The writer is superintendent at Voorheesville Central School District. Her husband, James Snyder, passed away Feb. 28. This article originally ran on the district’s website.
I want to thank everyone in the community for their patience and for their support during these past few months as my husband endured a brutal, but mercifully brief battle with cancer. In his final illness, I have been frequently distracted, and I thank my administrative team and the faculty and staff for pulling together to keep this ship moving forward. I thank the Board for understanding that my mind was frequently elsewhere.
All that said, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what I learned from forty years of being with my best friend. My husband, Jim, was a kind, gentle soul — a simple man who loved simple things: our family, his dogs, our neighbors and friends, and thousands of children and young adults whom he met while running first Big Brothers and Big Sisters and later the Siena Mentoring program, which matched Siena students to urban youngsters from Albany. He was involved for close to fifty years, beginning back in the Civil Rights era, working with Fr. Peter Young and Bishop Howard Hubbard, who was then known as the street priest in Albany. During this close to half century, literally thousands of youngsters grew up in the program, which included a summer camp at Siena, staffed by the “Bigs” from the Siena community.
He was a quiet unassuming man, with a ready smile and a passion for justice and opportunity. Because of his relentless pursuit of opportunity, dozens and dozens of children matured through the program, obtained college degrees and careers and made lives better for themselves and their own families.
The response to his life’s work was so obvious in the difficult days of his wake and funeral. Indeed, the amazing outpouring of gratitude and affection made those painful days bearable.
The essential message of my husband’s life reverberates in our many discussions about education over the years. Children are saved one at a time. It is the relationships between caring adults and individual children which make all the difference.
As educators grapple with the Common Core and as political pundits excoriate public schools and their teachers, it is vital that we in the field do not lose sight of what really matters. We make a difference in children’s lives not by judging and by critiquing, but by being there for them, encouraging them to reach new heights and building their resilience when they fall down. I have lived my life stating that a child can never be reduced to a test score and that we must never put ceilings on a child’s potential.
Jim’s “kids” reminded me of that so much during the past few weeks — messages from young adults stating things like “I don’t know why you put up with me at camp all those years, but because you did, I am in college;” or from a young man who dropped out of college several years ago who wanted Jim to know that he had returned and is getting his degree in the spring;?or from a mom who stated that her son — who is an honors student with a triple science major — became a serious student because of being surrounded by the love that permeated the mentoring program.
When we speak of college and career ready, we must not let the political verbiage puncture the mission. It is one child at a time, it is about the quality of the relationships with caring adults, it is about affirmation and challenge and it is about building resilience. I learned this from 40 years of watching children grow and thrive in the face of social obstacles and inordinate pressures. I learned this from countless conversations with children who were deemed at risk, but in whom my husband saw only hope.
It changed my life. Thank you, Jim.