The Neighborhood
Tiptoeing into Poverty and Finding Hope
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As I step into the century-old church building, grit crunches under my Birkenstocks. I look down at the floor and feel sadness at the oldness of the cracked, black-and-gray diamond shapes that used to be decent linoleum. In their day, they were probably black and white. I trudge up the staircase holding the sticky wood bannister while making a mental note to stop at the drug store for some hand sanitizer on the way home. The pharmacist will know the strongest brand. I tell myself that the railing was probably once polished to a high sheen. The first thing I remember thinking when I stepped into the lone classroom at Neighborhood Academy is: “Boy, they’re going to need some bigger desks in here. Could somebody please give these people a leg up?”
Jim Streitelmeier, a pastor on the younger end of middle age, sits folded into a child-size chair. He and a teen-ager are hashing out the answer to a math story problem, seated at a table more suited to second-grader. Never mind. It’s learning that’s important in this Neighborhood Academy classroom.
Neighborhood. Sounds like a sunny cul-de-sac where happy kids play ball and ride bikes.
Academy. The word seems fitting for a private school in the suburbs where it’s not uncommon for homes to have entire nightclubs in their basements and vast upper-floor suites for the seclusion and comfort of harried parents.
Neighborhood Academy is none of the above. It’s smack dab in the middle of an area riddled with every known form of 21st-century urban pestilence.
When I started visiting Neighborhood Academy regularly in 2004, the entire school was one room on the second floor of a century-old church building that bore the scars of neglect. To get to the school room, I made my way down a cavernous hallway, past rooms scattered randomly with institutional tables, metal folding chairs and unmatched shelving. Here and there were sagging couches people had donated with the good intention of upgrading the church and school.
The academy status of this place comes from the heart of the school, not from a measure of its furnishings. Its students are salted away from the destruction and failure of inner-city public schools – not by distance, but by philosophy.
Going there wasn’t easy in the beginning. I live a relatively comfortable life in the suburbs. People like me go to college, take our kids to Little League and soccer and are room mothers at school. We don’t generally gravitate toward problematic situations if we don’
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About the Book
Jim and Debbie Strietelmeier, a middle-class Christian couple, move with their three young children into the grittiest, most crime-riddled neighborhood in Indianapolis. They call this suffering on purpose. The goal is to bring hope and a haven to people in a place where nice folks don't go.
Then, a curious thing happens: "Nice" folks start going there. The wealthy suburbanites dine side by side with people who don't even own a coat. They stumble in their efforts to connect, but people from both cultures get back up and try again.
Leslie Collins' eyewitness account brings to life the people of Indianapolis' inner city, and with painful honesty chronicles their strengths, weaknesses and astonishing will to succeed. The story centers around Neighborhood Academy, a two-room school with a student population of broken children.
First- through 12th-graders bring to the school their foibles, their infirmities, their hopelessly fetid home lives. There, they find a goldmine of love, acceptance and hope. All of this whild studying upstairs in a building where street prostitutes and their johns steal inside to do business in a cloak room.
About the Author
Leslie Collins is a former newspaper editor and award-winning news journalist who grew up in the Indianapolis area and has traveled throughout the United States on feature-writing assignments for national magazines. She lives in Zionsville, Indiana, with her husband, photographer Robert K. Collins.