Prize Pupil

By Tara Bahrampour
Sunday, February 19, 2006

Wanda Hill has helped hundreds of minority students get into expensive boarding schools. Now all she wants is to see one of her last proteges -- a boy who was abused and denied an education -- graduate

Reveling in a week of spring break, 18-year-old Amir Paul folds his tall, lanky body into a booth at a sunlit diner in Arlington and starts talking. He jabbers about the lacrosse camp he just attended in Florida, about his research project for Spanish class, about the week-long prep school graduation party in a couple of months that will go up and down the East Coast in houses belonging to friends' parents.

Wanda Hill, 77, sits across from him, picking at her Greek salad and enjoying herself. She smiles at the story of how, in the dead of a Massachusetts winter, Amir got his classmates at Groton School to clear an entire soccer field of snow so they could play a homecoming game against St. Mark's School. St. Mark's didn't show, but Amir got a lot of credit from his classmates.

"Did I tell you I was in a one-act play?" Amir asks as he wolfs down a cheeseburger, onion rings and fries.

"Oh, I'd love to see that," Hill says.

"I got a videotape," he says unselfconsciously. "It was my first time, and they said I did great."

Hill still finds it a little amazing to see Amir like this. When she met him, in the fall of 2001, he was a ninth-grader at Paul Junior High Public Charter School in Shepherd Park who'd been through six foster homes and was living in his second group home. He hadn't seen his parents in years, didn't know where they were and said he didn't care. He had huge gaps in his formal education.

"He didn't go to school until fifth grade," Hill explains as Amir gulps down a glass of ice water. "And yet he was making all these strides at Paul. He was involved in all these different things. I just thought he was really ready to blossom."

"And you're still waiting," Amir adds, flashing a smile.

Hill looks at him reproachfully, but they both know there's some truth to his words. Hill is still waiting for him to pull through his final semester at Groton, an elite boarding school whose graduates include Franklin D. Roosevelt, and she is worried. Amir's academic skills have soared at Groton, but he is in danger of failing one class, ecology, with only weeks left until graduation. If he doesn't bring up his grade by about five points, on commencement day he'll be handed a rolled-up piece of blank paper.

That prospect is awful. To see Amir come all this way and not get a diploma wouldn't be bad for just him. In a sense, June 5 -- "Prize Day" at Groton -- will be Hill's own graduation day, too. After 25 years, she's retiring as president, secretary, tutor and chauffeur for Project Match, an organization she founded in 1980 to help minority students in the Washington area attend boarding schools.

Working out of her home in McLean and spending thousands of dollars of her own money, Hill has helped place 500 mostly black and Hispanic students at, among other prep schools, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Foxcroft School in Virginia and St. Mark's in Massachusetts. Many were from families on public assistance who received financial aid.

But none needed what Amir needed. None was parentless. None had missed years of schooling, when fundamentals such as addition, subtraction and topic sentences were taught. When Amir got into Groton, Hill wasn't sure he would make it.

"I didn't know if he had the fortitude, when times got tough, to fight his way through it," Hill says. Not to mention the skills every 10th-grader should have. When Amir turned in his first paper at Groton, the teacher took one look and refused to grade it. Amir didn't even know what a paragraph was.

Now, though his graduation remains in doubt, Amir lists the 13 colleges he's applied to, including Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of Maryland and Brown University, which is his long shot.

Hill listens carefully. "You've really covered yourself," she says. "That's a good variety of schools."

"It's a great variety," he corrects her. Then he brings up an issue that's been bugging him. Groton graduates do not wear caps and gowns, and he's always dreamed of wearing a cap and gown.

"Somehow we'll get you a cap and gown," Hill promises. "You can wear it to a party or something."

"Now remember," she says for the 50th time, "if you need anything, Project Match provides it."

"I need a car," he cracks.

"We're talking about clothes. Do you have a navy jacket?"

Graduating Groton boys wear navy jackets over white shirts and slacks. Amir doesn't have one. Not a problem, Hill says; she'll come up and take him shopping before the big day.

"I'm going to be there," she says.

He looks at her meaningfully. "I'll be there, too."

The idea of sending other people's children away to school came to Hill unexpectedly. A former music teacher, she was floored when, in 1975, her son Stephen, then an eighth-grader at the private Potomac School in McLean, told her he wanted to go to boarding school.

