ANNOUNCER: Good morning. We re going to start, so please be seated now.

ANNOUNCER: Good morning. We re going to start, so please be seated now. This morning, as all good things always come to an end, we re going to end with a wonderful note about believing in children and how that belief can really take us really far with our students. With that said, it is my pleasure to present Salome El Thomas. Principal El as he is called by his students and colleagues, has an honorary doctorate degree from Ursinus College. And he also received the Marcus A. Foster Award as the Outstanding School District Administrator in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania s distinguished Martin Luther King award. Principal El is a principal at John F. Reynolds Elementary School in North Philadelphia and the author of a great book called I Choose to Stay. As we always have people who believe in education and he believes also in giving you a more in-depth information about who he is and what he does. So there is a presentation of all of his accomplishments through this video. [VIDEO BEGINS] FEMALE: Every child needs someone to be crazy about them. This is the mantra of Salome Thomas-El, award-winning teacher and principal and nationally recognized educator. It shapes his lifelong to answering the question, how do we ensure that every child achieves their greatest potential? This question lies at the heart of the national dialogue on education policy, the day in and day out work of school personnel, and the hopes of every parent. Central to this challenge is how we succeed with children who are facing the most serious barriers to success: poverty, violence, neglect, and low expectations. 1

For over 20 years, Principal El has taken on this challenge with the absolute belief that every child can and will learn as long as adults in their world care enough not to give up. Starting as a teacher and chess coach at Vaux Middle School and through his years as principal at several traditional public and charter schools, Thomas-El has transformed the attitudes and strategies of school staff, parents, and members of the community to help hundreds of troubled children not only graduate from high school, but to go on to earn higher degrees from major colleges and universities. He brings to the process a powerful combination of passion, caring, and leadership to craft a refreshing common-sense road map to help kids achieve their dreams no matter the odds. SALOME THOMAS-EL: The first thing I want to do is make a connection. You ve had teachers. You ve had some run-ins. You ve had fights in the lunchroom. So how are things at home with you and your parents? FEMALE: Got married to their college sweetheart. SALOME THOMAS-EL: The second thing I want to do is to get to know these children to find out what s really going on in their life. Maybe take them on a basketball court, play a little basketball. Get that stuff out of here! The third thing I want to do is become a part of their world. It s about going to where that child is and taking that child to where you want them to go. FEMALE: Salome Thomas-El is married and lives in Delaware County with his two young children. He is a nation education consultant and long time teacher and principal in Philadelphia. He received national acclaim as a teacher and 2

chess coach at Vaux Middle School, where his students have gone on to win world recognition as eight time national chess champions. Thomas-El speaks to groups across the country and frequently appears on C-SPAN, CNN, and NPR Radio. Principal El is a regular contributor on The Dr. Oz Show and the author of the best selling book, I Choose To Stay, which was optioned by the Walt Disney Company. His newest book, The Immortality of Influence, stresses the importance of leadership, mentoring, parenting, and service to others. He has received the Marcus A. Foster award as the Outstanding School District Administrator in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania s distinguished Martin Luther King award. Principal El was honored as a Reader s Digest Magazine Inspiring American Icon and Philadelphia Magazine s Best Philadelphian. Principal El is on a mission to motivate educators and parents to realize the tremendous influence they have over our children to help them reach their fullest potential. SALOME THOMAS-EL: You re talking about my motto. You must believe in them until they begin to believe in themselves. You will not fail. You will pass because I will help you pass. Now I may be hard on you now, but it s because I want it to be easy on you later in life. There s no class that won t pass. [VIDEO ENDS] SALOME THOMAS-EL: Good morning. Now my students greet me like that every morning and I complain about it every morning. And they continue to do the same thing over and over again. And I ll be darned if I m going to take it from 3

