April 26, 2021 | Jeffrey Good
The veteran educator and Charleston native who will lead the new Lowcountry Acceleration Academy in Charleston knows more than a little about the challenges faced by her future students, especially young men and women of color.
When Dr. Jacinta Bryant drives past the former McLeod Plantation — where her ancestors were forced to toil as slaves — she remembers what her mother told her as a child.
“Do you realize every time we pass this place that many of your ancestors were beaten because they wanted to read?” her mother told the then-schoolgirl. “Take advantage of the foundation that your ancestors built for you.”
Bryant took those words to heart, succeeding in grade and high school, then going on to earn an undergraduate degree in psychology, one master’s degree in counseling and another in psychology, an Ed. S. in school psychology and a Ph.D. in educational leadership.
She plans to make the newest of a nationwide network of Acceleration Academies a place where a new generation of learners — regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or economic background — finds the success they might have thought out of reach.
“Lowcountry Acceleration Academy can really shift the landscape for that high school student,” she says. When the school opens this summer, Bryant says she and her team will welcome young people into “a culture that looks out for them, as compared to getting them in trouble.”
Trouble is what all too many students have found in other school settings, she says — particularly the Black students who arrive at their first schools with bright eyes and big hopes, only to find racism, low expectations and cultural misunderstanding.
“With students, when you don’t celebrate who they originally are, they become broken,” she says. She felt that brokenness as one of the only African American children in her school, and rebuilt her self-image only when a 6th grade teacher saw her potential and helped her shine.
Dr. Jacinta Bryant was only one of two Black students in her 8th grade class.
“She celebrated me. She made me realize that I could do it,” Bryant says of the teacher, Elizabeth Grace McMenamin. “She didn’t see me as black or white. She saw me as a student who needed her.”
Bryant wants to carry that gift forward to a new generation of aspiring graduates from Charleston, Berkeley and Dorchester counties. Working in partnership with the South Carolina Public Charter School District, Lowcountry Acceleration Academy will offer a personalized, tuition-free high school opportunity.
Her message to the young learners who enroll?
“Let’s start a new beginning,” she will say. “Let’s be empowered by our pain. Out of that pain there has to be some purpose.”
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To understand Bryant’s perspective — and her academy’s potential — consider the history of Charleston and South Carolina.
“By 1860, there were 4 million slaves in the United States, and 400,000 of them — 10 percent — lived in South Carolina. African-Americans, enslaved and free, made up 57 percent of the state’s population,” according to a report in the Post and Courier newspaper. “Charleston was the nation’s capital of the slave trade, the place where many of those enslaved people first landed in the New World. The city was built on slave labor and, for nearly 200 years, thrived under a slave economy.”
Bryant’s grandfather, Edward Nehemiah Drayton, was the son of slaves and a member of the first generation of free Black people. Like many members of her family and Charleston’s African American community, she grew up on former plantation land — in this case, a section of James Island known as “The Hill.”
Bryant, 49, says her parents worked hard to build a good life for themselves and their 8 children. Her father was a master plumber who worked as a naval pipe fitter, invested in real estate and opened a convenience store and laundromat. Her mother earned her certification as a licensed practical nurse while a student at Burke Industrial High School.
“Both of my parents went the vocational route and that enabled them to have successful career paths and support our family — and that’s what we want to do at Lowcountry,” Bryant says. “We can really help the students focus on their college and career pathway.”
Dr. Jacinta Bryant says her parents worked hard to build a good life for themselves and their 8 children.
As a child, Jacinta attended the Nativity Catholic elementary school near her home. There, she found herself one of only two Black students in her grade. She didn’t think much of it until, “in my 7th grade year, one of the boys called me a nigger.”
“I didn’t know I was different than the white kids at that school until I heard that word,” she recalls.
It wasn’t just other students. She recalls a 7th grade teacher who led her largely white students in a rendition of the racist Confederate anthem. As she heard them sing, “I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten,” she found herself thrust into a painful past and a dishonored present.
Moving on to the academically strong Bishop England High School, she found some fellow students of color — but not a sense of belonging. Some of her black peers teased her for the way she spoke, wore makeup and styled her hair. White students, meanwhile, held themselves apart.
“I couldn’t fit in with any group,” she says. Her experience wasn’t much different at the store her father opened near their home and a subsidized housing complex. Neighborhood youths would come into the store, see her behind the counter — always with a book in front of her — and scoff.
“Because they made me feel so inadequate, the only thing I could do was put myself in my books and help my dad,” she says, particularly after diabetes cost him his eyesight and family members needed to pitch in. “I was focusing on my education. I became an adult in a child’s body.”
