OAKLAND, Calif. -- In 1987, real estate agent Oral Lee Brown walked into a class of first-graders in a blighted neighborhood and made a promise: Stay in school and I'll see you through to college.
This fall, she made good, sending 19 students off to the colleges of their choice."When God is with you, no one can stop you," says Brown, who was making about $45,000 a year selling working-class homes when she made her promise at Brookfield Elementary.
Brown will be in Washington this week to pick up a John Stanford Education Hero award. It commemorates her 12 years of changing the world, one child at a time.
Brown's journey began with a chance encounter with a little girl who asked her for a quarter. She only had a $5 bill, so she took the girl to the corner store and offered to treat.
She knew something was wrong when the girl passed up candy for a loaf of bread and some bologna. Outside the store, as they waited together to cross the road, Brown asked, "Why are you not in school?" The child shrugged.
"I said, 'Where's your mother? Do you go to school?' She said, 'Sometime.' "
The light changed. "I watched her walk down to 95th Street and take a right," Brown said. "I never saw her again."
Over the next two weeks, Brown couldn't shake the conviction that kids in struggling east Oakland were in trouble and it was up to her to help.
A colleague warned her, "You can't change the world." The colleague was wrong.
Yolanda Peeks was floored the first time Brown unveiled her plan.
As the then-principal of Brookfield, she hadn't thought much of it when Brown called to say she wanted to adopt a class. But when Brown walked in with her church minister and explained she'd be shepherding a group of first-graders through college, "I almost fell through the floor," recalls Peeks, now the district's associate superintendent for curriculum.
"Who are you?" Peeks exclaimed.
Peeks lost no time finding a class for Brown. It took the children a little longer to catch on.
"I remember a lady coming in the class and she gave all the students Christmas gifts and I remember her saying she would be a part of our life and I didn't know what she was talking about," says Jeffrey Toney, a student in that class.
Four of the original 23 first-graders didn't make it to college, but 19 hung in. Now 18, Toney is in his first semester at private Columbia College Chicago, courtesy of Brown.
Getting the group of kids into college took more than good intentions.
There were monthly meetings with parents, weekly meetings with students, lunches on school playgrounds.
"Oftentimes there would be more parents at the classroom meeting than there would be for PTA meetings for the whole school. It was a great way to get the parents connected to their kids' education," Peeks recalls. "She talked a lot about college and her own dreams and aspirations and her life. I think a lot of the parents began to see then that it is their role to really keep the long-range role of education in front of their kids' faces all of the time."
"I could not keep up with the ways that she wanted to work with them," says Peeks. "Tutoring, donations of encyclopedias, books, interacting with them, field trips, all kinds of ways to keep them inspired and feeling positive about school."
"She started being like a second mom," says Toney. "If I needed some clothes or something, she'd give me some money to get some clothes. If I just came to her and told her I was hungry, she'd give me something to eat."
It was in 1995, when Brown took her students to visit black colleges in Atlanta, that Toney fully grasped his good fortune.
"I was like, Whoa! We're on the plane going to visit these colleges. It was like total organization."
Now, he's planning to become a businessman. "I want to own my own business, he says, "and I want to help some kids like Brown."
This year, the federal government recognized Brown's accomplishment, too, with the Stanford awards that are honoring 12 citizens for outstanding contributions to education.
"Why me?" was Brown's reaction.
Sometimes there was trouble.
The children of Brookfield went to school with all the problems of their neighborhood. Most lived below the poverty line, a number were in families receiving welfare. The school had some of the lowest test scores in the district. "Crime in the community was a great deal of influence in terms of the kids," Peeks recalls. "Many of the kids saw that as a possible career option."
Having a fairy godmother didn't make the problems of Brookfield magically disappear.
Brown, a graduate of the University of South Florida, found herself remonstrating with a girl who was skipping class, telling her, "I didn't have to take you. I chose you. And then she started crying, 'But Mrs. Brown, you don't understand what I go through.' I told her, 'I came out of Mississippi. I picked cotton.' "
The girl went back to school.
Once, Brown had to appear before a judge to plead the case for a student who had run afoul of the law.
The judge relented but not before he had given Brown a lecture. Later she took a turn at lecturing herself, telling the young offender: "This is an opportunity for you to make the right choices in the future."
That student is now in college.
"There's been times that I went home, put my purse down, went upstairs and got in bed and cried myself to sleep and said, 'I'm never going back.' " Brown says. "I'd wake up the next morning and I was the first one there."
Paying for the dream wasn't easy.
Brown, who is widowed and has two grown daughters, found $10,000 every year to put into a trust fund. "There was days I ate beans," she said.
She also holds an annual fund-raiser with the help of others in the community. Funds now stand at about $183,000. She expects to raise another $275,000 to finish the job.
Last spring she went to eight different high school graduations.
"I cried until I didn't have no more tears," she says.
In four years, she plans to attend 10 different college graduations.
"When my babies walk across that stage," she said, "then they can just lay me down and let me die."