaughan Ventures, a business development and consulting firm. She is a supporter of causes for children, women, education, art and economic mobility for underserved communities.

• Tomeika Hunter-Koski, the director for Mission Machangulo, a Sarasota-based charity that provides food, school supplies and other needed goods to children in the Machangulo peninsula of Mozambique. Hunter-Koski, a U.S. Army veteran, also runs Queen Bee Real Estate in Bradenton.

• Ronald Johnson, the immediate past president of Clark Atlanta University in Georgia. Along with previously serving as chair of the Consumer Advisory Board for the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he also serves on a committee for Sarasota’s Community Foundation.

• James Stewart, a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University, where he works in the departments of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, African and African American Studies, and Management and Organization. He is also a board member for New College of Florida, the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition, and the Suncoast Black Arts Collaborative.

• David Wilkins, who worked at the Dow Chemical Company for 25 years. He retired as the associate general counsel and director of ethics and compliance. Wilkins and his wife, Lois Bright Wilkins, are also leaders with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

“One of the other key criteria for board members — and teachers, too — they have to strongly believe in our mission,” Parker said.

This story was originally published June 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.