A strong student, Bryant enrolled at the University of South Carolina after graduation, initially following her mother into nursing but soon switching to psychology and a career working with those facing all manner of challenges. She landed a job at a residential facility for children who had been subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
That work reminded her of her 6th grade experience, and how a caring adult can ease the burdens of too many young people. “I wanted them to still enjoy being a child.”
From there she moved onto a treatment center for women inmates who had been prostituted by prison guards. She heard their stories of falling into drugs, theft and other crimes that landed them behind bars — all tied together with a common story of feeling like failures in school.
“What I realized is that it was the educational system that failed them. They weren’t just the offender number on their shirts; they were human,” she says. “Today we call it the school-to-prison pipeline. They were that pipeline.”
Armed with an Ed.S. in school psychology, Bryant shifted to the public education system, becoming one of the few Black psychologists in the Charleston County public school system. Over time, she rose to become the first Black leader of the Charleston district’s special education department, and then advanced to her most recent post, Director of Special Services for the Colleton County School District.
At every step, she has seen students of color — particularly young Black men — being wrongly labeled as problem cases and made to feel inferior to their white peers. She has made it her mission to help her colleagues understand and support students who have great potential, if only adults can see and encourage it.
“This is where I see all of my past, all of my work, come together.”
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When Lowcountry Acceleration Academy opens its doors, Bryant says, it will have one central mission: “rebuilding” young learners who, for a wide range of reasons, have not found success in more traditional schools.
Some students come to Acceleration Academies with hopes of speeding up their studies and graduating early. Others come because they need a flexible schedule that will allow them to raise children, care for other family members and work long hours to make ends meet. Many come because they’ve been bruised by a school system that makes them feel less-than.
“Kids walk in and they’re shattered,” she says. “Their spirits are taken from them.”
Rather than looking for ways in which students have fallen short, staff members at LAA will emphasize their strengths and build on them through a deeply personalized academic curriculum and personalized coaching. These core elements will be supplemented with wrap-around supports to address issues that get in the way, including poverty, homelessness, prenatal and child care, mental health counseling and help for moving past legal troubles.
“That’s our role today,” she says. “We have to meet the needs of the whole child.”
Dr. Jacinta Bryant’s father grew up in Charleston’s East Side neighborhood and, as an adult, made real estate investments that helped to revitalize the historically Black community. In recent years, the neighborhood has transformed anew, as expensive homes rise up where modest dwellings once stood.
All students — who are called “graduation candidates” to remind them of their goals — need encouragement and support. But Bryant has a particular sense of the need to do better by students of color.
Bryant has two children, a 24-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. Both have experienced the feeling of being “other” in schools dominated by white culture. Like her mother, Kaylah is spirited and smart. She and her Black peers sometimes speak the rich dialect of their Gullah-Geechee culture. And their high spirits can be misinterpreted by white educators, Bryant says.
“Our girls are sassy,” she says. “When we’re in school with those behaviors, we become a ‘discipline problem.’ We become threatening to the teacher. So that child will shut down right there.”
Black male students face even greater challenges, she says. When her son Malik was in 4th grade, qualified for admission to an academically elite magnet school. But in the final interview before enrollment, the school administrator told the child and his mom that the As he had earned in North Charleston schools were not on par with the As at his new school.
“Here you have to work for your A,” the administrator said.
“That’s the plight of the Black man right there,” she says. “I lost Malik that day in front of that administrator. He lost motivation for school from that day forward.”
Luckily for him, he had a powerhouse of a mother and a skilled educator at his side. With encouragement from her, he succeeded in grade and high school, then went on to earn a degree from the Citadel and begin a career in law enforcement. He also served 7 years in the U.S. Army Infantry Reserves.
“What if he didn’t have a parent like me, ready to fight the system and tell him, ‘You are good enough,’ ” she says.
Dr. Jacinta Bryant and her children, Malik and Kaylah.
The potential for racist treatment grows when Black boys become young men and are treated as a threat, she says. As the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer and other such incidents show, that mistreatment too often turns violent.
Regardless of their race or gender, Bryant says, all graduation candidates at LAA will find a safe, welcoming and inspiring school. They will hear the message that they are not only good enough, but also have the potential to succeed beyond their imagining.
“Transformation is what we do,” she says, likening the development of Lowcountry graduation candidates to that of a butterfly that begins as a homely caterpillar. “Nobody wants to touch it, but it turns into the most beautiful piece of art in nature.”
“Many of our students may come to us feeling like that caterpillar, but we are going to work to capture their true essence and help them build their strengths into a beautiful life.”
Dr. Jacinta Bryant stands in front of the laundromat and convenience store run by her family.