“Who would I tell if I came across a body now?” I wondered wistfully as I crossed the wooden bridge over the river, heading to yoga class as the warm summer sun started to slip below the row of picturesque brick storefronts in the downtown district.
The yoga classes were supposed to mask my distress over recently selling out on my dream job. My first purchase with my new obscenely large paycheck had been a high-end pink yoga mat and unlimited classes. Before, on my reporter’s salary, I scraped to afford drop-in classes a few times a year at this studio.
The problem was every time I walked across the bridge to the downtown studio, I couldn’t help but think of a time months earlier when I was on my way to yoga class and saw first responders pulling a body from the river. I sent the tip to my coworkers in the newsroom as I walked into the yoga studio — after debating whether I should skip my class and start reporting on the scene myself. When I checked my phone after the closing “namaste,” my coworkers already had the story online.
Now, there was no need to gather news tips. For the first time in a decade, it wasn’t my job to report the news.
My dream job had become too heavy. The weight started to lift as I toured the campus building where I would begin my new job as a university “communications specialist,” a title that felt as foreign as the buttoned-up aura of academia. Between taking in the vaulted ceilings and art-lined hallways of my new workspace, I noticed the exterior doors were always unlocked and no one monitored who entered the building. Newsroom security had been tight, with locked doors and ID checks to enter. We went through active shooter training after the 2018 mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Maryland shook the whole journalism industry. An armed guard arrived in the office any time the threats aimed at our staff reached a certain pitch, and warning flyers on the doors showed the mugshot of a man who had repeatedly shown up to aggressively complain about our news coverage.
“Oh right, people don’t want to harm you for doing this work,” I commented to one of my new coworkers.
But my lighter reality wasn’t necessarily easier. I felt like an outdoor cat abruptly allowed inside; while I was thankful to be out of survival mode, I didn’t fully understand the house rules. I didn’t know how to sit through a conversation without scribbling in a reporter’s notebook. The summer days in my new office passed slowly, calmly, absent the adrenaline rush of breaking news or battling for public information. I wasn’t sure how to tell what I’d accomplished without page views or bylines to count. Escaping the endless stream of online comments critiquing everything I created was a relief — and a quick way to feel irrelevant. Now that I had the freedom to show my bias about what was happening in the news, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say.
I started taking walks after lunch to break up my workday, an impossible luxury when trying to finish a story on deadline. As I sat on a bench looking over the grassy campus quad, I kept thinking of lazy summer afternoons more than a decade ago, when my college roommate and I sprawled out on blankets in the patch of grass behind our apartment and talked for hours. Our conversations drifted to the careers and families and lives we might make for ourselves someday. I had always pictured myself as a journalist.
At a loss for who I was supposed to be if not a reporter, I turned to my friends from my first newsroom. We gathered at the lakeside on hot weekends in July and August for countless bottles of wine, a sunburn or two, and marathon sessions of dancing and drinking through music festivals. In not so many words, I tried to ask the people who knew me when I fell for journalism whether I would be alright without it. They told me they still want to read what I write. They said contentment is more fulfilling than fleeting bursts of joy. They said I might always feel this way, and life would go on.
They had been through their own versions of this break-up. As recent college grads, we had landed together at the same small-town newspaper for a handful of years. We spent our days together reporting the news and our nights together at the bar next door. Then, one by one, we’d gone our separate ways — my coworker-turned-husband and I to another newspaper, everyone else to something else. At a time when one journalism job was hard enough to come by, Marty and I managed to work together at three different papers. But I was fully aware our path to new newsrooms would always be paved with layoffs and buyouts and “restructures.” Eventually, I lost sight of my way forward amid the rubble of the collapsing industry.
For months after my departure to what journalists call the “dark side” of communications, I obsessed over parsing which parts of journalism I had loved and which parts made me leave. The conclusion I reached — after meditating on it through those many yoga classes — is the line between the two is incredibly thin. I watched my husband continue reporting, pitying his tether to the news cycle and envying the stories he wrote. I cheered on my reporter friends and wondered if they judged me for leaving, like I had judged the journalists who left before me.
The summer wound down with a former coworker’s wedding, and I was surrounded by people from that world I was pretending not to miss. I caught up with my first editor Dave, who’s now a college newspaper adviser, and found myself asking if he felt conflicted sending the latest crop of college graduates into this industry. Like any good reporter, I noticed he skirted the question and instead said he teaches them to be storytellers, which will serve them well in many lines of work.
“It’s not like when I promised you if you gave me two or three years, there’d be a bigger opportunity in journalism waiting for you,” he said. “I can’t tell them that.”
I remember him saying that when he hired me. I was 21, a month out of college and had no idea what I was doing. For some reason, Dave kept believing I could be a good journalist and so I kept trying to be. And his promise had borne out. When I cried myself to sleep the night of the wedding, I was mourning that we can’t make the same promises to the next generation of people like me, who think the thing they might be best at is reporting the news. I was mourning the disorienting trajectory that led something I once loved to become untenable.
