Morning lessons for Jaquan Bridges and Brayan Flores at J.L. Francis do not include any screen time. (Photo by Jay Paul)
It’s just after 9 a.m., and a bell rings in J.L. Francis Elementary School in South Richmond. Gregory Stallings, almost 60 and clad in a maroon vest, short-sleeve plaid shirt and bow tie, is sorting white binders that hold neon worksheets. In a few minutes, nearly 30 third- and fourth-grade boys will come in for the first Monday of their school year.
It’s only the second week of school; while the students might be expected to barrel in, cackling at one another’s jokes and roughhousing with thoughts of summer fresh in their minds, quite the opposite happens.
They slowly and quietly trickle in and attack their breakfasts of a granola bar, yogurt and a foil-topped juice cup. One student, Brayan Flores, flaunts a second juice cup he was given by mistake. Stallings asks the class for its attention, but the kids continue to giggle and want Flores’ extra juice.
“I can wait,” Stallings says calmly and quietly with eyes locked on Flores. It doesn’t take long for order to be restored. Through his demeanor, Stallings offers — and demands in return — a level of respect. He believes this is the secret to his success.
Gregory Stallings has been an educator for 30 years. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Stallings’ students are mostly from low-income and single-parent households in South Richmond. His male-only classrooms, a program called Boys to Men, started in September 1995. At the time he was teaching at Patrick Henry Elementary School, which has since been converted to a charter school.
Stallings is also part of a rare breed of black male elementary school teachers. In Virginia, less than 20 percent of educators identify with a racial minority, yet the schools are populated with almost 50 percent minority students.
Educators such as Stallings and others interviewed say they believe black men in teaching roles can help eradicate stereotypes. And considering the graduation rate for students in Richmond Public Schools — about 10 percent below the state’s average, according to a 2016 Virginia Department of Education report — this all-male elementary class is an early intervention.
For Stallings, his class is about addressing the issues he has seen around him for decades. Instead of seeing boys in classrooms, students were waiting in the principal’s office. Instead of reading and writing, they were being scolded for acting out.
Stallings has anecdotal theories, based on his involvement with Boys to Men for more than 20 years and from three decades of teaching.
“We have to offer our students different environments to survive in,” Stallings says, sitting in a tiny chair in his classroom a few weeks before the start of school. “Single-gender is good for some kids, not all kids. I think the more choices we can give our kids in the public system, that’s a good thing,” he says.
It is with those boys, who some might call troubled, that Stallings’ Boys to Men program succeeds.
The program is unusual for other reasons: He often finds himself as the male role model for his students, something he himself sought after the death of his father when he was young.
A native of Richmond, Stallings grew up near Byrd Park, the son of a cleaning woman and a father who worked at the railroad station. His father died when he was 9, which lead him to seek support from other men in the community, in his case, his family’s pastor. Stallings found more support at the Richmond Boys Club, which has since been demolished, on Robinson Avenue in The Fan.
This was his first exposure to community outreach, and that exposure would shape him into the community-driven individual he is today.
The Boys to Men program got off the ground in 1995 when Stallings was teaching at Patrick Henry Elementary near Forest Hill Park. Working with then-Principal Carol Williams, they hammered out the framework of a boys-only class that they envisioned would elevate the self-esteem of at-risk students. The program was a first in the state.
Stallings took on the fatherless, those with learning disabilities and others who couldn’t perform in normal classroom environments. Reading, writing and arithmetic were bolstered with lessons on leadership and mannerliness that are still used today.
Each morning begins with a powerful call-and-response exercise lead by Stallings:
Who are we?
We are compassionate boys with
no directions, no place to run
and nowhere to go.
We are boys labeled disabled, at-risk, endangered, hyperactive and slow.
Who are we?
We are gifted boys who raise our
voices and make demands.
We are boys who rap, dance, sing and pray when we can.
It’s a practice that can leave lasting impacts.
“He makes our work come alive,” Tony Coley, a member of Stalling’s Boys to Men class, told Richmond magazine’s Annemarie Roma in 2001. “[He’s] not like a teacher, he’s like a friend, a friend who wants you to do your best. I try to give that to him.”
Now, 16 years later, Coley is the assistant principal at a North Carolina middle school, and Stallings’ legacy burns brightly within him. “As a teacher and mentor, he’s what inspired me to go into education,” Coley says in a phone call from his desk at Central Middle School in Gatesville County, North Carolina.
Coley recalls being picked on for being overweight by other students. So Stallings, to help build his confidence, gave him responsibility in the form of a leadership role. “He really inspired me to be all that I can be.”
Of Coley’s time in class, Stallings says, “When he came to my room I … put him in the spotlight, and he loved it cause now they couldn’t talk back to him; they had to look up to him. You have to find and see what’s going to make that kid motivated.”
“We want everybody to do the same thing at the same time in the same way, but that’s not how kids learn.” —Gregory Stallings
Back in Stallings’ classroom at J.L. Francis, a few hours after finishing morning lessons, the students grow noticeably restless. The lunchroom is just around the corner from the open classroom door, and the smell of food and the sound of laughter drift in.