adults. Now, I ll take it from them, but I won t take it from you, especially people who I know get the same thing. So we re going to try that one more time. Good morning. Good morning, much better. Now I know this is the last session and I know there are people that are excited about getting back home to their families and some are you are probably excited about getting back to work. God bless you. But I want to first of all thank all of you for being here. On a nice day like today, when there are so many other things going on not only in our surround area, but back at home in our own communities, trying to beat traffic and just trying to get back to the day-to-day life. Some of you have been here since Monday, some maybe even Sunday. To think that you would come into a room -- and you know, and most agents will tell their speakers don t take the last session. Most people don t show up to the last session. You want to speak into a room full of people. But see, folks, I m an educator. So I know there s some days when I may only have five parents that come to hear. I may only have -- I may have 25 students in my room, but there may be only five that may hear me on any given day. So I learned early on in life that I don t need a room full of people to be able to influence change. What I need is the people who are in the room to be people who are willing to do the same thing. That we need to be people who are willing to say that I m going to take what I learn this week, the people that I met, the programs and best practices that I ve been exposed to, and I m going to go back into the my own school, my own community, maybe even my own family, because some of us -- and if you re like me, you have people in your family who 4

are struggling. And we go back and we say, look at what I ve learned. Look at who I ve met. But my hat goes off to you because you ve made the sacrifice. Not knowing what you were going to come in here and you say, who s this guy from Philadelphia that I m going to -- I could be out of this area. But you came anyway and many of you sat in the back because you think that somehow if you sit in the back, the session is going to end earlier because I m going to think the day is longer. But I m all right with that because you are in the room. And that s how we have to be with our children because all of them are not going to come and immediately sit in the front. All of them are not going to come and immediately sit in my office as the principal. And then some children that are there all day. There are some that are in my office more than my furniture and their parents complain about my program. They say, you discipline my child too much. I don t like your program. And then I have to remind them if their program was working, I wouldn t have to use mine. Because their children who spend all year in my school and never see my office other than to pick up their straight A report card. But those children come to us no matter who they are, no matter what they look like. They come to us wanting so much more than they have. Parents don t keep their good children home. They send us their best. They try, they do what they can, and then we try to close that gap. So that s what making AYP is all about, folks. See for me, first of all, I have to make AYP at home. So I got to make sure I m trying to spend as much time as I can with my own children instead of taking care of somebody else s 750 5

every day. I got to try to make sure that I m taking care of my home, that I m a part of the community, that I m getting into my -- the school that my daughters attend, that I m there, and then balance all of that with being in my school as much as possible and not having people feel bad when I m not there. Or preventing me from feeling bad when I m not there because we re home all day thinking about what s going on at work. And then we re at work all day thinking about what am I missing at home. That s a tough balance. That s a tough challenge, but we somehow chose to fight that fight. We chose this, folks. It didn t choose you. We chose this. But once you choose it, you learn early on if it is your calling. It takes a student about 30 minutes to figure you out. Some are experts. With the Internet now, about five minutes they know if you re there for them. After a day or two, you know if your heart is in it. I have literally seen teachers quit after one day of work, folks. The children that we work with -- it doesn t matter where you are, whether you re in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, in the city, in the suburbs, in rural areas, it doesn t matter. Our children are struggling. Columbine High School wasn t in the inner city. Our children are struggling. So when we talk about helping students become successful, realizing their dreams, we have to begin with starting with that foundation. And that foundation is shaped by people like you. And people like you acquire those skills because you re able to come to a conference where people put you first. Department of Education for years has given us the opportunity to be able to become better 6

practitioners so we can go and not only improve our students, but we can help some other folks that might be a little more hardheaded than we are. Now for years we ve been calling it PaTTAN and I found out that today that I ve pronouncing wrong my entire life. I am ashamed as an educator. Ashamed of myself. And I m going to criticize every other person who calls this organization PaTTAN for the rest of my life. As if I ve never made the mistake, but it s PaTTAN. Either one, it doesn t matter? It doesn t matter? Your name shouldn t matter anyway, folks, because folks, people are not going to remember your name. When you re gone, they re not going to remember your name. They re going to remember your work. They re going to remember the people that you have been able to influence who are making a difference and influencing other people s lives. But I thank you for having the courage to invite me, to invite an educator, someone who s still in the trenches because I m still a principal, folks. And people say, how come you haven t, you know, gone out and done this? Because see, if I do any of that, then it will require me to leave my job and I love my job. And I know some of you might think, you know, this man has a problem. He is a principal in a school, working with adults who really cause me more problems than my kids, and he enjoys it. See, because I found my passion. See, when you find your passion, when you find your life s work, there s nothing anyone can do to deter you from continuing on your mission. You enjoy going -- you know, it s not a job. You just happen to get paid to do what you like to do. See, because these children will keep you on your toes and on your knees 7