"I thought, Oh no, we can't do boarding school. I just had that idea that boarding school was where you sent kids who were bad, or was for rich kids whose parents wanted to get rid of them." But after visiting some campuses with her husband, Caesar, a Census Bureau statistician, she was impressed. "The whole embrace was so welcoming," she says. "The small class sizes, the teachers who lived on campus. We drove through the gates of one of the schools, and my husband and I were going, 'Haaah. . .' We didn't know such things existed."

Stephen, now executive vice president at Black Entertainment Television, ended up at Groton on partial scholarship; his younger brother, Gary, now a senior executive at the Motley Fool in Alexandria, joined him there three years later. Both loved it and went on to Brown.

When Hill saw her sons doing well at Groton, it hit her that other minority students could thrive there, too. In 1979, as her older son was preparing to graduate, Hill began talking with three other students -- children of friends of friends -- who were excelling at their D.C. area schools. She packed them into her red Volkswagen hatchback and ferried them up to New England for a boarding school tour. "I just called the schools and said, 'We want to come see you.' They said, 'Well, who is this woman?'" That first year, Hill got all three students into schools. She'd found a calling.

Over the next quarter-century, Hill estimates she spent $25,000 to $30,000 a year on tutoring, testing, application fees, interview clothes and transportation. A little of the money came from donations; the rest came from her husband's annuity (he died in 1984) and her own small investments.

The job consumed her time and savings, but it didn't feel like a sacrifice: "I think if you have a purpose, you don't think about what you give up." It was reward enough to help students with so much potential.

These days, Hill needs no introduction to most admissions offices. She has served on the boards of many schools (she was on Groton's board for years; now Stephen is) and has conducted workshops nationwide on how schools can identify promising minority students and help them succeed.

"She's had a dramatic effect on independent schools across the United States -- just this one person," says Rebecca Gilmore, Foxcroft's director of admissions.

As she built Project Match, Hill discovered that skeptical parents had to be wooed. Some refused to consider sending their children away, or backed out at the last minute. She also met opposition from local public schools. "I'm doing what they call 'creaming' -- I'm taking the best students out of the system. What does that do to their scores? What does that do to their role models? And I understand that. But my first concern is for the kids."

Some public school guidance counselors contacted her anyway. "Please do not tell anyone I called you," they would whisper, "but I have a student I think should go to a boarding school. Her situation is not good."

"Not good" often meant violence or neglect. Hill, a matronly woman with a neat cap of gray curls, has walked through apartment buildings past men playing dice who made lewd remarks. Her heart has pounded as she climbed stairways, her spectacles dangling from their gold chain, and entered apartments where the floors were strewn with mattresses and the adults were stoned.

She remembers one girl's house where "there were all these hangers-on, the father's in jail, there's an aunt that was feebleminded, or not sober, a brother that might be in a gang." With Hill's help, the girl began attending Sandy Spring Friends School in Maryland. During the girl's freshman year, her brother was shot in the face and killed on 14th Street NW, but she stayed on and graduated. A few years later, Hill was at a downtown TGI Friday's restaurant when a young woman ran up calling, "Miss Hill, Miss Hill!" It was the girl from Sandy Spring Friends. Now in her twenties, she'd graduated from college and landed a job with an accounting firm. It was her first day of work, and she was celebrating with her boyfriend. After chatting with Hill, the young couple returned to their table. Hill sat at hers and wept.

"Every now and then I realize it has made a difference -- their lives have been redirected." Tears well up, and Hill beats a fist on her chest. "Stop it, Wanda." She takes off her glasses and squeezes her eyes shut.

Not all the children Hill sent off made it to graduation. A girl whose mother was being abused returned home to try to protect her. A mother who missed her daughter bought her a new car to induce her to come home. One boy, who had a brother in jail and another who had been killed in a drive-by shooting, fought with his boarding school classmates and had to leave.

But Hill thinks Amir can make it. "This is my pride, my prize child," she says. "I always said that he represented my 25 years of work . . . I'm going to be there when he graduates, and that is going to be the conclusion of Project Match."

From the time Hill met Amir, he intrigued her. He had a movie-star smile, high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. (His mother is Jamaican Indian, and his father is, as he puts it, "a regular black guy from D.C.") His father had returned from the Vietnam War shellshocked and convinced the government was out to get him. He then served time in prison, where he converted to Islam (that's how Amir got his first name and his middle name, Ibn-Faruq). Because of his father's deep distrust of the government, he wouldn't let Amir and his two older siblings go to public school, but he couldn't afford a private Islamic education. Amir's mother and sister taught him to read, but he never learned math, science or writing.

