How Engineer Brad Ports Became Surrogate Father, Mr. Ports, to Neglected Students
Brad is an engineer by trade. “Teaching chose me,” he said, after he experienced a massive layoff in 1990 at McDonnell Douglas (nowadays Boeing), where he worked in St. Louis, MO. He started his four-year teaching journey at Gateway Institute of Technology, a St. Louis public school. His first adventurous undertaking was to create the bulk of an intense, high-tech 3-year curriculum that no other high school offered to this detailed level in the US: Aviation Maintenance.
Little did he know, he would become more than a teacher to his students in the 12th and 13th* grades. Oftentimes, he found himself being the surrogate parent who took those lost and neglected students – his children – under his wings. He protected and guided them to the right path of success. Many of his students turned out to be pilots, engineers, and even an aviation missionary in the Amazon. Below, Brad recalls some poignant stories on how he and his fellow educators turned the lives of students around. He also offers his take on the school system: what helps the students and what fails them.
*According to Brad, when these students graduated, they earned an equivalent of an Associate Degree in college, so much so, for example, when they got accepted in Purdue University, they started as Juniors.
Shirley: Let me start with this question: what is your most memorable moment as an educator?
Brad: Dealing with the kids. Particularly, the moment when one of my kids took 2nd place in a national competition.
Shirley: A few years ago, when you told me that he gave you a hug and a thank-you after the event, I saw the emotions in your eyes. How were you feeling in that moment?
Brad: I was proud of him. And I was happy that he had accepted me the way he had. I got invited to his 18th birthday party. Not too many people invite their teachers to their 18th birthday party. We stayed in touch for a long time. One time he let me know he was getting married. Last time we talked, he was a chief pilot flying a corporate jet.
Shirley: Flying a corporate jet, wow! Now go back to the day when you had a heart-to-heart talk in your office with a troubled boy. What did he do?
Brad: At 16, he was skipping school, drinking too much, and partying too much. He was too smart to do what he was doing. His parents were divorced. Since he had two places to stay, his parents did not know whether he went to school or not. I talked to his mother, who in turn spoke with his dad, and we came up with a plan.
Shirley: If you reported his skipping school to the admins, he could have been suspended, correct?
Brad: Yes, especially our program had a strict requirement for attendance, because we were covered by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), not just the school system. If you missed a couple of days of school, you had to start dropping out of the program.
Shirley: That day in your office, he asked you a question and you gave him a 5-word an answer that changed his life. What did he ask you? And what was your answer?
Brad: No, he didn’t ask a question. He was yelling at me: “You don’t have the right to be involved in my life. Don’t call my parents!” He did say, “Why would you do that?” And I told him, “Because I care about you.” He had too much potential not to.
Shirley: What was his reaction when he heard what you said?
Brad: He really wasn’t that happy, but he settled down. He was surprised because he was not used to people who actually cared. His mother went back to school to get a master degree and left him at home taking care of his three younger siblings. His father had a girlfriend. He felt like nobody really cared about him.
Shirley: But you saw something in him.
Brad: He was a smart kid. He just needed someone who actually cared about him.
Shirley: From that day on, how did you show him you meant what you said?
Brad: I was always there for him. I went out of my way for him like staying after school to help him. One Good Friday before the Easter holiday, school was closed. I had the keys to the school and worked with him the whole day to get his car running.
Shirley: Wow, that is care! So, he knew you truly cared about him. How soon did you see the changes in him?
Brad: Almost immediately. He tried not to let me down. There were a couple of times he did not come to school. I would call his mom and she would call his dad. He finally figured out: if he would not come to school, his parents would hear from me, and in turn he would be on his way to school.
Shirley: He turned his life around without being kicked out of school, because… Finish this sentence for me.
Brad: Because he figured out somebody cared about him. That there were people that were interested in him. Before, he was a kid who rode a motorcycle to school with a hangover because he partied and drank too much the night before. After he and I talked, he started putting a lot of effort into his school work. He actually graduated with a 4.0.
Shirley: Wow! He would have been wasted away if he did not have a caring teacher like you.
Brad: Yep. He probably would have ended up working in a manufacturing plant having a blue-color job.
Brad’s wife, Cathy joins in: He would send Brad emails and cards saying, “Thank you for everything. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know where I would be.”
Brad: His mom and dad both gave me a lot of credit for turning him around. He actually became a leader of the class, and everybody just followed behind him. He had come a long way.
Shirley: This gave him more confidence too. What do you think are some major reasons why students act out or fail?