every day. So if you re looking for some -- the path of least resistance, then I would advise you not to choose children. Not in the school or in your own. I m being honest. Some of you parents, you put it out there for me now. You amen that because I m still struggling as a parent myself. I have two young girls, seven and ten. You ladies are high maintenance at any age. It doesn t matter. And I took women s studies twice at ES, East Stroudsburg University, twice. And I get about an hour of ESPN every night in my house. But there s no greater sacrifice then the one you make when you look into a child s eyes and say that I will look out for you for the rest of your life. Parenting doesn t stop when they become elementary or middle school students. I have to fight with parents all the time. And then they become high school students and you become non-existent. And that s when they need you the most. See, but when we don t begin to look at how we operate as parents and how we operate as people who -- because see, you think you work in a field where it s K-5, K-6, K-8, K-12. Folks, this work is K through adult. Because if we had that idea, then we wouldn t have mothers murdering their children simply because they somehow want a better life. This is the life that we chose and we will take -- we will make all of the sacrifices that come with it. Sacrifice is the first word in the parent s dictionary. I know some of you are probably thinking, I thought he was a teacher, not a preacher. Well folks, this work is a ministry. Every day that you go in and you try to change someone, you are ministering to them. And we have to look at it that way. And we talk about preparing children and make adequate yearly 8

progress. And we have to look at how we are educating children at an early age, how we are teaching them to be responsible because these children have to somehow develop this concept of self-efficacy. If they are going to be successful in life, in school and in life, they have to begin to take responsibility for their own behavior and their own actions and their own learning. The research is out there that the majority, the majority of what impacts a student s test scores happen to children before they ever set foot in your school. And we know that. And so what we begin to do is say that we have to somehow counteract whatever those negative forces are outside this school and give them what they need in school. No matter what they look like and no matter what you look like. You can t think because a child looks different than you that you can t help them. And they can t think because they look different than you do that you can t help them. They don t care what you look like. They don t care what color you are. They don t care how old you are. They don t care where you came from. The only thing they want to know is are you going to be here tomorrow. Because almost every person in my life who told me that they wanted to help me or wanted to help me change, the next day I came and they were gone. And for some children, it takes them days. It takes them weeks. For some, it ll take them years before they believe you. And we have to be strong enough to say to those children every day that we walk in, I m still here. Oh, F me? Okay, that s fine. I ll be here tomorrow. Oh, now your mom s on the phone saying the same thing. I ll be here next week. Because at some point, you are going to realize that there 9

aren t too many people out there who are willing to help you that are going to take what I take from you. You look at these men in the room, what they represent. They represent fatherhood, strength in the community. There s so many of men out there who have given up on their own children. We are basically living in a fatherless society. But yet you have men who have decided that they were going to sacrifice large salaries to say to a child that you can be me because I was once you. That tells me more about you than anything else because when they re walking in, they don t care if you re trying to lose weight, if you re going to buy hair. They don t care if you ll be bald forever. They don t care. What they know is that you re educated and you somehow remain in my presence, that you re not trying to abuse me, you re not trying to use me, and you re actually trying to help me get to another level. And no man in my life, no man who s related to me by blood at all has ever even attempted to do that. But yet, you still try. And there might be one of you today who may be thinking there s some of that. You know, this is it. I can t do it. But folks, when you go back there in September, there s one that s going to come to you and say, thanks for coming back. There s going to be somebody that s going to say, thanks for keeping this program going. Thanks for not giving up on me. And you re going to have to excuse me today, folks, but I m a little fired up today. And I m not normally like this -- well, sometimes. But there is this sense of urgency now, where if we wait another day, we re going to continue to lose children. I just had three former students murdered in 30 days in North 10

Philadelphia, in a 30-day period. Just had one of my colleague s principals murdered. His funeral was last weekend. In a weekend where five or six people were murdered, the July fourth weekend, 30 people shot in the city. So now the epidemic is spreading. It s not just poor people. It s not just people who commit crimes. Now we have educators who are being slain. We have got to find a way to reach these young people and teach them that you must understand that you can choose the behavior, but you cannot choose the consequences. See, self-efficacy is not about teaching children how to be successful. There are probably a million books on how to be successful. What we need to do is teach children how to respond when they re not. What do you do when you don t get the A or the B? What do you do when you don t get the job? What do you do when you don t get your way? Do you decide to go and shoot up your entire college campus? Do you decide to go into a school and try to burn the school down? Or are you an NBA millionaire who s accustomed to winning the championship and this year you don t win, so you spend the last quarter trying to hurt every guy on the other team? Folks, this is real. There are adults who do not know how to handle losing. So if we want to teach children how to be successful, we must prepare them for failure. And I know that s probably counter to almost everything that you ve heard. But folks, failure is real. Failure is motivating. Success is paralyzing. See, we must teach children to embrace failure. We must learn as schools to embrace failure. When we don t make AYP, we don t hide and wait until the next year and don t do anything because we don t want to be known as people who have failed. 11

