Please Mr. Cantor, don't hurt The Count!

Come on Man….!! Tell me Eric, John, Jim, and Tom (R - House Majority Leader from VA, R - House Speaker from OH, and R - US Senators from SC and OKL respectively) don’t really want to kill ‘Sesame Street’, ‘The Electric Company’ and ‘All Things Considered’ do they?

The budget bill passed by the House last month would end funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports programs distributed on NPR and PBS. CPB is getting $430 million in the current fiscal year.

Fellas lean in and listen up. I gotta little story to tell you ….…

In 1975 Gary Simon, a White elementary school teacher working in the hell that had become the South Bronx, by then, teamed up with the Columbia Teachers College, to pluck myself, Steven Sapp, and Frankie Cruz from our 3^rd grade classes at PS 140 and began to “accelerate” our lives.

For the next 3 years, all I remember - between legendary dodge ball games, destructive fires, learning Hebrew, first kisses, hip hop jams, and Reggie Jackson’s titanic home runs – are:

• A whirlwind of books; A Wrinkle in Time, The Lord of the Rings, Great Expectations, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Things Fall Apart;
• Trips to the coolest NYC spots; the Bronx Zoo, the Museum of Natural History, the Hayden Planetarium (where that first kiss took place by the way), and
• Broadway Plays (full disclosure - loved Annie & the Whiz. At 10 -12 years of age though, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar & Pippin all enforced my young perception that there was something seriously wrong with white people!)

The program Mr. Simon began with the three of us, along with a handful of other Black, Brown and poor children is Prep for Prep, the internationally recognized, leadership development program. Prep for Prep

Ok, still wit’ me fellas? Here’s where the story gets really interesting……In ‘76, to place in one of the Ivy Feeder schools that ring NYC, admission required a type of IQ test called the Independent Entrance Exam (back then popularly known as the ERB). One of the questions on the test asked “what is a juggler?” I panicked. Remember I said we went to the Zoo, Broadway, and Yankee Stadium. I had no idea people with clown noses threw bowling pins in the air, so at 9, the context of the potential answers made no sense. And as far as I could tell, no circuses had ever come to South Bronx (in hindsight, probably best for the elephants, huh?). 

Eventually after what must’ve seemed a life time for Mr. Simon, I blurted out what I had learned from the famous Sesame Street character Count von Count. I remember the Count like it was yesterday. Cool… fly....and could hypnotize cats - I was hooked! I liked him so much in fact that not only did counting become cool, but I began consuming all things Dracula, (unfortunately, at the time that basically consisted of my older brother’s comic book collection – but hey ‘twas the hood. I took what I could get).

What happened next shocked me. Mr. Simon stopped the test. I thought I had failed, that I had messed up, and that he was angry.  Wasn’t till about a year later I realized that my answer about the internal and external jugular veins, their venous bpi, and the amount of time it would take a grown man to bleed to death once punctured, convinced him testing time was over. Result – my IQ in 155 -165 range, went on to attend the prestigious Horace Mann School, and the rest as they say….. 

Since then Prep for Prep, arguably the nation’s most successful program at identifying and preparing Black and Brown students for achievement, has shepherded approximate 4,000 students through Ivy League and other highly competitive colleges and universities. According to the Prep website 

"Prep alumni now include176 JDs; 102 MBAs and MBA candidates; 60 PhDs/EdDs and PhD/EdD candidates; 64 MDs and medical students; 7 Fulbright Fellows; 2 Truman Scholars; 2 Marshall Scholars; 2 Harlan Fiske Stone Scholars; 2 Rockefeller Fellows, and a Rhodes Scholar" for good measure.

At least a tiny part of that success gentlemen, can be attributed to the unlikely story of a single small, ghetto child - connecting with an impish, purple, vampire puppet, in what has got to be one of the most unlikely connections in modern history.   

OK folks, here’s the irony;

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), managed the debate on this topic on behalf of the House majority. When speaking about NPR’s bloated coffers she referenced the number of NPR’s $1million + donors saying “This is how wealthy the sponsorship and subscribership base is”….”it’s time for us to remove the federal support system they’ve relied on.”

Translation - screw the folks who would be most affected by a significant cut to the CPB - Rural White Americans. 243 of the 585 station receiving CPB support are rural (40 people per square kilometer). In ’09, $140 million or 35% of the CPB’s total federal appropriation leveraged an additional $1billion in support of these outposts of White America. So let’s see….lower fundraising capacity, higher engineering costs, more desperately needed jobs, and a vacuum of information and communication. Yep sounds like “winning” to me.  

The House’s Public Broadcasting Caucus has been one of the few areas that both sides of congress have agreed is worthy of support for well over a decade. Apparently the Tea Party has begun to punk certain members into believing their support is no longer good for their political careers. My god, what a metaphor for the new bizzaro world of American politics folks. An NFP created by Congress in 1967 that’s met its mandate of providing all (urban, suburban and rural) with free, quality, informative programming is threatened with having their federal funds withdrawn – Come on Man…!!!

Steven Sapp - Founding Member, Universes Universes

Frank Cruz – Director of Development Dream Yard Project Dreamyard