My yoga membership reached the six-month mark, and I signed up for another one as the leaves changed color and fell from the trees. I sleep better these days, and my fingernails no longer peel and tear off like they used to when I was constantly stressed. I realized there are no “bonus points” for sacrificing personal peace for work, even when you attach to that work such lofty ideals as upholding a cornerstone of our country’s democracy. I’m learning to show up in my life as a whole person, rather than as a reporter whose value depends on her ability to deliver the next big headline and keep herself out of the story. And I’ll probably always miss the magic of strangers trusting me to share their stories and the gratifying challenge of deploying every analytical and creative instinct at my disposal to try to tell those stories well. Who wouldn’t miss the greatest job in the world?
My new job didn’t change my pre-pandemic commute, other than making it a half-mile shorter. So every morning, the familiar route accentuated my new destination. I used to check Twitter at stop lights to see what stories the other news outlets published or compose emails in my head, trying to figure out the right combination of words to get people to give me information they’d rather not. Driving by a school would remind me I needed to follow up on the FOIA request I’d filed with the district, and passing through the ring of businesses around campus prompted a fresh list of calls I needed to make about which restaurants were closing, which were opening, and which were being forced out by rising rents. Before I left the house, I would have sent my editor a list of headlines for the stories I planned to finish by the end of the day, and I knew I should have the first one filed by 10 a.m. if I wanted to deliver.
After I left journalism, I took the bus to work and looked out the window at the trees. The news was something to consume with my morning coffee, and then I’d go about my day.
YPSILANTI TOWNSHIP, MI — Courtney Vesey’s 30th birthday dinner was leftovers she pulled from the fridge and ate standing alone at the kitchen counter. There was no cake.
She spent the quiet mid-December evening with her boyfriend, Mike Ponds, and her four kids. Romeiro, 12, Marcquise, 11, and Ramone, 8, watched cartoons in the back bedroom and took turns flexing to see who had bigger muscles. Two-year-old Alaya toddled around the house with her mom’s phone.
Vesey had three weeks to move her family into a new house and didn’t know where they’d go. That worry overshadowed any birthday festivities.
“I just want to be accepted, for my voucher to be accepted,” she said, dressed up for her birthday, with shimmery eye shadow and gold dangly earrings.
Ramone “ReRe” (left) and Romeiro “RoRo” Buckner work out side-by-side inside their bedroom at their West Willow home, Friday, Dec. 14, 2018 in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive)
Ramone “ReRe” Buckner, 8, wrestles with his brothers (not pictured) while his sister Alaya, 2, sleeps on the couch at their West Willow home on their mother’s 30th birthday, Friday, Dec. 14, 2018, in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive)
Vesey is among 3,252 Washtenaw County residents who receive a Housing Choice Voucher, a federal subsidy created more than four decades ago to help the poor gain entry into better, safer neighborhoods.
However, the private housing market dictates where Section 8 housing vouchers are accepted. Washtenaw County largely pushes these folks into already low-income neighborhoods – some of which are riddled with violence and drug activity – according to an analysis of voucher data from 2016 and 2017 by MLive and The Ann Arbor News.
Tenant screening policies, fees and high security deposits keep voucher recipients out of more affluent areas with better job opportunities and schools like Ann Arbor, Saline, Dexter or Chelsea – even if they can make rent.
(Kate Howland | MLive)
Fifty percent of renters in Ypsilanti Township’s West Willow neighborhood use housing vouchers, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
About 200 voucher recipients live there – effectively making West Willow a subsidized housing complex, but without the support services traditionally offered by public housing.
Vesey was among those funneled into West Willow. After seven months, she was desperate to get out.
“I don’t want my kids to be a part of this culture,” she said in a December interview.
Jo Ann McCollum, president of the New West Willow Neighborhood Association, poses for a portrait at the Community Resource Center on Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2018, in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)
Death of an American dream
West Willow – full of single-family homes with fenced-in yards, churches, a park and an elementary school – sounds like an ideal place to raise a family.
“I have this vision of this neighborhood being affordable to live in, friendly, safe,” said Jo Ann McCollum, New West Willow Neighborhood Association president and a homeowner there with her husband since 1994.
“I want it to be sort of like a model neighborhood where you don’t have to have a lot of money, you don’t have to have a lot of education to live a high-quality life.”
In some ways, West Willow has fallen short of McCollum’s vision, as the ups and downs of the auto industry determined the fate of the neighborhood.
This undated photo of West Willow shows the neighborhood’s original houses, which were built in the late 1940s. (Courtesy of Ypsilanti Historical Society)
West Willow was built in the late 1940s as a subdivision for executives and managers at the nearby Willow Run Bomber Plant, which Ford had then recently sold to Kaiser-Frazer Corp.
General Motors bought the plant in 1953, which helped to stabilize the neighborhood even though GM offered fewer jobs than Kaiser-Frazer, said local historian Matt Siegfried.
“You see this ratcheting down of jobs since the end of World War II,” he said. “You can see how the starts and stops for the plant would lead to starts and stops in housing production.”