Brad: First of all, it is the lack of expectation from the parents’ part. The lack of parental figures. For example, there was another boy whose dad was a manager of a hospital and his mother was a professor in a college. They were always going to conferences on the weekends or something like that. They ended up sending the boy to rehab paying $30,000 at that time. After that, they sent him to a private high school for behavioral challenged kids for $16,000 a year. Then he came to our program. That’s when the light went on in him that this was what he wanted to do.
Shirley: So why didn’t the private school work for him?
Brad: Because he was bored. It wasn’t what he wanted to do. That’s one of the problems that this country has had a real problem for the last 30 years. Because they got rid of a lot of the vocational education, the training courses or similar courses, and try to push kids to go to college. But many kids do not want to go to college. They are not college material, but they are not dumb either. That’s what our program was. We could keep them challenged. They were around helicopters and airplanes in a huge hanger.
Shirley: And that’s what a lot of boys would love to see and work with instead of sitting still in the classroom listening to lectures.
Brad: Right. This boy lived in a what is equivalent to a 5- or 6-million-dollar house in today’s value, but he did not want to go home. He actually graduated and now works for Boeing. Had he not come to our program…
Shirley: He would have been another wasted kid.
Brad: Yep, he would be another wasted kid. Four year ago, the Aviation Maintenance program has since been moved out of Gateway Institute of Technology high school and into St. Louis University.
Shirley: When this program is only available at the university level, this could be too late for many kids. Because, by high school, they have already lost interest in school and started to drop out. So you believe
one reason why some students act out or fail in school is because they are not challenged in the classroom or do not like the subjects being taught, right?
Brad: That is correct. It is also the fact that not every student learns in the same manner. Some kids learn better hands on, or by example, rather than strictly a textbook and classroom setting.
Shirley: Do you believe suspension is a solution to correct a student’s misbehavior?
Brad: No. Because that’s what a lot of kids want. In-school suspension, yes; out-of-school suspension, no. Because what do they do when you suspend them? They sit at home and play video game all day. You are giving them what they want when you suspend them.
Shirley: On the other hand, Brad, from my experience as an advocate and stories told by parents, I know more kids who did not want to be suspended. A lot of them were suspended or even arrested due to discrimination on their race and/or disability, not misbehaviors. What is your opinion on this and can you suggest a solution for discrimination?
Brad: I never really had a problem with discrimination since the faculty and students were heavily minority. Therefore, I can’t really speak about discrimination from my experience as a teacher.
Shirley: Why are so many schools and educators still using out-of-school suspension as the main disciplinary action to correct students’ misbehaviors?
Brad: Because it is easy and inexpensive for the school system to just push the kid out the door and not get to the root cause. There are two types of teachers: one has the passion to do the job; one takes the job to get paid and they depend on things such as a video or computer to teach in the classroom. One of the problems goes back to funding.
Shirley: Yeah, like when a teacher has 30 kids in the classroom without a teacher’s aide, the frustration can get really high when some students act out. The easiest way to stop the situation is to suspend them and get them out of the classroom. And teachers are not paid well. Being a teacher is tough.
Brad: Yeah, we can pay our college coaches at 7 million dollars a year, but we can’t pay a teacher enough to live on. We don’t respect teachers as they should be respected.
Shirley: And being a kid is even tougher these days than being a teacher. You have peer pressure, bullying, and adults seemingly not caring about you at home or school… They have all these factors to deal with.
Cathy: And they have nobody to turn to, if they don’t have a supportive home. They have nobody to turn to for straight answers from, or to get guidance from except their friends.
Brad: We were lucky. In our school, our principal had a master degree in physics. She cared about the kids. She hand-picked the top teachers in our school. We brought 400 new kids in every year. Her thing was in 30 days after the school started, she knew every freshman by their first name, so she could walk in the hallway and greet them by their first name.
Shirley: Isn’t that wonderful! That really made the kids feel she cared about them. The keyword here is care.
Brad: Yes. They loved her. The other thing is they realized they could not be an anonymous face in the crowd. If they did something wrong, she could find out who they were.
Shirley: What advice would you give to your fellow educators on how to deal with students who are disruptive in the class?
Brad: You have to find the underlining reason on why they are doing that. Are there problems in their home life? Are they bored? Are they overwhelmed? Are they so gifted that they feel they don’t belong in that classroom? You have to find out what motivates these kids. You have to start really early. You can’t just throw these kids into the first six years of their lives and expect them to do what everyone does. You almost need to do an IEP (Individualized Education Program) for them in first grade, and one in sixth grade when they go to middle school.
Shirley: It makes perfect sense! Because every kid is a different individual human being.
Brad: I am an example. At 6th grade, I started getting bored in the class, so I acted up. By 7th and 8th grades, I had a lot of issues at school.
