Helping Free a Needy School

If you should ever need proof of humankind’s complexity, you can find it out here in the patchy snow at the high desert foot of the Sierra Nevada.

This is where Kelly Koerner shows that he is more than a man who murdered his ex-wife--five swift bullets to the head. Where Anthony, an 8-year-old schoolboy, rises above a bad-breaks beginning to give the kind of comfort he has been short of himself.

Where Officer Mike Ramirez, prison guard and inmate advocate, proves that his heart did not die more than a decade ago, along with a beloved but suicidal son.

Behind barbed wire and high chain link at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a band of mostly Vietnam veteran felons is reaching out to the trailer-park children of a hardscrabble elementary school a city away.

They are doing it the hard way--but then, most things behind prison walls happen the hard way--recycling aluminum cans and flattened cardboard boxes to raise money for Reno’s Stead Elementary School, for first- and second-graders like Anthony, who have had as few breaks as their benefactors behind bars.

“Our kids are poor,” says Principal Neil Schott. “They don’t have a whole lot going for them. We see a fair amount of abuse and neglect. . . . We don’t have the parental support. There’s a lot of shift work and a lot of no work at all here. The prisoners have helped us tremendously.”

What the 60 inmates, all members of the Vietnam Veterans of America, get in return is no small gift from some very small hands--the reminder that their troubled lives still have some value, somewhere, to someone.

“When we sent them our first donation, they thought really that the veterans are our savior,” said Orvlea Ivey, who is doing time for trafficking marijuana. “Some of these kids have a problem learning. . . . It makes me feel good that I’m a part of getting them a higher education.”

The inmates know they help, because the children tell them. Not in person, of course, for men serving multiple life sentences, for example, have few opportunities to hang with 6- and 7-year-olds.

Instead, the kindness comes in a steady stream of thank you notes and Veterans Day cards scrawled in childish hand, shedding gold glitter throughout the prison library, breaking the bounds of conventional spelling.

“Thank you for the books and are freedom because u gave us are NFL and are NBA,” wrote a grateful Anthony. “I like u because u gave us are freedom.”

Wrote Tiffany, 8: “Dear Veterans, Thank you for the accelerated readers and books and paper. . . . I wish you were out of jael.”

Although it is difficult to gauge the flow of penal philanthropy, prison rights groups say such efforts are rising as the number of inmates in America soars.

Felons revamp old computers and donate them to schools, go cell-to-cell during holiday food drives, hold walk-a-thons behind prison walls.

Most such efforts are intrinsic parts of the prison systems themselves; few allow for much more than anonymous charity and cursory thanks. But after 18 months of gift-giving and gratitude, with the help of Ramirez and other guards as go-betweens, these inmates have managed to forge a relationship with their adopted school.

“A lot of schools have business partners,” says Schott, who was honored last summer at a prison party. “I don’t think any of them are partners with a group of prisoners. . . . These guys are better because they’re doing this.”

But for the men in Chapter 719 of Vietnam Veterans of America, it hasn’t been easy to do good after doing bad. The very nature of their circumstances makes it less than convenient to live up to their organization’s motto: “In service to America.”

Their first big annual fund-raiser, dubbed “Prison Break,” raised $3,900 for the United Way from 1993 to 1995. But future fund-raising events were canceled by the Nevada director of prisons and their own warden, they say, leaving the men at a philanthropic loss.

Then they read about the VVA’s Project Friendship, in which veterans around the country adopted schools and other worthwhile programs. So they wrote to the Washoe County school district for a list of the area’s neediest campuses. They wrote to the schools to offer assistance. And then they waited.

The response? At first, deafening silence.

“They didn’t think we were sincere,” complained Arthur Coleman, in prison for the past eight years on charges of “I’d rather not say.”

“It’s the ‘con’ in convict,” says a philosophical Koerner. “Why would a bunch of inmates do something like this? It’s the sincerity problem we had to get over first.”

Schott was the only elementary school principal who did not have that problem. Help, he says, is help, no matter where it comes from.

“I will go for anything that will help the lives of our kids,” says the pragmatic principal, whose school is the proud recipient of more than $1,500 of prisoner philanthropy. “They are helping our kids to have a happy childhood.”

Most of Schott’s pupils need that assistance. In the heart of industrial northern Reno, Stead Elementary serves free breakfast and lunch to nearly 50% of its 538 students. Some of these children sleep in the family car. Others come to school without underwear. Some arrive swathed in extra-large men’s T-shirts, thrilled because their clothes are at least clean.

The school is also plagued with a nearly 50% transiency rate, which means that almost half the children are gone before the school year ends.

“We have kids whose families show up in front of the school with their car packed,” says Schott. “The kids don’t get to clean out their desks before they’re gone.”

The result is an interrupted education, often filled with learning gaps, says second-grade teacher Sharon Burke. “They move from school to school,” she says. “They play catch-up.”

Brian Lucero, incarcerated cocaine trafficker and father of one, sees his young self in every child who walks the halls of Stead Elementary. His own father killed himself when Lucero was 12. His mother worked in the mines in New Mexico until they closed and then patched together employment when and where she could. He went to eight schools and remembers vividly the toll that takes.

“You get your friends and get settled in and then you move again,” says Lucero, 31, an associate member of Chapter 719. “It’s real hard, makes things real complicated for you.”

Of all the gifts that the prisoners have given to the needy campus miles away, Lucero’s favorite is a program called “Accelerated Reader,” which quickly teaches children the fundamentals of reading--before they move on to another school and miss out again.

With the help of a handful of guards like Ramirez, they have managed to order and deliver loads of reading programs and construction paper, glue sticks and round-nosed scissors.

Ramirez, in fact, is their main contact with the outside world, a willing facilitator of the prison-school relationship, which is continuing with the prisoners’ pledge to give $1,000 to Stead each year.

“Everyone needs help sometimes,” Ramirez says of his charges. Given a choice at age 16 “of going to the military or juvenile hall,” Ramirez, now a veteran himself, knows this better than most.

But more important to the men than the money and the supplies, they say, is the message they send to the children they are helping.

Now, says Lucero, “they have someone who actually cares what they’re doing. I didn’t have that. There wasn’t anyone there to help me.”

Because of the inmates at Northern Nevada Correctional Center, the children of Stead Elementary have learned several things.

They understand prison and who is inside.

“It’s a big building with a gate and you can’t get out and people are in there and that’s all,” says Edgar, 7. “Maybe they were drinking and driving and maybe they were taking drugs and maybe because they stoled something.”

And they understand kindness.

“The little kids love it that these people care enough about us--even though they’re in prison and their life is falling apart--that they took time out to raise money for us,” says second-grade teacher Suzy Davenport. “These are total strangers who care enough about us to buy us extra books.”