What we say is we re going to own this. We re going to learn from it. We re going to grow from it and we re going to change what we do to become better, understanding that there will be other failures along the way, so we better be prepared for it. But we don t run from it. If you can look up, you can get up. We decide early on that these young people that we are going to teach you that you can be successful, but trust me, it ll be a long, hard road. And when we decide that we want to make that journey quick, we want to make that journey easy, see, that s when people start cheating. That s when people start doing all kinds of unscrupulous things because they somehow think that there are shortcuts. There s no journey in life that s worth it, folks, where there s a shortcut. And I learned that the hard way. Coming up in the inner city of Philadelphia and down the street projects, right near Temple University, I learned that any -- every move you make could cost you your life. My mother was raising me as a single parent, raising eight children. And she walked into my elementary school and talked to my third grade teacher and she said, this is my next to the youngest child. None of my older children are going to college and graduating. One of my children must graduate from college. My teacher said, you want me to help your child? Oh, I will. See, you know, see, now she could have very easy have said, I got 25, you know, depending on where you work. If you re in Philly, 30, 35 other children in my classroom that I have work -- I have to help. I can t focus on your child. But she didn t do that. See, excellent teachers move ordinary children to do extraordinary things. 12

She worked with my fourth grade teacher, who was an older, African American female who had been in our school about 30, 40 years. We thought she came with the building. And see, my third grade teacher was this young, white female, was not from the projects. So, you know, this was a serious dynamic here, but see, in her heart she knew that she was sent there to help children. My fourth grade teacher had all these after school programs, about 15 of them. Not one had a title. They were all called Get In Here, and we got in. Because she knew if they were going to help kids, they had to get us off the street. Because remember, it doesn t care what you look like or where you re from, it s where you are, where you re making a difference. And those teachers said, we re going to help you. And they talked to my mom. They helped me get into the Masterman School. I went to the Masterman School and I was shell-shocked. The kids there, two parent homes, nice cars. You had everything you could want in this school, but I struggled. I struggled because I was only the one from our family who was allowed to go to school outside of the community. But those teachers didn t let me down. They supported me and I went on to high school. Simon Gratz High School and became a basketball player and thought I could skip college and go right to the NBA. And my teachers all gathered around me, my counselor and they said, yeah, we heard you been talking about skipping college. We need to talk to you. I said, you know a good agent? They said, no, but we ve seen you play basketball and you can t jump over a credit card. So you are not going to the NBA, but you re smart enough to 13

get an MBA. Why don t you go away to college and come back and help the same community that nurtured and supported you and supported your family? And they were right. So many people get help and make it out and never come back. I went off to ESU, spent four years, and I came back, folks, and I didn t have a job. I m going to keep my eye on the clock because my goal is to try and get you out of here a little early today. Now I may appear like I m up here talking for an hour, but it won t be. It s just going to look like that. I come back and I have no job and my friends are waiting for me on the corner. Oh, we told you you were wasting your time. You d have been better off in the state pen instead of Penn State. Why you thinking about going to Yale instead of jail? See, there are young people in the community, even adults, their entire mission in life is to kill the dreams of other people. And the children that you are working with deal with this on a daily basis. They want to submit to you. They want to submit to your leadership, to your teaching, to your mentorship, but somehow there are people in the community who are telling them that they re wrong, that they re sellouts. You re selling out because you want to be successful. So you know what? My friends are sort of making me feel like a failure. Here I am with a college degree. Most of them didn t even graduate high school, but they somehow made me feel like a failure. And I called my teacher. I called my high school teacher and I said, listen, you told me to go to college. Not only do I not have a J-O-B, I don t a C-A-R or A-P-T. And my friends on the corner are 14

