…and it’s rocking — vital, growing, run with compassion and conviction. I spent the day there touring the Frazier neighborhood, meeting with partners, discussing curriculum and attendance policies. So much of it is familiar — the setting up tables, laying out food and paper plates, the books and course packets and due dates. Yet this is its own thing, a classroom with a view of skyscrapers where Reg and Quincy and Jackie and Renee and V and Patrick and others gather around the table. I told them when you sit down to class, know our students are sitting down to class in Austin too. And they were, at that same time, in a classroom where the tables are gray, the view over a playground where it’s too cold for the kids to play. I listened all night, impressed and excited, while they pondered Margaret Sanger and agreed and disagreed about what’s come since. On the way out the door, they wished me a safe ride home, wishes, it turned out, I was going to need.

February 26, 2015