Allan Appel Photo
The menu: salad, ziti with meat sauce and peppers, and pineapple upside down cake. The deeper nourishment was provided by the fathers and sons sitting down at the table and talking with each other.
The meal — and the pitch to get dads more involved in their sons’ education — were served at report card night Thursday at New Haven Academy.
The school’s parent outreach coordinator, Ramona Knox, has her eye on doing something that is difficult at the magnet high school and throughout the city: getting young men to bring their dads to school.
On Wednesday, she cooked up a hearty menu for a father-and-son themed night at the school’s “restaurant,” a classroom-sized space just off the main corridor of the school’s newly refurbished building on Orange and Bradley.
Even with the uncooperative weather, Knox got nine dads and their sons, including Morris Trent and his son Morris Emery Trent, a senior at NHA, to dine with her.
Last November, at the restaurant’s inaugural father-son evening, 14 NHA young men dined with their dads. For that evening (that menu, Knox remembered well, was baked chicken and yams) there was also no budget for food. But Ramona Knox bought the food herself and cooked it. At Wednesday’s event, school directors Greg Baldwin and Meredith Gavrin funded the food, although Knox did the shopping and all the preparation. She corralled half a dozen students to work as waiters.
“You’d be surprised how many kids call her [Ramona Knox] ‘mom,’ said Gavrin. “Some of us do too.”
Knox is an omnipresent greeter at the school and a shoulder for visiting parents to lean on while they wait often nervously to talk to a teacher or a director.
She has also scheduled a dizzying number of other special evenings to involve parents: mother-daughter buffets, old fashioned dances, ice cream socials to celebrate every month’s birthdays, bingo nights, and, of course a prom and a field day.
Still, these father-son events hold a special place in her priorities.
“You see mothers with daughters, and mothers with sons. You don’t see fathers with sons that often,” she said.
Of the dads who have shown up so far, Knox said, “they are good fathers.”
That described Morris Trent. A jazz musician, he played guitar and upright for decades with the Eddie Buster/Morris Trent Duo. He said over the years he had turned down opportunities to tour beyond the region so he could remain near home and raise by himself four other kids including Morris.
He prepares the food in the morning and at night. “I’m Mr. Mom,” he said, The younger Morris seemed to know how lucky he is.
“I’ve got a lot of friends who don’t have their fathers. I’m grateful he’s here with me,” he said.
With fathers and sons who have solid relationships like the Trents, Knox said, the dinners can also become a simple and moving way of saying thank you.
In addition to the food and good cheer, Knox brings a theme and a speaker to her events. On Thursday, she invited the pastor of her church. Pastor Walter Williams III of the Walk of Faith church in New Haven showed a video. He led a discussion on the gun violence among black males and the continuing use of the words “nigger” and “bitch” in young African-American culture.
It was a tough discussion. The words were a sign of the continuing or lingering physical enslavement of blacks, now taking the form of verbal self-denigration and mental self-enslavement.
“You wouldn’t call your mother “bitch,” would you?” Pastor Williams challenged one young man. Another said that he knows of families where that in fact occurs.
NHA Dean James Huckabey said when kids put down the value of education to which they are entitled, that also is an aspect of enslavement or self punishment. The whip has been internalized.
Jay Kemp of the Brotherhood Summit joined the NHA restaurant crowd Thursday because he heard good things about what the experience was doing for young black males. “We need to curb the appetite for negativity in hip hop culture,” and elsewhere, he said.
The Trents listened intently. At the end of the pastor’s remarks, the elder Trent asked for a copy of the video.
Ramona Knox informed the younger Trent of other upcoming activities at NHA, including the semi-formal ball she’s running on March 13. “I’d like to see you there,” she said.
Her commitment is to use the restaurant and other school activities to get every child in the 240-student body to come to the school at least once with a parent, and the boys with their fathers if possible. Each of the invited boys receives a kind of interview from Knox. If a father is not around or incarcerated, they know an uncle or any concerned adult is a fine substitute.
On this Thursday’s father and son restaurant night, ninth-rader Dashaan Perry was to have been on the guest list. Dashaan was supposed to have had dinner with his dad. At the last minute, however, his father had to work.
So he spent the evening ushering people in from the rainy sidewalk up to the second floor restaurant. Knox wanted to be sure that Dashaan had his dinner, too.