In 1960, the 770 homes in West Willow were occupied by white homeowners, according to Census data. The neighborhood nearly doubled in size by the mid-60s as more houses intended for factory workers were built, Siegfried said.
By the early ‘70s, after changes in federal law that theoretically prohibited race-based discrimination in home sales, a few black families had moved to West Willow.
Auto companies hired more black workers in the ’70s, and houses in West Willow were affordable for blue collar workers like Robert and Sandra Harrison, who both worked at Ford’s Rawsonville plant when they bought a house on Desoto Avenue in 1974.
“We moved in and we just never moved out,” said Robert Harrison, now 76. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re in a good neighborhood. It just needs a little tender, loving care.”
Workers build houses in West Willow in 1955. (The Ann Arbor News archives courtesy of Ann Arbor District Library)
The gradual influx of black families to West Willow prompted white families to move out, Siegfried said.
GM layoffs and a recession in the ‘80s raised unemployment and lowered property values in the triangular-shaped neighborhood bordered by U.S. 12 and I-94.
Gangs that cropped up in West Willow around that time brought a wave of violence and drug activity that continues to ripple through the neighborhood today. For decades, residents and police have tried to curb the criminal activity, with varying success.
However, some longtime residents say the accounts of gang activity in West Willow are exaggerated.
“West Willow became racialized,” Siegfried said. “The fact West Willow is black and working class makes it a ‘bad neighborhood’ compared to other areas around here.”
In 1992, GM closed its Willow Run transmission plant and moved thousands of jobs to Texas. The company maintained a powertrain plant at the Willow Run site, with fewer jobs available.
Black political power in southeast Michigan was largely tied to the United Automobile Workers, Siegfried said, so the downfall of the auto industry hurt the black community.
“We get a kind of bottoming out of living standards and political power and voice,” he said.
The offices of the New West Willow Neighborhood Association on Tyler Road, Monday, Feb. 18, 2019. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive)
Scenes from Ypsilanti Township’s West Willow neighborhood, Monday, Feb. 18, 2019. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive)
The Great Recession of 2007 brought a new layer of hardship.
In 2008, West Willow had the second highest foreclosure rate in Washtenaw County, with 12.5 percent of the neighborhood’s 1,089 mortgages in foreclosure, according to data collected for a federal grant.
At that time, 59 percent of mortgages in West Willow had higher-than-recommended interest rates and fees that made homeowners more vulnerable to foreclosure.
“Just that look of all these for sale signs on these homes changes things,” McCollum said. “It was like a mad rush. People lost their homes or were trying to sell them.”
GM – which had been Ypsilanti Township’s largest taxpayer – completely closed the Willow Run plant in 2010.
In 2012, Willow Run schools closed Kaiser Elementary in West Willow, and the following year the struggling school district itself disbanded.
Property values plummeted, and more renters moved in after investors bought up the inexpensive houses.
In 2005, 28 percent of houses in West Willow were rentals, and 71 percent had a market value between $90,000 and $113,000, according to Washtenaw County data.
Post-recession, in 2017, rentals made up 46 percent of West Willow houses, and 97 percent had a market value of $70,000 or less. At the same time, the racial makeup of the neighborhood shifted, and 75 percent of West Willow’s 3,180 residents in 2017 were black.
The graphic shows the change in owner-occupied versus renter-occupied houses in West Willow from 2005 to 2017. (Courtesy of Washtenaw County)
The graphic shows the change in state equalized value of property in West Willow from 2005 to 2017. The market value is approximately double the state equalized value. (Courtesy of Washtenaw County)
Alex Thomas, 49, a community activist who grew up in West Willow, was surprised by how much the neighborhood had changed when he moved back in 2016 after spending eight years living abroad.
There was more litter on the streets, fewer children playing outside and the closure of Willow Run schools took away a “focal point” of the neighborhood, he said. He didn’t know many of his neighbors anymore.
“It was just shocking seeing the decline in the neighborhood,” Thomas said.
In the struggling real estate market, housing vouchers brought steady rent checks.
The maximum voucher amount is based on a county-wide formula, so West Willow landlords accepting housing vouchers can charge more for rent than they otherwise could in a high-crime neighborhood in a low-performing school district.
“That was an incentive for some of the last holdouts to move and use their home as an investment property,” Thomas said.
Meanwhile, the area’s lower property values have hollowed out Ypsilanti Township’s tax base, making it more difficult to provide basic services and maintain infrastructure.
“That’s individual people’s property values, but that’s the community’s tax base, too,” said Teresa Gillotti, Washtenaw County’s Office for Community and Economic Development director.
“It’s just like kicking you while you’re down.”
Courtney Vesey (top left) poses for a family portrait alongside her boyfriend, Mike Ponds (top right) and her four children, Romeiro Buckner (top middle), Ramone Buckner (bottom left), Alaya Buckner (bottom middle) and Marcquise Buckner (bottom right), outside their West Willow home on Friday Dec. 14, 2018, in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)
Courtney Vesey (right) locks the door to her mother’s apartment before leaving to drop off her children for their first day back to school following winter break on Monday, Jan. 7, 2019, in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive)
The quest for a fresh start
Vesey was 16 and pregnant when she first considered applying for a housing voucher. She wanted a place of her own once her child was born and knew she’d need help paying rent.
