Last month, Normandy Superintendent Stanton Lawrence was faced with the biggest obstacle of his career when the St. Louis County Health Department notified him that as many as 50 students at Normandy High School may have been exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
An unassuming person, the 52-year-old was faced with a heavy burden.
“Sometimes I can get a little emotional, because when I think about my own teenage children and if they were facing this situation,” Lawrence said.
He became an educator by default. As an English major at Prairie View A&M University, he had hopes of becoming a writer. He turned down his first teaching position, instead taking a job as longshoreman.
“It was really backbreaking labor,” Lawrence said. “I decided that after two years, I probably had missed my calling.”
He accepted a job as a writing instructor at Jarvis Christian College, a private, black college 230 miles from his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas.
He taught there for two years and gained his master’s degree and certification to teach before becoming a high school English teacher in Dallas’ public school district. He created havoc in the district as vice president of a teachers’ association and writing columns that generally condemned the administration.
“I was quite expressive, and if I felt strongly about something I had no inhibitions about expressing that,” Lawrence said.
His assertiveness convinced administrators that the classroom was not a place for him and persuaded him to go into administration. He enrolled in the education doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of African Americans getting in at that time,” Lawrence said.
His first year at the school, a professor told him he wasn’t fit to be at the school because of his undergraduate experience. Lawrence admitted that his grades were not the best, but still felt the professor stigmatized him because he had graduated from a historically black college.
“It motivated me like I never thought I could be motivated,” Said Lawrence, finished his Ph.D. coursework with a 4.0 grade point average.
He was scheduled to complete his dissertation in the spring of 1992, but halfway through it he became a principal in a Dallas public school and never wrote another word up until two years ago.
That’s when he decided to quit work full time to finish the last chapters of his dissertation. He completed his doctorate in education at UT in May.
‘Team of Eight’
Fresh out of UT’s prestigious superintendency program, Lawrence was hired to take the helm of Normandy School District, a district that has been marred by accreditation problems for years and is at the brink of state takeover.
“When you’re in trouble, you always look for someone who has a sense of urgency and a passion for what’s valuable to you,” said board president Cozy Marks. “He’s a compassionate guy and also an aggressive guy towards the goals that need to be achieved for the district.”
Armed with a plan to turn the district around in two years, Lawrence has spent his first few months working to rebuild its infrastructure. When he arrived in July, he teamed up with the district’s seven school board members to indentify key problem areas.
The “Team of Eight” laid out a set of goals n which include improvements in communications, student achievement, curriculum, teacher performance and student behavior n intended to help the district regain full accreditation.
“When I walk into a classroom, the first question I ask myself is do I want my child sitting in this classroom,” Lawrence said. “If the answer is no, then I have a responsibility to make sure that no child sits in that classroom with that teacher.”
While it is too early to tell whether the district’s 5,329 students have made any improvements thus far, Lawrence was confident about the district’s prospect.
“Within this next year, we are going to set the stage to where we’re going to be five years from now,” Lawrence said. “At the end of this school year, if nothing else we’ll see a blip of positive improvement across all our campuses.”
HIV Scare
His biggest hurdle yet came when he learned that some students at Normandy High School may have been exposed to HIV.
The news went out in a letter, which Lawrence generated himself, sent home to parents and guardians. Lawrence said school officials knew they were risking a lot of negative attention when they decided to send the letters but the district had to err on the side of caution.
“What I was really concerned about was the media frenzy,” Lawrence said. “I had to do a lot of soul-searching and say that, even though this could possibly happen, I have a responsibility to the kids first.”
When the news made the national spotlight, Lawrence appeared on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, National Public Radio and CBS’s The Early Show, defending the district’s decision to offer free, confidential HIV testing to the school’s roughly 1,300 students.
He felt that the school n whose student population is 99 percent black n was stigmatized by inaccurate and sensational news coverage.
“When you read headlines that really misrepresent the situation, your first thought is not about the district but it’s about how the kids feel,” Lawrence said. “We told the media that this is a very private matter between students and their parents. I believe if the school didn’t look like it does and we had a more affluent student base, they would have been more respectful of that request.”
The initial testing results are known and a second round of testing will take place in January, Lawrence said.
He hopes that the crisis opens the door for a larger discussion about health risks facing the black community.
Lawrence said, “This is an opportunity for us to not only educate the young people and their families but also the larger community about the kinds of health risks that tend to be prevalent in our population.”