As Amir grew older, he says, his father became increasingly paranoid and violent. When Amir was 10, his 13-year-old sister decided to run away. Amir and his 11-year-old brother left with her. The three were farmed out to relatives, and Amir and his brother bounced between their maternal grandmother's apartment and foster families or group homes.

Despite his five-year gap in education, or perhaps because of it, Amir adored school. "I just enjoyed the whole learning process," he says. "And it was something I was never able to do. So my guess is if I had done it [from the beginning], I wouldn't have had the same passion for it as I did, just jumping into fifth grade."

In seventh grade at Paul Junior High, he grew close to his English teacher, Bill Kappenhagen, and would linger after school to wash the blackboards, straighten the desks or play chess. "He kicked my butt all the time," Kappenhagen says, "but sometimes he'd let me win."

Kappenhagen would drop Amir off at his grandmother's apartment on his way home, but he didn't know what lay behind the door. He learned about Amir's troubled childhood through casual comments the boy made while they shot hoops or played Trivial Pursuit. One day, when Amir was in ninth grade, Kappenhagen returned from a weekend away to find his Siamese fighting fish ("I named him Faruq, after Amir"), which he had left in Amir's care, in the classroom of a math teacher. "With water in his eyes, Amir told me he was living in a group home," says Kappenhagen, who had become an administrator at Paul. Amir had fought with his grandmother about staying out late.

That was around the time Hill met Amir. She'd gone to his school to administer a practice SSAT, a test used by many private schools to gauge academic ability. Amir did well enough to interest her. His grades were outstanding, and he had the kind of personality -- outgoing, vibrant, alert -- that appealed to admissions officers. She took him on the tour of New England that she reserved for her program's most promising applicants. But she didn't really know what he'd been through until an admissions officer at Exeter asked how many brothers and sisters he had, and he replied that he didn't know anymore.

Hill called Kappenhagen and told him how impressed the admissions people had been with Amir. But they were worried about his lack of a stable living situation. Where would he go, they asked, on holiday breaks and in the summer?

Kappenhagen, then 26, had an audacious idea. He could foster Amir, or even adopt him. Becoming a foster parent meant giving up time, money and freedom. But the role felt natural to Kappenhagen, who had signed up for Teach For America, a nonprofit group that supplies teachers to low-income communities, right out of college. He took foster parenting classes and became Amir's legal guardian. In May 2002, Amir moved into Kappenhagen's home in Petworth and began preparing for his first year at boarding school.

At Groton, Amir quickly realized that the pecking order he had learned on the streets of Washington didn't translate. "My biggest thing was, like, can't get punked . . . You know, like someone walks up and, like, pushes you or something, or someone looks at you wrong, and if you let them get away with that, then you're punked."

But at Groton, he noticed boys pushing each other, wrestling and jumping on each other's backs, and none of it seemed hostile. Even when there was a conflict, it was solved differently. "At Groton, you talk out your problems, which I at first didn't want to do because I'm so used to fighting," Amir says. But the boys didn't fistfight -- they wrestled. "And, like, afterwards," he says, incredulously, "they shook hands and went to Denny's."

For the first time, Amir was exposed to preppy styles (pastel shirts with turned-up collars, khakis and flip-flops) and to cultural phenomena (the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) that his classmates took for granted. Classes were different, too. Work that would have earned an A in Washington was unacceptable at Groton. So was certain behavior. "Mr. Crowley, my history teacher -- on the first day of class I was chewing gum, and he just stopped me and said: 'Please don't chew gum. I teach children, not cattle.' I kind of blew him off and said, 'My bad,' and he's, like, 'My bad?'"

Amir can't recall being homesick--most likely, he says, because he'd never had a real home. He bonded with his roommate Jason Oxner, of Canada. "He had an accent, I had an accent; I'd laugh at his, he'd laugh at mine."

Oxner, now 20, says he had never met anyone like Amir, who took a while "before he started trusting people. But we found that once he liked you . . . he was the best friend you had, and he would do anything to protect you."A few months later, they got a third roommate, Ian, whom Amir describes as "a tea-and-crumpet guy."

Ian and Amir couldn't have come from more disparate backgrounds. "He went to yacht clubs; I went to the street corners. I played ball in the street; he played squash," Amir says. Yet the two clicked, Amir says, because neither tried to be something other than what he was.

"I think that's why I like Ian so much, because Ian is Ian, no matter where he is. Like Ian and I were on the subway, in the Bronx, heading to the zoo. And Ian was just talking, wearing his pastels, and I was just kind of noticing how everyone was staring at him, but he didn't care, the same way I was at Groton."