She spent six years on the waiting list before receiving a voucher in 2012.
In that time, Vesey graduated from Belleville High School, welcomed three sons to her family and lived with relatives and her children’s father.
In 2016, Vesey lost her voucher after failing to disclose a change in her income. Pregnant with Alaya at the time, she moved in with her children’s father again. Their landlord ended their month-to-month lease, and they struggled to find a new place to live.
In February 2018, Vesey and her four children landed in a homeless shelter. Three months later, they moved into a house in West Willow thanks to the Rapid Rehousing program that provides temporary rent assistance for people who are homeless.
Two-year-old Alaya Buckner laughs while she plays on the stairs of her grandmother’s apartment on Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019, in Ypsilanti Township. (Ben Allan Smith | MLive.com)
Rapid Rehousing paid a decreasing amount of Vesey’s $1,200 rent each month, and she knew she could not afford the place on her $700 a month income.
Plus, Vesey wanted to move away from the drug deals she said she saw on the street outside her house, the threat of gun violence and the worries her sons would start smoking marijuana with other neighborhood kids.
“You’re raising your child different,” she said. “It’s hard to be different in an environment like that.”
Vesey received a new housing voucher in November and quickly ran through the list of properties recommended by the Ann Arbor Housing Commission and Section 8 website. There were no units available that could accommodate her family.
She and Ponds started calling any property in southeast Michigan and Ponds’ home state of South Carolina that seemed promising. They checked on about 275 rentals.
“When you realize (the apartments are) nice, you know not to call,” Vesey said. “You kind of look at the ones that are beat up a little bit and you shoot your shot with them.
“The odds are against you, so you’ve got to pick the worst place. But you’ve got to pick the best of the worst.”
(Kate Howland | MLive)
By law, landlords are not required to accept housing vouchers. Ann Arbor’s and Ypsilanti’s non-discrimination ordinances include source of income, so landlords cannot deny prospective tenants solely because they have a housing voucher.
However, apartment complexes can set a minimum credit score for tenants or charge high application fees or security deposits, which are not covered by housing vouchers.
Ann Arbor’s housing market lets landlords set rent higher than the voucher payment limit, so there’s little incentive for them to accept vouchers and reduce profits.
“You can’t get into Ann Arbor,” Vesey said. “They either tell you that they don’t accept Section 8, or they tell you that you have to meet their criteria. If I met the criteria, I wouldn’t need Section 8.”
Between 25 and 30 percent of people who receive Housing Choice Vouchers from the Ann Arbor Housing Commission don’t find a place to use them within the 60- to 90-day deadline, said Executive Director Jennifer Hall.
There’s a variety of reasons for that, said AAHC Voucher Program Manager Misty Hendershot, including the lack of affordable or satisfactory housing options, poor credit history or criminal record.
“With affordable housing being limited right now in Washtenaw County, even though we’re giving out all these vouchers to people, they’re having a hard time finding places to stay,” she said.
From left: Siblings Ramone “ReRe,” 8, Marcquise, 11, and Alaya, 2, play on an air mattress during Marcquise’s birthday party at their grandmother’s apartment on Saturday, Jan. 12, 2019 in Ypsilanti Township. Courtney Vesey and her four kids spent more than six weeks staying at Vesey’s mother house while waiting for paperwork to be processed for their new apartment.
Vesey found out on New Year’s Eve the apartment complex she had her eye on in Greenville, South Carolina, accepted Section 8 and had an apartment available.
While waiting for the paperwork to be processed, Vesey and her kids have spent more than six weeks sleeping on the floor at her mother’s apartment, their belongings packed in black garbage bags piled in the living room.
“I’m a little nervous – just about starting all over again,” Vesey said in early January as she planned a trip with her dad to go see the apartment.
As moving plans materialized, Vesey left the pharmacy technician job she’d had for less than three months.
The extra income could jeopardize her Social Security disability payments, Vesey said, and her pharmacy tech certification wouldn’t transfer to South Carolina.
Vesey’s housing voucher is the main source of income to pay $843 a month for the new three-bedroom apartment.
“The voucher itself is really a good stepping stone for a family who doesn’t have money to be able to afford housing on their own,” she said. “But all I can say is that it was very difficult for me, just very challenging. I got more ‘no’ to my Section 8 voucher than I got ‘yes.’”
This piece won second place for best public service from the Associated Press, second place for news enterprise reporting from the Michigan Press Association and second place for public service from MPA.
Pedestrians walk along Miller Ave near Miller Manor in Ann Arbor as seen on Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018. (Ben Allan Smith/MLive.com)
ANN ARBOR, MI – A young Russ Calvert would curiously watch as pigs were unloaded at the Peters Sausage Co. slaughterhouse on Summit Street, a block from his north Ann Arbor home.
