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Taking a Hard Line
Bonnie Hernandez, 41, a single mother of three, lives in public housing on Manhattan's Lower East Side. A minimum-wage cook's assistant at a Head Start program, she dropped out of school in the ninth grade and only lately got back to studying for her general equivalency diploma. But she hasn't let her own academic struggles keep her kids from succeeding.Exhibit A: her daughter Jennifer, who, Hernandez says, graduated from a city public high school among the top students in her class, and scored in the 98th percentile on New York's rigorous math Regents Exam. Now 20, she plans to attend a local college.
The brick building where the Hernandezes live may look bleak and forbidding from the outside, but step inside the three-bedroom apartment the family calls home and you enter a world that's cozy and inviting. One thing that keeps it that way is Hernandez's strict set of rules. They include the basics: no drugs, and no sleeping around (she's got a pretty good idea of what other kids are doing). She's strict in other ways. When her youngest son, Joshua, 13, had a chance to attend a high school in a distant part of the city, she balked at the idea of his traveling so far on his own. Instead, she insisted he enroll in school closer to home. Now, he says, "she watches me out the window."
She never stops watching. "I try to monitor as much as I can," says Hernandez. "I am nosy. I will go through your drawers. I will go under your mattress. Definitely. I want to know. I want to know what's bothering you."
Hernandez understands that being deeply involved in her children's lives has made a difference in their education. To do it, she had to swallow her pride.
"There were things I was unable to help them with -- homework. But I wasn't embarrassed," she says. "I called people and said, 'How can I do this?' The moment you close your mind from embarrassment, you close it to knowledge." Hernandez, a poor reader herself, knew she had to get her kids reading early on to give them a chance. So she took them regularly to local public libraries. "I pushed it on them," she says. "They had their library cards already at three years old." At night, she read aloud to them despite being so tired "my head would drop."
She also kept an eye out for recreation programs, and when she heard about an art program, she asked if she could get a discount by volunteering a few hours each week.
Recently Hernandez's older son, 18-year-old Joey, got into trouble at school and started to dress in what Hernandez sniffs at as a "gangster" look. Her response: "You're taking the space of someone who wants to make something of himself," she says. This tough love may just be hitting the mark. Joey has begun working with disabled children, and recently told his mother how wonderful it was to be able to read to a third-grader who couldn't read himself. Says Hernandez, "It felt like he was passing on a gift that I'd given him."
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