The following is one of those heart-warming stories and I want to share it with South Africans because, maybe, just maybe, we may need this also in our schools, but not only in schools, but even at our homes and in Spur Restaurants! And maybe, just maybe people like Judge Mabel Jansen won't be in trouble!!
A group of Memminger Elementary students and their teachers
were featured on the Steve Harvey Show
(aired in SA on 3 August 2017) to talk about "The Gentlemen's Club"
and how it's changing their approach in the classroom.
Fourth grade teacher Kenneth Joyner and Raymond Nelson with
the Communities in Schools program work at Memminger Elementary, a predominantly
black school in Charleston.
Memminger is a Title One school and Nelson and Joyner say
there has always been a discipline problem, especially among boys, who go to
Memminger and other middle and high schools in that part of the city.
Wanting to change that, the two men started "The
Gentlemen's Club" and offered the school's boys a chance to learn what it
means to be a gentleman.
"Our young boys were having a lot of problems with
discipline; they were having a lot of problems with respect, and really self-esteem.
So they had no value system. So we say that and said, 'We got to do something
about this,'" Joyner said.
Every Wednesday they meet in their best clothes, many
capping off a clean, pressed shirt and pants with a colorful bowtie, where
Nelson and Joyner teach the boys how to look and feel good, how to be
respectful to each other, their classmates, and teachers.
The result has been significant not only in their personal
lives but also in the classroom, the boys told Harvey during the show.
"It's helped me become a gentleman, and later it life
it helped me become a man," said Devon, one of the members of the club.
"Well, being in The Gentlemen's Club it's helped me
learn to be more like a gentleman, not just by the way you dress but by the way
you act," said Amari, another of the club's young members.
Harvey asked the boys what they thought of girls and three
hands shot into the air to laughs from the audience.
They boys said girls notice when they dress up and they get
comments on their style and manners regularly.
"It's just a wonderful feeling of having our boys
walking around, doing what they're supposed to do, and feeling like they can be
young gentlemen in school and outside school," Nelson said.
For their efforts to become gentlemen, Harvey told the boys
he was sending the entire club to Carowinds just outside Charlotte, North
Carolina.