Calvert, now 75 and living on a lake near Chelsea, grew up with his parents and four siblings in a modest two-bedroom, 740-square-foot house on North Fourth Avenue in Kerrytown.
When the young Calvert wasn’t hanging around the slaughterhouse – which sat adjacent to Lansky’s Junkyard in the residential area – he’d play pool and go to Boy Scout meetings at the Dunbar Community Center, an alternative to whites-only youth activities elsewhere.
He also played hockey at the ice rink at Summit Park – now Wheeler Park – which in 1968 expanded to include the property where the slaughterhouse and junkyard once stood.
“I hate to use the word poor, but we had a roof over our head, food on the table,” he said.
At that time, their neighborhood was one of the few places in Ann Arbor where black people were allowed to live.
Little remains of Kerrytown and Water Hill as “old neighborhood” residents like Calvert knew it in the 1950s and ’60s.
Located directly north of Ann Arbor’s downtown, with Water Hill on the west side of Main Street and Kerrytown on the east, these neighborhoods are again in the midst of transformation.
Since the Great Recession of the early 2000s, home prices there have rebounded nearly twice as fast as the city as a whole.
In the past 12 months, the average sales price for houses in Water Hill and Kerrytown was $543,611, compared to $370,768 citywide during that same time, according to the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors.
It’s “just good old-fashioned gentrification,” said Jack Brown, the board of realtors president elect and Howard Hanna real estate services associate broker.
But some current residents worry that – like the black community that faded away a generation ago – their eclectic neighborhood as they know it also will cease to exist.
Before fair housing
In 1960, 38 percent of residents in what’s now Water Hill and Kerrytown were black. By 1970, black people accounted for 45 percent of the area’s residents, according to U.S. Census data.
At that time, black people in Ann Arbor had few alternatives.
Ann Arbor implemented a fair housing ordinance in 1964 — the same year the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin related to voter registration, schools, employment and public accommodations.
Four years later, the federal Fair Housing Act took effect and prohibited landlords or sellers from discriminating on the basis of race and other protected classes. It wasn’t until 1974 that the federal government passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which made it illegal for creditors to discriminate.
Prior to that, realtors could openly refuse to show black people houses for sale in certain neighborhoods, and banks and the federal government could deny mortgages based on a person’s race.
Neighborhood associations could prohibit selling or leasing a house to people of color. White people were afraid black neighbors would lower their property values.
Relegated to north Ann Arbor, many residents there forged deep bonds. An annual cookout where “old neighborhood” residents reminisce and catch up is now in its 22nd year.
Social events revolved around two prominent black churches and the Dunbar Community Center, now called the Ann Arbor Community Center.
Growing up, Audrey Lucas, 84, sang in choirs at the Dunbar Center and Second Baptist Church, where she’s still a member and the church clerk.
The Rev. C.W. Carpenter, who led Second Baptist for 35 years, was influential in her life, Lucas said, and he fought “urban renewal” proposals in the 1960s and ’70s that would have forced black families out of their neighborhood.
“He had very firm ideas on how we represented our race,” Lucas said. “You had standards … and you just learned from seeing and doing and knowing that the people that surrounded you in church wanted the best for you all of the time and were always in your corner.”
An era of change
From the 1970s through ’90s, the Water Hill and Kerrytown demographics again shifted.
Fair housing laws theoretically meant black people could purchase houses in other neighborhoods. People who grew up in Water Hill and Kerrytown were ready to move away and start their own families. And the city began improvements that made the neighborhoods more attractive to white families.
“It was young people really, and they didn’t want to stay here anymore,” said Diana McKnight-Morton, a Washtenaw Community College trustee who grew up on West Kingsley Street in what’s now Water Hill and whose parents ran DeLong’s Bar-B-Q Pit on Detroit Street in Kerrytown for 37 years until it closed in 2001.
Urban renewal plans called for a Beakes-Packard bypass across Water Hill and Kerrytown, but that project was abandoned in 1972 due to public resistance. At that point, the city already had bought some people out of their houses to make way for the bypass, including Shirley Beckley’s family.
Today, condos have replaced Beckley’s childhood home, across West Kingsley Street from where McKnight-Morton grew up. Neither of the girls had siblings, and they would frequently spend the night at each other’s houses and roller skate through the empty stalls at the farmers market in Kerrytown.
“I can’t move back in where I grew up, because I can’t afford $500,000,” said Beckley, 76, who now lives in an apartment in Pittsfield Township. “We don’t have our black community.”
From 1970 to ’80, the black population in Water Hill and Kerrytown went from 45 percent of residents to 25 percent, and that continued to drop to 18 percent in 2000, according to Census data.
The graph shows the number of black people as a percentage of the total population in Water Hill and Kerrytown as well as Washtenaw County as a whole, from 1960 to 2016, according to the U.S. Census. (Lauren Slagter | MLive)
Diane Black, 69, and her husband at the time were among the white residents who moved into Water Hill in the ’80s. Black still lives in the house on Spring Street they purchased in 1987, after renting a house in the same neighborhood on Chapin Street for several years.