Shirley: So how did you turn around when you were bored and acted out? What led you down the path to being a successful engineer?
Brad: I was smart enough. I barely made it out of high school. My father was an alcoholic and my mom did not push me. She was there and positive, but she had her own life. You know this saying about it takes a village to raise a child? I had a whole neighborhood that raised me. I had a lot of mentors. Like the owner of a car dealership next to the bar my dad and mom went to. I was around 7. He basically told his employees that their number one job was to look out for me. At 11, the owner of the restaurant nearby put me to work. He took me under his wings. And I had a neighbor who was like my big brother. And a couple whose son died in a car wreck and they treated me like their surrogate son.
Shirley: Wow, you had a huge support system! Now go back to the day of the public event you brought your student to. What was the event, and what happened?
Brad: It was a competition organized by the Vocational Industrial Clubs of American, which is now SkillsUSA.
The competition started locally, then went through state and national levels. We took 6 kids to the state level of the competition in the Aircraft Maintenance category. And this student won the state competition individually two years in a roll. So, I took him to the national level. He won 3rd place in the nation the first time, and 2nd place the second time; he lost by less than 1 point to the top winner.
Shirley: This is when he gave you the hug and said thank-you.
Brad: Yep. The school’s Aviation Department even bought him the custom suit specific for the Club. Since he was working, trying to support himself, we didn’t feel like it was fair to make him spend his money to buy the shoes, tie and suit.
Shirley: That’s another very heartwarming act by you and others. So he was very proud of himself and…
Brad: This is another point you talked about the kids: you have to build these kids up, in terms of self-esteem and confidence. You got to make a big deal out of when they have accomplished something good. And not just criticize or punish them when they do something bad. That’s a problem in a lot of situations.
Shirley: Exactly, like telling a kid, “You are stupid,” or “You are not going to amount to anything.” And that’s the problem: the kids would believe this which ends up destroying their self-esteem, spirit, and motivation. Because when you are a little kid, you don’t know how good you are until someone tells you, “You do have the talent,” or “You can do it.”
Cathy, who suffered similar treatment from an adult during her childhood: The negativity stays there in your psyche until they are adults.
Shirley: Brad, what is your advice to educators when they feel helpless and frustrated in their quest to turn around the lives of some troubled students but can’t?
Brad: That’s a tough one. Because you feel like a failure. I had a few kids like that. As long as you’ve done everything you possibly could, and given your best and tried. You are not going to save everybody. At home at night, if you have made a difference that day, then you are good.
Shirley: Lastly, complete this sentence for me: All students can be successful in school if…
Brad: If they are given the opportunity and support. It is a tough thing to say, especially in inner city schools. Some kids are out selling drugs by the age of 13. But you look at where so many of these kids come from.
Here is a story of another boy. In our school, the possession of a weapon would be an automatic expulsion. One day I saw this boy sitting in the principal’s office in handcuffs, with tears running down his face. He wore all black and a black coat. He was Mr. Macho. [The principal] told me, “The St. Louis Police Department is here.” The boy carried a 4 inch or so knife. He went through a really rough attack, and tried to protect himself. [The principal] asked me, “Brad, I got a question for you. We caught Danny with a knife. He said he brought it to school because he was using it to cut the hydraulic hose in the class. Is that possible?”
Shirley: And you said, “Sure. Yeah.”
Brad: She’s looking at me like “Help me! Help me get this kid out of this!” So I said, “Yeah.” He did get expelled and spent one semester at an alternative school and then he came back. But they didn’t file criminal charges, and didn’t put him in jail.
Shirley: What an exemplary principal she was! This is the perfect story to end this interview, because it really accentuates the essence of what being an educator should be all about. She used the love and common sense in her heart instead of the dead rules in the book, and looked out for the welfare of the students – her children. Thank you, Brad, for all your insights, heartwarming stories and, more importantly, your fatherly hard work in saving the lives of the children. I have learned a lot today.
Throughout the interview, it seemed one keyword kept bouncing between the walls like a racquet ball: care. Brad and the principal exemplified the virtuous qualities of a compassionate educator: Before punishing the students, care enough to understand their home life, their mental state and their need; give them the opportunity to prove themselves; give them the support to excel; and give them a second chance when they fall.
Actually, Brad and his colleagues did even more than the above. They were so heroic in the way to protect the children under their wings that I had to keep some of the stories he recalled off the record. They are truly the unsung heroes.
Whether it is from the educators, the parents, or members in the community, a child cannot survive without care. It would be like abandoning a baby out in the coldness of the wilderness. It has no chance to survive.
When a child is saved, the whole society benefits; when a child is wasted, the whole society suffers.