He pauses, trying to sum up Ian. "Like, he would call people petty-minded worms, which I thought was funny."

Back in Washington, Hill fretted. Amir's first grades were barely passing. She sent him a letter saying that it was a good start but that she knew he could do better. She called the school each week to check on him.

Kappenhagen worried, too, though less about Amir's grades than about whether he would feel socially isolated in a place with so few poor and minority kids. "I was really concerned that some white kid would say something horrible to him, and Amir wouldn't be able to hold back his temper."

There were times when this almost happened, especially in the beginning. People could barely understand his heavy slang, Amir says, and some were rude about it. Amir remembers a wealthy boy from Washington -- "a real bitter snob" -- saying hostile things, "Like, 'Hey, so you're from the projects in D.C., eh?'" Others provoked him in a different way. "You know how there are some white guys who dress up and try to act black? 'What's up dawg,' and 'Yo, what's up.' " Amir hated that phony ghetto persona.

But Jason and Ian were always there to calm him down. And the verbal taunting and near-fights soon tapered off. Far from feeling isolated, Amir joined the student activities committee, acted in plays and joined the lacrosse, football and basketball teams.

During breaks, Amir returned to Kappenhagen and their cat, a skinny tabby named Fubar that each insists the other named. Kappenhagen went to Groton for parents' weekends. When they told people they were father and son, they'd get double takes.

Hill kept worrying, but she stopped calling as often after a Groton admissions officer said something that struck her. "She said, 'He is adjusting better than most of the kids here,'" Hill recalls, "and I realized that he's been adjusting all his life. This wasn't new for him."

On a mild day last winter, Amir stepped up to the lectern of Groton's St. John's Chapel, holding his life story in his hands. Sheltered by the chapel's 105-year-old stone walls, surrounded by 350 or so classmates and teachers, he gave his chapel talk, a tradition in which Groton seniors read a personal essay aloud.

Chapel talks are often lighthearted, making funny references to teachers or telling anecdotes about school. But Amir had some things to say that no one besides Jason and Ian had heard before.

He started by describing being grounded the week before for sleeping through too many classes. As punishment, some of his senior privileges were suspended, and he was not allowed to leave his dorm at night. Being grounded, he explained, wasn't a concept he'd grown up with.

"Up until the age of 10, me, my brother and my sister lived with our parents," he said. "The horrible thing is they never grounded us, sent us to bed without dessert, told us we couldn't go outside or any other cliche punishments. They abused us.

"I remember many times when the three of us would cower in a corner, screaming, as our father kicked and punched us until he tired himself out . . . I don't know what exactly caused him to think that the government was against him, but in his fits of paranoia, we were the ones that were accused of being spies and beaten for treason.

"Eventually, we feared for our lives. We were getting older, and our father was hitting harder. When I was 10 years old, me, my brother and my sister ran away from home . . . In seven years, I have been to four group homes, six foster homes and four facilities for foster kids with behavioral problems."

In the hushed chapel, Amir told of fighting and stealing, of shuttling between judges and lawyers. He described arriving at Groton, where everything was unfamiliar.

"Most of you that know me know that I'm not religious at all, but if there are such things as angels, Wanda Hill is definitely one of them. To this day, I haven't the slightest clue why she spent her valuable time and money on a kid like me, but it was her and my seventh-grade teacher Mr. Kappenhagen that completely changed my life. I still think I got into Groton because someone in the admissions office dropped a stack of papers and, somehow, my name got mixed up with some other kid's. No matter how I got into this school, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me."

By the end, many people were crying. Amir cried, too.

Over his final spring break from Groton, Amir strolls through his old neighborhood, past the homeless guys on Georgia Avenue NW, past Lion's Liquor and Spirits, past a sign advertising "Girls Girls." He is looking for a friend who might be hanging out in a vacant lot.

Half the people he passes say hello or give a nod. Amir likes that. "I love this place to death," he says. "It feels like home to me. But when I'm about 25, I don't want to be hanging around here." The trick, he says, is to "find a good mix of the Groton in me and the D.C. in me."

He ducks into a crumbling apartment building to visit his grandmother, a doll-like woman who is wearing a black plastic bag as an apron. Amir towers over her as she stirs spices into a pot of curried peas. She warns him not to be late for dinner, and he dips into a Caribbean lilt to reply: "Me know, Gramma, me know."

His cell phone rings -- the friend he's been looking for -- and his accent changes again. "Aw-ight," he murmurs. "I'm leavin' tomorrow, I was just tryin' to holler to you before I left."