When they first moved in to the two-story, three-bedroom house, Black and her ex-husband, an architect, slept in the same room with their two young sons while they gradually fixed up the rest of the house one room at a time, she said.
Although the house needed work, the location was good, and Black could walk to work when she held jobs at Del Rio, a former bar on West Washington, and the former artist and dance studios on Chapin Street.
Along with the Black family, artists and musicians congregated in Water Hill in the ’80s and ’90s.
Paul Tinkerhess – the man credited with coining the name Water Hill – and his wife Claire moved to Miner Street in 1992. They couldn’t find a house they liked and could afford in Ann Arbor, so they bought a vacant lot on Miner Street and had a house set for demolition on Ashley Street moved there.
The Tinkerhesses, who own Fourth Ave. Birkenstock in Kerrytown, play music, as do their three sons. The family soon realized there were other musicians and singers living within a few blocks of them.
In 2011, Tinkerhess launched the Water Hill Music Festival, which invites people to watch the neighborhood’s musicians perform on their front porches the first Sunday in May.
“That’s when the name really stuck,” he said.
Tinkerhess realizes the things he likes about the neighborhood – proximity to downtown, parks and the Huron River; friendly neighbors; and a nonprofit that shovels sidewalks in the winter – also make the area attractive to others and have prompted this latest round of gentrification.
“There’s less cultural diversity than 25 years ago. Fixer-uppers are being fixed up. Developers are tearing down some perfectly good houses and filling in the backyards with structures that are two times the size and three times the price,” he said. “Some of that is painful to watch and leaves us with the challenge of figuring out how to protect our neighborhood and city from gentrification.”
Housing crash and condo boom
Developer Tom Fitzsimmons started building housing in Water Hill and Kerrytown around 2005, and he’s helped to create hundreds of units in the area since then.
There were a couple of difficult years following the housing market crash in 2007, Fitzsimmons said, but now he and other developers are barely keeping up with demand.
“I’m very concerned on where this is going,” Fitzsimmons said. “If we price everybody out of the market, we can’t build anything. A big issue that we have is market demand and people wanting to live downtown. Twenty to 30 years ago, people wanted to live in the suburbs.”
Since 2010, Water Hill and Kerrytown have seen a 133 percent increase in average home sales price, according to the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors. By comparison, the city of Ann Arbor as a whole has seen a 69-percent increase in average home sales price in the same timeframe.
The table shows real estate statistics for the Water Hill-Kerrytown area and the City of Ann Arbor as a whole, according to the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors. (Milton Klingensmith | MLive)
Larrea Young and Robbie Kozub, who are white, started renting a house in Water Hill in 2015. At $1,500 a month, their three-bedroom, one-bathroom house within walking distance of downtown Ann Arbor was a “dirty steal,” said Young, 26.
Kozub is a woodworker and works for Zingerman’s, and Young is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. The young couple, who married in 2017, connected with the “artists and hippies” living in Water Hill, and they enjoy walking their two dogs around the area and frequenting Ann Arbor Distilling Company and Big City Bakery.
But now that they’re looking to buy a house, they can’t afford to stay.
“We wanted to stay in the neighborhood, but the houses don’t really sell anymore for under $400,000,” Young said. “I like the artsy feel, but as an artist I can’t afford to live here.”
The pastor’s booming voice filled the Spring Arbor University chapel as he grew more passionate, testifying to students about the power of prayer.
“I don’t have the time to tell you the history of those who have come to our church transgender and given their heart to God and changed,” the visiting pastor said during the hour-long service on Nov. 6, moving around the stage in jeans and a button-down shirt as he spoke. He held a Bible in one hand and gestured with the other to underscore his points.
“I don’t have time to tell you the stories of lesbians that come to our church and repent of their sins and now are living straight lives. I don’t have time to tell you about murderers who walk in and they get changed by the power of God,” he continued, his voice rising with each refrain. “I can’t tell you the drug dealers who actually hand me drugs and say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And it’s not by my might, it’s not by my power, it is by the spirit of the Lord.”
He paused. Applause filled the room.
But the LGBTQ people in the audience who’d just been compared to murderers and drug dealers were not inspired. They were filled with sadness and frustration. And they wanted to do more than sit in silence.
So, they did the unthinkable. This small group of students organized a protest.
They sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the concrete steps of the university library following that chapel service. They waited to see how people would react as they held up a rainbow flag – a gesture meant to force people to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ students at Spring Arbor University.
The protest lasted only 20 minutes. But, it took guts.
Students can be dismissed from Spring Arbor University, which is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, for being openly gay or transgender or violating other expectations outlined in the university’s “community standards.”
“It’s very much a profound frustration with wanting to be able to stand up for yourself and not knowing what you’re allowed to do and not knowing to what extent you’re allowed to stand up for yourself without facing consequences,” said Caitlin Stout, a 22-year-old lesbian from Jackson who finished her sociology degree at Spring Arbor University in January.