Stallings abruptly calls for the boy’s attention.
“We need a break!” he calls out. “Walk around your table three times. … Stop! Hold your hands up, shake them to the left, shake them to the right. Go down, back up, left, right, up, up, down, right, left…” The boys laugh, shout and mimic the commands as best they can before becoming noticeably defused and refocused. “All right,” Stallings says, “Have a seat.”
“Boys have to move. They want space,” Stallings says before the school year starts. His knack for timing is not to be understated; this quick distraction does wonders to rein in the students who still have a whole hour until it’s their turn to eat. The exercise also helps the boys understand that their misplaced energy isn’t a bad thing, it just needs to be redirected at times.
“You gotta love [boys when they disobey commands]; it’s OK, [he’s] just learning how to express himself,” Stallings says. “If you shut [him] down, then he’ll never learn how to not talk back, he’s gotta learn to talk with you.”
After the brief exercise, the class moves on to the next part of their day, math. He calls over all the fourth graders first to sit on a brightly colored floor mat while he teaches from one of the student’s tiny chairs, his legs akimbo.
The two grade levels within one class sometimes requires him to teach the material twice. Beyond the day’s lesson — place values and turning written numbers into digits — Stallings takes the opportunity to teach study skills as well.
He instructs everyone to highlight the bolded text on some notes he’s passed out. He doles out “good jobs” to the students who follow directions. He calmly calls out names of third-graders he sees not sitting quietly while he teaches the first group.
This method of teaching is one he’s used before – splitting the class by grade to hit finer points on certain subjects – but he’s used other systems as well. When his class ranged from second to fifth grade, he’d often use the fifth graders as “assistant teachers” for the younger students.
“For them, they get to be retaught different skills and go over skills again as well as strengthen skills they know already,” he says. “It also adds to their responsibility and leadership skills.”
When it comes to reading, a subject that traditionally carries specific skill levels, Stallings has a trick for that, too. He points to the sports magazines he has on wall racks. While many say young boys don’t read, he’s found success appealing to what they’re interested in — usually sports or current events.
“A kid can perform at any level they want to given the resources and given the time and motivation. You have to motivate kids,” he says. “We want everybody to do the same thing at the same time in the same way, but that’s not how kids learn.”
The tools in his Boys to Men toolbox have evolved over the years, but noticeably absent, compared to today’s modern classrooms, are computer screens or digital distractions.
It’s something Stallings has insisted on since computers entered the classroom years ago. “Technology has put them in front of a phone … and it’s just them and that machine,” he says. “They don’t get to talk about those things with everyone else … ”
Without glowing screens, kids have to talk and share, but that language communication isn’t always easy, and it’s another part of Stallings’ evolving educational environment.
As Latino families have entered Richmond, many of their children have enrolled in Richmond Public schools — nearly 13 percent of the system’s students are Latino. When Stallings started Boys to Men, his classroom was by far majority black. Now, 22 years later, about half of his students are Latino.
While the increasing bilingual nature of his classroom has offered another teaching opportunity — Spanish-language cue cards now adorn the classroom, and bilingual kids often help ESL students — the current political environment has also added new challenges.
In March, when President Donald Trump enacted his second executive order limiting immigration, Stallings said he spent several days talking over the situation with his students to calm their concerns.
“There was a fear, there was a fear that when they go home they don’t know what they will find,” he says, remembering that March morning which left many Latino students, concerned with their families’ future, crying and looking for comfort.
“It was amazing, my African-American boys cried with them,” he says. “We become a family here, we understand the hurt and need of each other, and we help each other.”
The impact of Stallings and his class might be difficult to quantify at such a young age, but those in charge at J.L. Francis have taken notice.
Kecia Ryan, the recently promoted principal, says she’s seen the success from Stallings’ students for years.
“He teaches them what it means to be a man, about responsibility and gaining and earning respect,” she says.
Ryan’s words echo much of what Stallings says he hopes to achieve: giving support to students who need it and helping them become the man they want to be. But at the end of the school year he admits it’s hard not to get emotional.
“I try not to say goodbye,” he says. “I call them my sons, and I have my own kids, but I do get attached to them. It’s very difficult, they sit and cry and I try not to. We hug it out here, it’s just the relationship that we build.”
Nearing 60 and knowing that others retire around this age, Stallings says he’s not sure what he’d do without a classroom full of boys to teach. He’s working on alternatives though; he says he’s been consulting with the city to create an all-boys middle school program. He’s afraid the idea will disappear if he does.
It’s not about him, he says, it’s about the students — and the Boys to Men class of 2018 is looking mighty bright in Mr. Stallings’ eyes.
“We’re just starting out, but I see a lot of potential in them,” he says. “They’re exciting, and there’s never a dull moment,” he says. “I love the challenge, and they enjoy it.”
