Howard County man rises from custodian to teacher

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. (AP) - Anthony Bell says he hustled as a teenager, selling weed and the video games he stole from The Mall in Columbia. He had a reserved seat in the principal’s office at Wilde Lake High School.

A decade later, he found work as a night custodian with Howard County’s public schools and began his long road back to the classroom - as an educator. Though he once couldn’t envision a career beyond the streets, Bell now teaches at Howard County’s alternative high school.

“I had friends who went to this school when I was growing up - I should have,” he said. “I understand these kids. . They remind me of myself in so many ways.”

Howard County schools Superintendent Renee Foose mentions Bell’s rise from custodian to teacher when talking about the system’s efforts to diversify. His unlikely path came to her attention during one of the meetings she holds with aspiring administrators.

Foose wants to hire more minorities, she says, and the system offers programs such as tuition reimbursement and scholarships for aspiring teachers from low-income families. About a quarter of all school employees and 16 percent of teachers identify as minorities in Howard County.

Bell, 45, never took the SAT, but he became the first in his family to attend college and the first black man and paraeducator on the board of the Howard County teachers union. He has represented Maryland on a National Education Association committee.

And last spring, Bell reached another milestone, earning his Master of Science degree in education. He is hoping to become an assistant principal.

Howard County school officials know of three people whose careers have progressed from custodian to the classroom. Bell, with his master’s degree, has come the furthest.

He managed to graduate from Wilde Lake in 1990 and earn admission to Hudson Valley Community College near Albany, N.Y. But his girlfriend became pregnant, Bell said, and he dropped out.

Bell never knew his own father and said he made his daughter, Jenna, a promise: “I was hers for life.”

He would search nearly a decade for some way to support her. Bell cooked at Burger King, assisted disabled adults and sold home alarm systems door-to-door.

By 1996, he had moved his young family back to Howard County, where his mother could help raise Jenna. His uncle and grandfather had lived comfortably as custodians. So he applied to the county schools and began working nights. He was in his 20s and without a college degree when Jenna’s mother left, he said. Now a single father, he needed a day job so he could be with his daughter at night.

While cleaning, he ran into his former Wilde Lake principal, Bonnie Daniel, and he told her his worries over money and how he would provide for Jenna.

Daniel recognized that Bell had a lot of potential.

She sent emails about an earnest young man looking for work. Soon he was interviewing at Mount Hebron High School.

He was hired as a special-education instructional assistant, working to guide students with their schedules and help them during math class - though he had failed algebra. Now he hushed the students who interrupted class. It was 1998 and Bell was back in school, almost a decade after he had brushed off education.

Everything crashed when he saw his first paycheck, he said - just half of what he earned as a custodian. Yet he could work sports games, taking tickets and helping out, for $40 a night. He could work Saturday school to earn extra pay. Coaching paid $3,000 a year, so he coached track and field hockey.

Another Mount Hebron teacher took notice. Ann De Lacy showed him wage scales for teachers. His salary would jump with an undergraduate degree.

“Every time I saw him, I hassled him,” she said.

Still, Bell said, he worried. “How am I going to do this?”

Howard County offered tuition reimbursement. Earn a C or better, and the county would repay him for classes.

Over the next decade, Bell forgot what it meant to have down time. He began classes at Howard Community College, then transferred to Coppin State University. He would wake at 6 a.m., drop off Jenna for school, work all day at Mount Hebron and coach track, then scoop up his daughter and rush to night classes at Coppin. His daughter sat beside him through class. Sometimes professors handed her a test, too.

“I probably fell asleep,” she says now.

In 2008, at the age of 36, Bell earned his bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from Coppin. He made the dean’s list that year, too. Mount Hebron promoted him to teacher. But he didn’t stop there.

This past May, he put on a cap and gown and walked across the stage at McDaniel College to receive his master’s degree in education and administration. His daughter watched and cried.

Bell keeps his hard-earned teacher’s certificate tacked to his office wall at the Homewood Center, where the county’s alternative high school is located. About 140 students in high school and middle school attend Homewood on referrals. These students had fallen behind after having trouble in other Howard County schools.

“It does help when his story is real and it’s right here,” said Tina Maddox, Homewood’s principal.

News spread at the school last week that a 20-year-old former student had been shot over the previous weekend, suffering injuries that eventually would prove fatal. Police said they found drugs at the scene.

The principal called a faculty meeting about the shooting. Afterward, Bell slumped in his office chair.

When he once refereed a student-teacher basketball game, Bell said, the young man had razzed him over calls. “What’s up, Bell?” the student had greeted him the next day. Teachers from Homewood had taken the boy to the barber before prom.

“Are you all right?” asked Chandra McKnight, the school psychologist.

He nodded. “Damn,” he said, wiping his eyes.

Of his current students, Bell said, “I just try and save them from going through the same mistakes I made.”

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Information from: The Baltimore Sun, https://www.baltimoresun.com