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"I've Been There"
Just north of the airport in Phoenix, in one of America’s most violent neighborhoods, the crackle of gunfire often ricochets between shabby stucco houses. Jacked-up cars blaring hip-hop cruise past the dirt yards, and the clatter of police helicopters echoes through the desert air. But if you listen closely, you can hear a chorus of small voices wafting from a classroom in a white brick school building. Brenda Combs is leading her students in song. “When we wake up in the morning,” she belts out in a soulful contralto, “we can brush our teeth … comb our hair … eat some food ... and get ready for a brand-new day.”The kids in this summer class range in age from 5 to 12 and, like most pupils at StarShine Academy—a charter school serving kindergarten through 12th grade—come from Phoenix’s poorest families. Some of their parents are drug addicts; others are homeless. The woman by the chalkboard, for her part, has achieved a kind of success that once would have seemed well beyond her grasp. Combs, who runs the summer program and teaches third and fourth grades the rest of the year, was recently listed in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. When she received her master’s in education from Grand Canyon University last spring, First Lady Laura Bush sent congratulations. As Combs was being interviewed on CNN, the university’s CEO showed up with a surprise graduation present: a full scholarship toward a PhD.
“Brenda is incredibly gifted,” says StarShine Academy’s founder, Patricia McCarty. “I often think of how many people used to walk by her and say, ‘She’s a throwaway.’ ”
What makes Combs such an extraordinary educator of at-risk children—the kind whose students drop by later to thank her—may be the years she spent living on the streets as a desperate crack addict. She slept under bridges and rummaged through dumpsters for breakfast. And she seldom used a comb or a toothbrush.
Combs, 45, likes to show teenage students her “before” photos, which portray a gaunt, disheveled derelict with zombie eyes. “I know what it’s like to want to get high,” she says, “to be hungry and abused. They trust me because I’ve been there.”
When Combs was a girl in Flagstaff, 135 miles to the north, few would have expected her to follow such a torturous path. Her father was a baker by day and a janitor by night; her mother, a part-time restaurant cook. Both believed in education and hard work. Brenda, the eldest of three, had an ear for music; when she taught herself to play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on the piano as a kindergartner, her mother wept with pride. For her family, church came before all else.
“My parents were very religious,” she recalls, “and they had a firm grip on their kids.” Drinking, smoking and cursing were prohibited; so were dating and slang. Brenda felt like a misfit among her more worldly peers, especially after the family moved from the inner city to a mostly white suburb. By the time she got to college, she was determined to live by her own rules. She lasted a year at Northern Arizona University, then quit and found work as a bank teller.
She also started partying. First came margaritas and daiquiris, then pot and acid. A boyfriend introduced her to cocaine. Combs now believes she has an addictive personality. At the time, she knew only that getting high banished her insecurities and inhibitions. She began drifting from job to job, committing petty crimes. Arrested for forgery and shoplifting, she got off with probation. But Combs’s real undoing proved to be crack—smokable cocaine—which hit Flagstaff in the mid-1980s. Suddenly nothing else mattered. Home became a cheap motel or an acquaintance’s sofa.
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