making me feel bad. They said, well, we didn t promise you that you d be rich. I said, yes, but you didn t tell me that I would have to deal with this in the community. The pool of the community when you want to try to get out, they somehow don t appreciate that. And there s some children who deal with this right within their own families, envy and jealousy. We ve got children we ve tried to get into universities whose parents have said, I refuse to sign off on the financial aid paperwork. I refuse to sign the college application because you ll be too far away and I need you to babysit for me. This is what you have to help children and parents overcome. My teacher said, well, I can help you. My high school teacher, Marcia Pinkett, Simon Gratz, she said, my brother s an executive producer for a sports channel. You know, at the time it was prison sports. She said, I can get you a part-time job. It won t be full-time, but at least you ll have a job. So I started working for what we call at that time the NBAB. There were two great guys. And every week we spent a day with an NBA player and we would televise a feature on them at halftime of NBA games. So every week we spent a day with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, which was very interesting. But when I got back to the neighborhood, my friends were not impressed by that. They said, you re not working on The Today Show. So I had to come back and tell them that I was working on Nightline. I mean, they didn t know anything about Ted Koppel. Most of them, it took them two hours to watch 60 Minutes, so I know they wouldn t know anything about the nightly news. But 15

there was somehow this need to impress people in the community when in actuality -- see folks, they were already impressed. They just would never tell me. They were impressed just by the fact that I had the courage to do something different. But when you do those things, when you choose to be different, when you choose to stay, when you choose to be a part of the life of a child, you shine a light on all those other people who have given up. And for them, that can be difficult to accept. So I have this wonderful job. I m a production assistant and my teacher s calling me and say, listen, we need you to come and talk to some high school kids about your job in TV. And see, teachers always have an ulterior motive. You know you do. So I said, sure, I ll come. And I went in and talked to the students and you know, they didn t even ask me my name. They wanted to know how much money did Michael Jordan have and how many cars did Larry Bird have, but there were several who came to me after the program and said, if you can come in and motivate us, how come you aren t a teacher? It was the first time in my life that someone had me asked me a question and I had no response. Not my coaches, not my mother, teachers, no one, some young people. That taught me that I had become the same person that I complained about, who made it out of the community. The community helped and came back to give nothing. So I walked into my TV job and I quit. And I enrolled in graduate school and I got a master s degree and a certificate to teach and I went right back to the same high school and started teaching. Those students taught me that -- I found my calling now. I was afraid. I was nervous because there s nothing like walking 16

into a school building on the first day as an employee. And I walk in and the kids all run up to me and they re a little older now. Its a [inaudible] mansion, high school, and they run up to me and they say, Principal El, Mr. El, you came back. We were only joking about coming back. I wanted you to hook me up with a TV job. I said, Well, it s too late now. I m here and I got student loans, so I m not leaving. But it was then that I realized, folks, that high school reform does not begin in high school. The children are coming to high school lacking so many skills. So I decided to spend the next ten years of my life in a feeder middle school. And in ten years at Vaux Middle School we lost 20 students to murder in our community. There s no teacher certification program that will ever prepare you to walk into a school or to a classroom and see an empty chair that a 12-, 13-year old child will never sit in again. There s nothing. And I said to myself, I ve got to find a way to teach these children to make better decisions. So, I started teaching them to play chess. I started teaching special education students mathematics on the chessboard. Knights move on right angles, bishops move on diagonals, the chessboard is a large square that contains 64 smaller squares. And folks, what I didn t realize was not only was teaching these students mathematics, I was given them intellectual capital because they were now walking around the school carrying chessboards. And if you don t think anything else about a child who carries a chessboard, then you believe that they are intelligent. So you had these -- learning disabled, learning support students walk around the building. The kid 17

would say you know, aren t you in the LD program? Yeah, I am. Let s play a little chess and see if you should be my roommate. See, I learn quickly as a teacher that smart is not something you are, it s something that you can become. These students starting beating me right away. So I started sending them to play other teachers. They started beating the other teachers. Teachers would call me up, stop sending them. They re embarrassing me in front of my kids. And they said, why don t you take them out and have them play chess against other schools. See, there had been a long history for years of strong chess players at Vaux, but the program had died. And I said that this is something that we have to rebuild. See chess teaches you critical thinking, problem solving, reasoning. And those students who struggled the most need those skills. See what I ve learned in my years of working with students who have learning issues is that many of these student suffer from overconfidence. That these are students who somehow early in their life were taught that they were struggling but it s okay. That you re still smart. Don t worry about it baby, mommy had the same issues. You re doing well. You re doing great. So they go through school never really feeling that they need to be challenged because I was always told it s okay to be two years behind. And folks there s lots of research out surrounding this issue. And we have to find a way to be courageous enough to say to students that, no, you need to step it up. Being willing to only praise what is praiseworthy. And knowing that students can handle when you tell them that I need just a little bit more. We just 18

