Educational 'village' leads to success

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When Gail Meadows was growing up in Salina, Kan., she was the only black child in an all-white school. It made her feel adrift, unseen. "My culture was validated at home but not at school," she remembers.Today, Meadows gives African American students the affirmation she lacked as a child. She is the owner and head teacher at Meadows-Livingstone, a progressive, Afro centric elementary school that emphasizes ethnic pride and self-esteem along with academic skills. Her 30 students get the rudiments of science and math, reading and writing. But into that mix she adds weekly classes, taught by six part-time teachers, in African civilization, percussion, dance and singing. Genealogy and politics also are in the curriculum. "We don't make a lot of money," says Meadows, who charges $700 per month per student. "But we are turning out the most amazing children. I look back at my notes, and 99 percent go on to university. That's a marvelous track record."Meadows, 57, uses two rooms in a funky building adjacent to a freeway off-ramp. She teaches the second- through sixth-graders in one room, and fellow teacher Morgan Dox has kindergartners and first-graders next door.There's nothing conventional about Meadows-Livingstone. The desks aren't lined up in perfect formation, and students work not in unison but in small groups. Friendly, exuberant chaos is the leitmotif. It gets noisy.Meadows encourages personal expression, and each students' emotional needs are addressed and nurtured, in holistic fashion, along with their learning skills. Once a week Meadows teaches swimming, and each day she and her students run seven blocks to a nearby park and then run back."It's a village," says Meadows, a loquacious woman with a big grin and a head full of gray locks. "I know the children intimately, and I know their families -- their grandmas and uncles and aunts. Because it's such a small setting, we can give more of ourselves. ... We understand their individual learning styles because they've been with me so long."The "village" approach, Meadows says, harks back to the pre-integration schools in the South, "where all the teachers were black and all the children were black. The teachers all went to church with the families. They lived in the community. Now, all of our teachers are not African American, and I don't go to church with their parents. But we do have a family situation here."At Meadows-Livingstone, older students are expected to function as "elders," helping younger ones with behavior issues and socialization. "You're being mean," a sixth-grader with a short Afro told an addled second-grader on a recent morning. "It's like you're a piece of Jello, and the Jello is bouncing back at you. Change your attitude a little bit, and people will be nice to you."Opening her own school came naturally to Meadows. Her father, Othello, was an artist and math teacher who painted the marquee at the local movie house with drawings depicting the current attraction. Her mother, Lavya, was a community leader who started several schools and organized political actions.At Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, Meadows met her husband Livingstone. A tall Jewish man, Livingstone is a psychotherapist specializing in sand tray therapy, a technique in which children and adults express themselves by manipulating objects in small tabletop sandboxes. He's the author of a book, "Redemption of the Shattered: A Teenager's Healing Journey Through Sandtray Therapy."The couple married in 1971 and moved to San Francisco in 1979. Meadows found work teaching at a private school in Daly City, which gave her the impetus to start her own school. Meadows is speaking in her office, a tiny room decorated with ethnic fabrics and framed photos of classrooms going back 25 years. She remembers every former student's name and loves to point out her successful alumni: the one who works for Doctors Without Borders; the one who got the full scholarship to Smith University; the psychologist and the pediatrician; the social worker and Financial District executive.A lot of students enroll because their parents hear about the school from friends; some are recommended by a public school teacher. Meadows interviews the parents, makes sure they're comfortable with the village environment and approach to instruction. "I tell them what we will teach their children about politics and ask what their morals and political convictions are. That's generally a fit." "I love this school," says Lea Williams-Pinkston, the mother of an 18-year-old Meadows-Livingstone graduate and grandmother of a current second-grader. "Gail changed my daughter's life. She didn't like being black till she came here. When she left here, she was proud to be who she was." Tabitha is now a freshman at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania."The real difference between Gail's school and other schools is the sense of community at her school," says Quo Mieko Judkins, a Mills College graduate who earned a law degree at Penn State and is now a criminal defense attorney with the Washington D.C., public defender's office. "The essence of the curriculum was social justice, giving back to the community. That was ingrained in everything we did." E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann(at)sfchronicle.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com