Stout wasn’t at that chapel service, but she agreed to help her friends take a stand against the words that hurt them. As a recent graduate and prominent figure in Spring Arbor’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community, Stout no longer fears consequences from the administration.
Spring Arbor University goes further than most in setting parameters on how LGBTQ students can express themselves, but many Christian colleges have similar policies specifying that sexual activity should be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman.
Those policies are putting Christian colleges increasingly at odds with a growing societal pressure to affirm the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
The result is a tangle of theology and practice as college administrators try to find a middle ground. They proclaim love for all people but condemn same-sex relationships and “conspicuous cross dressing.” They support LGBTQ students but do not affirm aspects of who those students are. They welcome students to campus, but only if students act a certain way.
Like Spring Arbor University, Hope College, in Holland, saw student demonstrations this academic year calling attention to campus instances of homophobia and racism.
LGBTQ students at these schools don’t know how “out” they can be, and they often feel undervalued or ignored within the Christian community.
The basic premise of queer pride is claiming your value and demanding respect, said the Rev. Elizabeth Edman, a queer priest with the Episcopal church.
“I view it as a spiritual crime,” she said. “It is a type of gas lighting. It messes with your mind to be told this integral part of you simply does not exist.”
‘Potentially unpopular view of the world’
The majority of American Christians now say homosexuality should be accepted, although Christian colleges and universities are among the last institutions to fully affirm LGBTQ rights.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2014 found 54 percent of U.S. Christians say homosexuality should be accepted by society, which is up 10 percentage points, compared to a similar survey from 2007.
Young Christians are leading that shift, with 51 percent of Millennial Evangelical Protestants (those born between 1981-96) saying in 2014 that homosexuality should be accepted, according to Pew. That compares to one-third of evangelical Baby Boomers (now ages 54 to 72) and one-fifth of evangelicals ages 76 to 93 who felt the same.
Christian institutions are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion. A guiding principle for the followers of Jesus is not to conform to the ways of the world.
“At Spring Arbor University, we hold what we understand to be an increasingly polarizing and potentially unpopular view of the world,” states an internal email sent by Spring Arbor University to the campus community following a couple of pro-LGBTQ student demonstrations last fall “… We understand that this belief and instruction may be in conflict with the practice or the vision of the larger culture, as Christian beliefs have been in other times and places.”
Some people will not recognize any progress on LGBTQ issues unless Christian universities change their theological stances, said Shapri D. LoMaglio, vice president of government and external relations for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Others see any effort to welcome LGBTQ students to campus as a betrayal of traditional religious principles, she added.
The CCCU is an association of 180 Christian higher education institutions worldwide, including Calvin College, Cornerstone University, Kuyper College and Spring Arbor University in Michigan. The council wants to help colleges improve the experience of all minority groups on campus while staying true to their religious foundation, LoMaglio said.
Andrew Deeb, a transgender man, felt isolated at Spring Arbor University.
Deeb, now 25, fully transitioned to male in 2013. As a result, he said university officials told him he had to live off-campus for the 2013-14 academic year, his third year of college and second year at Spring Arbor. The move presented a financial hardship because Deeb’s university scholarship couldn’t be used for off-campus housing.
He also was not allowed in either the male or female dorms on campus beyond the common rooms or outside of visiting hours. A university administrator “very heavily implied” that he should not use the restrooms on campus, Deeb said.
“I was by myself most of the time. I couldn’t go visit my friends in the dorms really,” Deeb said. “They classified me as this third group that wasn’t really allowed in a lot of spaces on campus.”
Andrew Deeb displays the award he won for outstanding achievement as a student at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, MI. (Courtesy photo)
Deeb filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education in the fall of 2013 that alleged Spring Arbor University was violating Title IX by discriminating against transgender people. He was not happy when SAU received an exemption from complying with Title IX in 2014.
Title IX is the federal law saying education institutions receiving federal funding cannot discriminate against people on the basis of sex, although the law allows for exceptions for religious organizations if compliance would violate their religious tenets.
“(There’s an idea that) the legal right of an LGBTQ person somehow trumps religious right,” said LoMaglio, with the CCCU. “Actually, the religious right for an institution that teaches or promulgates the faith … that actually trumps this other thing.”
Deeb decided to transfer from community college to SAU because he wanted to major in worship arts, and he wanted to be part of the Christian community he saw there.
Deeb then transferred to Concordia University in his hometown of Ann Arbor in the 2014-15 school year. He said he felt more welcome on that campus, and he graduated from Concordia in spring 2016 with a degree in pre-seminary studies and theological studies. He now attends seminary in San Francisco with plans to go into ministry.
“At least as far as my personal faith, before I transitioned, I needed assurance from God that God would be with me through the transition or I wasn’t going to be able to do it,” Deeb said. “I had that assurance, so I was able to hold onto that throughout all my experiences at Spring Arbor.”