Back at Groton, the gaps in his education continue to haunt him. He's caught up enough in most subjects to stay afloat. But he dropped chemistry in 10th grade after realizing it was over his head. And he needs a science class to graduate.

He's done all the reading for ecology and has gone to the teacher for help, but he still has a 56 average. The concepts are "just a huge jumble to me."

He pushes himself in the final weeks, meeting his teacher up to four times a day. He wakes up early and visits the vernal pool he is studying, wading shoulder deep into freezing water to try to catch wood frog larvae.

"People didn't see me for four weeks. I would stay in the library, miss lacrosse practice," he says. "I wanted to graduate from Groton, you see."

On a humid day in June, Hill sits on a stage beneath a white tent on Groton's velvety lawn. She has watched a dozen Groton graduations, but never participated in one until today. As a former board member, she is allowed to personally present Amir with his diploma.

Which he will be getting.

"I was just praying," Hill says, "please let him make it, please let him make it." Her prayer has been answered. Amir passed ecology with a 62. But he graduated with a 75 average, and he's been accepted to Ohio Wesleyan University.

Hill also faces big changes. For the past year, she has kept her usual hectic schedule: tutoring kids, administering tests, shuttling students to rural campuses. But hip-replacement surgery has slowed her down, and she wants to quit while she can still take cruises and spend time with her 1-year-old grandson, Charlie. Maybe, she says, she'll write a book about how to get into boarding school.

Amir and the other seniors fill in the front rows facing the stage. A weak breeze ripples the muggy air. Storm clouds roil somewhere far off, making the sunlight hazy and unreal. A Groton alumnus reads a long speech. A graduating senior makes another. A Newsweek reporter informs the crowd that John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill were not the best students even though they became great leaders.

Finally, the names are read. One by one, each student mounts the stairs, takes a diploma and steps down. M . . . N . . . O . . . When the headmaster reaches P, Hill, wearing a navy suit and white pearl-tone earrings, rises.

"Amir I. Paul."

His straw hat is tipped jauntily, his smile is huge. Hill's eyes are shining, and Amir falls into her arms. Fighting tears, she pats his back. Then she returns to her seat, and he marches down the steps, fist in the air, diploma in hand.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Hill picked Amir up from the house that he and Kappenhagen had shared in Petworth (Kappenhagen had taken a new job in San Francisco in the fall and had put the house on the market).

Amir knew of a breakfast place -- a restaurant across from Howard University. As they drove there, he spotted a young man on the street who looked familiar, someone Amir thought he'd fought before he went to Groton. But, in the restaurant, that chapter of his life seemed far away.

Hill says they talked about how far Amir had come and where he was going. She advised him, in her motherly way, not to do anything to spoil the progress he'd made. He smiled and said, "Yeah, yeah."

But Hill isn't so worried about Amir these days. In his first semester at Ohio Wesleyan, he earned almost all A's. He plays intramural basketball, has joined the College Democrats, has traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild storm-damaged homes with Black Men of the Future, and he plans to tutor elementary school children with the Columbus Initiative. As a dorm representative, he attends weekly student government meetings, and he is thinking of majoring in economic management and political science. "I want to go into politics and combat the gentrification of Washington, D.C.," he says. He has a summer internship lined up at BET through Hill's son Stephen.

When he visits his old neighborhood, people take notice of him. "I always thought that a lot of people would say, 'Oh, nerdy'" because of his college studies, Amir says. "But it's not like that. I've always been praised for, like, trying to make it out. I've got friends, you know, who smoke marijuana. But the dealers are, like, 'No, I'm not selling it to you because you can't mess up the brain.'"

No one Amir knows from Washington has gone to college -- except his siblings, who surmounted legal and emotional troubles to do so. His brother studies business at Parks College in Ballston, and his sister, who is married, studies child psychology and Spanish at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some of his old friends and classmates have gone to jail, or even been killed. For many of them, just staying out of trouble and paying the bills is a triumph, something that Amir, who has not seen his parents in almost 10 years, recognizes. Often, he says, "I have a lot more respect for some people in D.C. than I do for people at Groton. Being millionaires versus being someone who's helping his mother through crack addiction."

After breakfast, Amir asked Hill to drop him off at the barbershop, one of his old haunts. She says she smiled when he told her why. "He said, 'I walk in there, and they'll make glowing remarks about me.' Because they know what a hard time he'd had. They see him as a winner, because he's going to college. And he said they would welcome him and look at him, I guess, with pride -- one of theirs who had made good."

Tara Bahrampour is a Post education reporter.