Education Edition - 1736 Magazine, Fall 2019

Volunteer Kory Futreal
helps students at
Lamar-Milledge
Elementary School.
A literacy grant is
funding programs
to help the school
improve academic
achievement.
‘Oh, where did you go?’ He said, ‘I went to Heb-bu-bah.’ To
him, going out of town was going to Hephzibah. That’s where
I live. That’s not ‘out of town.’ ”
At a school still marked by a 2015 shooting – when a thirdgrade
boy accidentally shot a classmate with a pistol he brought
to class – Adkinson created a mentorship program for boys,
most of whom are from single-parent households. Community
volunteers “teach them how to be young men,” Adkinson said,
through life-skills and character-building lessons.
The program dovetails with the school’s existing Positive
Behavior Interventions and Supports initiative, known as
PBIS, which focuses on reducing disciplinary cases, and its
Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, program
to help children develop academic habits for success in
upper grades and even college.
But most important, Adkinson has increased the school’s
parental involvement, which formerly had been limited to
encounters with disgruntled parents and caregivers. For that,
Adkinson and his staff adopted a no-nonsense policy.
“The expectation (for parents) is that you come right, or you
don’t come at all. I said that from day one,” said Adkinson,
a former college basketball star who was recently inducted
into the Paine College Athletic Hall of Fame. “We had parents
come in cussing and fussing. I said, ‘We can talk, but the first
cuss word, you’re out the door. The second one, I’m calling
the police.’ So I don’t have an issue anymore. It took about a
month. When I first got here, a lot of people didn’t like me.”
Last year, Adkinson’s first parent assembly drew only six
people. By the end of the year, “it was standing room only,” he
said.
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