need to be more descriptive about it. Instead of just writing the grade on the paper and saying, good job. We say, you know what? This is pretty good, but I think you could have given me a little more detail. I think your ending could have been a little more exciting and then maybe you could capture your reader. Be willing to say to students what they need. But when those students struggle, when we know we shouldn t publish it, why are we publishing it? Just make them do one more revision. Trust me, you will change their lives. You will, but we have to be willing to -- and I know it could be tough to try to confront a student today, folks. I know, think about those teachers who had to confront me when I thought I was going to be the next Michael Jordan and I couldn t jump over a newspaper. But they said we ve got to save this kid s life. So I knew. And so, I took the advice of those teachers and I started taking on students to play against other elementary, middle schools and they were winning. They were arrogant, cocky, overconfident. You don t know children like that. And I said to my kids, this is going to stop. From this point, we only play high schools. So they started losing right away. Oh, and they were humbled folks. See when they were winning, they wanted to play and jump rope and have a good time and sing and dance, but when they lose all they want to do is cry and make excuses. But see, I had a big problem because after a while they started beating high schools. See because children will rise to your level of expectation. And see, I said, this can t be happening. Then they beat Central High School s chess team, which is one of my magnet high schools. And then the teacher said, you need to start taking these students to chess tournaments. I say, well then, you 19

need to go talk to my wife and get permission for me. I notice you keep saying you need to, you need to. Said, you teachers are good. You take them and I m going to stay right home and stay married. So I went to my wife and I begged and I said, I want to take these children to this big tournament in Parsippany, New Jersey, in North Jersey near New York. It was the U.S. Amateur Team Championship. Largest team versus team even in the world. Larger than the Olympics. Over 220 teams, no age limit. The problem for me it was Valentine s Day weekend. It was 1997. I remember it. As I remember the look in my wife s eyes when she heard me ask to go away with Bebe s kids on Valentine s Day weekend. She said, you have got to be crazy. I said, baby, you got to understand this is what a teacher s life is about. If I don t do it, who will? See, but what saved me is we had President s Day on Monday so we were going to be off on Monday and she said, well you come back and we can celebrate. You know, see you wives you re always accommodating. Said, we can celebrate on Sunday and Monday. I said, fine. See the problem for me, folks, was that this tournament didn t end until Monday and I did not have the heart to tell my wife. So I went the entire weekend and did not call my wife. Big mistake, and I m going to tell you -- and here s the problem. I learned it from some guys in the barbershop. See when we go to the barbershop -- now fellas I got to let them know. We go to the barbershop for therapy. That s our little man time where we get to talk about your issues. All the planets you re from, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, 20

everywhere, all but Earth. It s like a mini Dr. Phil show at the barbershop and there were several older men that said, son, we re going to give you some advice and we re not going to charge. When you go out late at night, you come home, you re going to hear it. Never, ever, ever, call home and hear it twice. That s the worst advice ever received in my life. So I pull up to the Parsippany Hilton Hotel, you know, nice hotel and I tell the students that I have 15 kids in the van. I say, listen, if the furniture is not in the van when we pull up, I don t want it in the van when we leave because we don t have room for it. And they promised me. So the first match, my students are matched up against Bucknell University s chess team and one of the students, a graduate student, who came back to play with his friends -- remember there was no age limit. So I told my students, it s time to get humbled now. And after the match, they were playing ball and jumping rope. They were happy. See, they were now learning. And I was proud and I told them, this is what losing can do for you. It teaches you life lessons. They said, one issue sir, we won. So I went to find the graduate student. I said, what happened, sir? Tell me what. He said, I have two questions. Are these middle school kids or midget adults? He said, who is the chess master that works with them? I said, sir, we re from a poor school district. We can t afford a chess master. These children are surrounded by adults, teachers, who teach them that success only comes before work in the dictionary. Now you must work hard every day if you re going to be 21

