Steve Bumbaugh was 23 and a recent college graduate when he took a job in 1990 that could enable him to help change some young lives.
His task: help 67 eighth-graders at a Washington middle school who’d been promised college scholarships by a local businessman if they made it through high school.
The students lived in Anacostia, a poor neighborhood in Southeast Washington. Crack cocaine had infiltrated the city, known then as the nation’s “murder capital.”
The story of the students and those who worked with them is told in a new documentary, “ Southeast 67.” Their benefactor was Stewart Bainum, who founded the nursing home chain HCR Manor Care and Choice Hotels International.
He became deeply involved in the program and visited often, getting to know many of the students, Bumbaugh said in an interview. Bumbaugh and Phyllis Rumbarger, a teacher who was also hired to run the program, worked 10- to 12-hour days, six days a week.
“The big lesson is that this work is just very hard,” Bumbaugh said.
But, he added, “I think it really resonated with the parents and the students. I don’t want to say it was all wonderful and perfect. It wasn’t. But we trusted them, and they trusted us.”
Still, when the program ended in 1994, Bumbaugh said he felt it had failed because only three-fourths of the students graduated from high school on time and a little over half of them started college.
In time, however, his view changed. The majority of the “Dreamers,” as the students were called, moved into the middle class. Today, most of their children are in college-prep programs in high school or already in college, he said.
“So inter-generational poverty that goes back 300 years, to slavery, was disrupted in one generation,” said Bumbaugh, now the director of Breakthrough Schools D.C., a project to design schools that serve low-income public school students in Washington. “And I think the program was kind of that last resource – in addition to mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles and fathers. And I think that last resource helped make a big difference.”
Rumbarger said she and Bainum sat down and discussed whether to repeat the “I Have a Dream” program when it ended in 1994 after the students finished high school. They chose not to, but it became the basis of what the Commonweal Foundation, which Bainum founded to support under-served youth, went on to do, she said in notes on the documentary’s website.
Bainum died in 2014 at age 94. The foundation has given millions of dollars to help disadvantaged students through after-school reading programs and scholarships to boarding and private day schools.
He modeled his program after the “I Have a Dream” Foundation in New York City, started by philanthropist Eugene Lang in 1981. Lang’s effort continues to support groups of students in high-poverty public schools through 37 programs nationwide.
The work now starts earlier, in elementary school, and staff members keep helping the students during their first year of college, or in some cases, longer, said Eugena Oh, the chief governance officer of the foundation in New York.
The program includes academic and other kinds of assistance, Oh said. There’s tutoring and homework help, but also mental health care, social services and aid getting summer jobs and internships.
Martece Gooden Yates, one of the Dreamers in the documentary, said in an interview that Bainum’s generosity in the 1980s and ’90s made a huge difference.
“I don’t know if he ever even knew how appreciative and how just amazed we were by someone who just wanted to do that for strangers,” she said.
Yates started college, but she didn’t continue. She’d been struggling to cope with her mother’s addiction to cocaine and crack cocaine. But she went on to marry and raise a family, and since 2009 has been working toward a nursing degree at Trinity University.
Looking back, she said she wished there had been a clinical psychologist or social worker – “someone who could help us deal with things that were going on.”
“Maybe if we could have cloned Mrs. Rumbarger and Mr. Bumbaugh,” she said. “Because just think: It was two people trying to maneuver through 67 kids.”
Brittany Peterson of the Washington Bureau contributed.