successful. That the students that you are competing against are not in your school. Bless you, and you must keep that in your mind. So the next day they match one of your young, Demetrius Callop against an expert level player. A guy who had been playing 20 years and in his mid 40s. All the coaches were upset. This young man s father was in prison. He s being raised by an older grandmother. He had been evicted from his home so we couldn t get clothing for him to go on the trip. The teachers and folks in the church all pitched in and raised money to buy him what he needed. Now, of course, he wanted Air Jordan and Sean Jean, we were able to get him some Air Gordon s, but he was happy. You know about those. And so, this young man sits there and he s winning this match. And I said, I m one the wrong side of the board. So I go around to the other side of the board, right? Remember what I taught those special education students. That chessboard is a square. It is the same on all four sides. This was the first time in 35 years of U.S. chess history that a novice or beginner player had ever defeated an expert level player at this tournament. Never done before. And I said, Meet, see we called him Meet, everybody has a Meet, right? I said, Meet, how d you beat this guy? He said, Mr. El, he said his friends were all there. They re buying him beers and you know, like he s just automatically going to win and I didn t think I would win. He said, but I thought about all those people who helped me get here. Who purchased clothes and gave me money. He said, I m not going to get up without leaving everything on the table. And he said, it was almost as if I 22

wasn t even moving the pieces. He said, I made a move, Mr. El, that made this guy think for 30 minutes. And then the tournament director said that this young man s thinking was not only superior to you, his coach, which was obvious, but to all the other adults who were there. He said, we had a chess master analyze the game and said there was no answer to how he checkmated this guy. He said, I want to treat your children to dinner in the hotel restaurant. I said, sir, this is a Hilton Hotel. You don t want to let my kids in your restaurant. You give me a few dollars, I ll take them to McDonald s and they will be fine. He said, no, no, this has never been done before. We re going to write an article in Chess Life magazine about these students. So I took the students to the restaurant and the menu was outside. So they put it outside so you could read it and decide if you want to come inside. So I said, students promise me, if you can t pronounce it, don t order it. They went an ordered Filet Mignon, Crab Bisque, but that was their experience. The children will eat like that on a regular basis. And see folks, it was no -- those students went on to defeat a team of four men at this student whose combined age was over 200 years. Never done before. They won first place. The tournament director gave them trophies and then he gave me a plaque. I said, why you giving me a plaque? He said, well, there s some talk around here that you haven t called home all weekend. You might need this when you get home. And so I go home and I ask the kids if I can borrow their trophies for sympathy, right? So, I walk in the door and my wife said, put the kids trophies 23

down. I said, why? You don t want to see them? She said, no, I don t want to hurt the trophies. See it was then, folks, I realized that, you know, we make all these sacrifices for the people we work with but there are people at home that take care of us. We get beat up. We get bloodied. It s just like a prizefighter. We go back home it s like -- and your spouse, your family is like your cut man. They patch you all up and spray water on you and throw you back out there for three more minutes. You get beat up and you come back home every day. But we got to take care of those people. And you got to take care of yourself. You say, you re going to eat better. You re going to exercise more. You re no good to the people you work with, you re sitting in the hospital waiting on a triple bypass. We got to make ourselves important, because see it s you, your body, through which you serve other people. So I learn now, I m struggling still as you can see I m here today. I m going to get right back on the road and I m not even going to trust that the airport may hold me up. I got a driver here waiting to take me right on out of here. So I can get on back to my family because my daughter 15 times how much she was going to love me and miss me when I was leaving. That she didn t call me one time since I ve been gone, but I know that that s important. Folks, I m going to wrap up and I m going to tell you that this life that we live, this work that we do is important. My first year as principal -- you know, my mother said, you got to be crazy. You want to be a principal. I said, mom, well I been teaching and breaking up fights in the lunchroom. She said, don t you know as a principal you will break up more fights between your teachers than you ever 24

did in the lunchroom. And she told the truth, but she said, if you re going to be an effective principal you ve got to realize that you can t be arrogant. She said, arrogance is the Achilles heal to school leader. Go in there and understand that there will be old ladies working there year after year, principal after principal after principal, teaching the children of the children that they taught. She said, go in and bow down and learn from them. And I went into my first faculty meeting, I use my mother s entire script. Problem for me is I didn t edit out the part about old ladies. So I spent my entire first year buying color copiers, right? If they had Smart Boards back then, I would have purchased one for everybody. But at the end of the year I started feeling like this principal job is -- this is tough work. This is tough work. I had a young man call me named Otis Bulleye. He d been one of my first chess players and he struggled. Lived in a home with 12 people. Kids teasing him. He wore the same uniform all the time. He was a good kid. We were able to get him into the high school for engineering science. He struggled. Ending up graduating from University of City High School, one of our troubled neighborhood schools. But, he was good kid and he went away to college but we had heard he dropped out. And we hadn t heard from him. He called me and he said, Principal El, I m graduating from college. I said, wait a minute, Otis. Where are you graduating from? He said, Westchester State. I said, Westchester State prison? He said, no, Westchester State University. He said, but listen, it s Friday and I m graduating on Sunday. I don t want you to come. He said, I just want you to go and thank all those teachers that helped me. 25

Let them know that one of their kids made it. And I said, wait a minute, Otis. You don t understand something. I ve been to too many funerals. I need to go to more graduations. So you re really graduating? He said, yes, I m graduating on Sunday. I call my wife because I call her before I go anywhere now. Said, you remember Otis? She was pregnant with our first daughter. And she said, yeah, I remember him. I said, we got to go see this young man graduate. We made the drive to Westchester. It was a 100 degrees. People were passing out in the heat. We cried through the entire ceremony. We missed it. We were crying so much. We took pictures of Otis with his friends, his professors. We took pictures of Otis with people he didn t even know. We were just happy to see that one of our kids made it. And Otis shared with us later on that many of his family members didn t even come to his graduation. But I said, look in that audience because I had every teacher who had never known that young man come to his graduation. And we can go to the state championship basketball and we can go the pageants and everything else that we need to show up when our kids graduate from college. Now you know when you clap, you re using up my time now. But folks, that was the proudest -- one of the proudest days of my life. But then it made 2004 -- see that was in June of 2000 when Otis graduated from Westchester. May 2004, Otis graduated from Temple Law School. And you know and I had everybody -- I had all his folks there again. And I went down, I said, Otis, you know when they give -- when you get a JD you get a big diploma. I said, Otis, you take this back to the hood. All 26

those kids that teased you about your uniform. I said, most of them probably need you to bail them out of jail anyway, but you show them your diploma. But you also let them know that their fathers teased me when I graduated from college and didn t have a job. Because see, I tried to do one of the toughest things in the world, folks, is I became a teacher and principal in the same neighborhood where I grew up. And there s so many people who view you as sleeping with the enemy when you become an educator. But we have to fight through that and fight through and get people to understand that I need you to join this fight because it s the only way to save our kids. For many of them it ll be one of the few salvations for them, education. I know we need to work with our parents. You often talk about, you know, our president had his leave no child behind. And see these parents today though don t understand that they can come in, kids run the conferences, they do everything they want. See our parents believed in leave no child with a behind. And see, it worked for many of us. But we know, we know that if we re going to save our children, save our schools and save the society that we ve got to raise a generation of children who understand that education is going to be important. Every child deserves to have at least one person be crazy about them, every one. And each of you have about 200 that you call your own. And I appreciate that. I am only here today because of people like you. If not for you, I would not be here to help hundreds of other children. So for that, you should be proud. You re saving lives. That s why you can t stop now. That s why we have to 27

want more for our children because we know, we know what happens when we continue to stay in their lives. Folks, I simply ask you if not you, then who? If not now, then when? I won t give up this fight. I promise you that I will stay in it with you. No matter what you do, no matter where you are, you have an opportunity to make a difference in a child s life. You ve done it already. I m asking you to continue to do so. What I m going to ask you to do is to pull more people, go out and get more soldiers to join us in this fight so that we can continue to save our children and save our schools. God bless you. [foreign language], thank you very much. Please travel safely and I will be outside signing books. If you folks in a hurry, you go on. I will see you at some other point in my life. I do not want to delay you. The folks that I do get a chance to meet. I will appreciate getting a chance to meet you. I love the fact that you have stayed here. That you made the decision to be here for this last session and to go back into your communities and make a difference. That tells me more about you than any degree that you ll ever receive, any job that you ll ever have. Thank you very much. 28