No longer a taboo topic
Today’s LGBTQ students say they are tired of the theological gymnastics required to navigate what it means to be gay but not act gay, in order to play a respectable role in the church. They refuse to choose between being Christian and being LGBTQ.
Spring Arbor University President Brent Ellis said sexuality is becoming more widely discussed within the church in general. SAU is having conversations on the topic more frequently, he said, although the university has not changed how it treats students in the past decade.
The university intentionally sets clear expectations for students, he said.
“We do not attempt to be all things to all people. We are not a place that every person would want to be a part of,” Ellis said. “We create an intentional community that we believe is most conducive for young men and young women to be successful and live a fully-integrated Christian life.”
A professor who taught at SAU for more than a decade – who requested anonymity to avoid repercussions for differing with the university’s official stance on LGBTQ issues – credited the current generation of college students, and specifically the LGBTQ community on campus, with forcing a conversation about LGBTQ issues there.
“The positives I have to say about the Millennial generation is that they are highly motivated, and they have a strong sense of justice,” the professor said.
Joshua Chun Wah Kam spent much of his teen years praying to be straight.
During middle and high school, he went to counseling once or twice a month with his family to address his same-sex attraction. He committed to remaining celibate, but even then, he said some members of the counseling group told him he still needed to renounce his attraction to men as sinful.
Chun Wah Kam, now 21, stopped going to counseling when he started attending Hope College. By his senior year, he had publicly come out as gay. He graduated from Hope last December, with a double major in history and classics.
Joshua Chun Wah Kam of Holland hugs a friend as members and supporters of the LGBTQ community participate in the Spring Arbor University Alumni and Community Walk for Solidarity in Spring Arbor on April 22, 2018. (J. Scott Park | MLive.com)
Born in Montana and raised in Malaysia, Chun Wah Kam says he is an orthodox Christian. After applying to a mix of Christian and secular colleges, he decided to attend Hope due to its financial aid offerings and the “genuine warmth” he experienced during his campus visit.
Hope College, in Holland, is affiliated with the Reformed Church and enrolls about 3,200 students. Hope recognizes the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman and believes the unmarried are called to a “life of chastity.” The college will not recognize or support a group whose aim “is to promote a vision of human sexuality that is contrary to this understanding of biblical teaching.”
This winter, Chun Wah Kam spearheaded a “95 Stories” project at Hope – a campaign coordinated by students to share via social media 95 anonymous stories of instances of homophobia and racism on campus. He easily hit his target.
This spring, students and alumni involved with the 95 Stories project coordinated a “Love Thy Neighbors Day” to welcome prospective students to campus during Hope’s Admitted Student Day and let them know about the unofficial support system available for LGBTQ students and people of color on campus.
While Hope College staff and faculty have been willing to talk about LGBTQ issues, Chun Wah Kam said, in his experience, the Christian community accepts only a “certain type of gay.”
“The harmless gay is always accepted … But let that never cost me anything, let that never inconvenience me in the form of protest or any LGBT students being too loud on campus,” he said.
One of the goals of the 95 Stories project is to break down the divide between the church and gay community, he said. In April, the group published a list of eight proposals for ways the college could provide more support for LGBTQ students and students of color.
Ideally, they would like to see the college eliminate its statement on sexuality, recognize a Gay-Straight Alliance on campus, add gender identity and sexual orientation to Hope’s non-discrimination policy and offer gender-inclusive housing options to make transgender and non-binary students feel more comfortable.
“We’re not interested in pitting the church against the gays,” Chun Wah Kam said. “… This is our home and we’re part of that home as Christians. This is our home and we’re part of that home as gay people.”
Kevin Sroufe (second from left), a 2015 graduate of Spring Arbor University, joins supporters of the LGBTQ community in the Spring Arbor University Alumni and Community Walk for Solidarity in Spring Arbor on April 22, 2018. (J. Scott Park | MLive.com)
Hate the sin, love the sinner
Many Christian colleges and universities frame their stance on LGBTQ issues in the context of affirming the dignity of all people and recognizing everyone is worthy of love and respect.
“I do believe actually that it’s that primary teaching of the dignity and worth of all people … that is the leading value for the community,” said Gretchen Jameson, senior vice president of student affairs for Concordia University, which is affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and has 10 campuses across the country, including Ann Arbor.
The philosophy can be summed up by a common Christian cliche: Hate the sin, love the sinner.
“‘Hate the sin, love the sinner’ is probably my least favorite because it’s a license to not only be fake, but to hurt people in a way. … It gives a license to say some people are not fully human beings, and just tolerate them,” said Aubs Thompson, 26, a 2014 Calvin College graduate who is a lesbian and works as a social worker in Grand Rapids.
The Rev. Elizabeth Edman agrees that mindset can be damaging to Christians who identify as LGBTQ. Edman authored the book, “Queer Virtue,” which talks about the parallels between the Christian community and queer community and how those two identities complement each other.
“There’s a lie embedded in the trope (of loving the sinner and hating the sin), which is that the way one lives one’s sexual life is a choice as if it were external to who a person is,” said Edman, 55, who lives in New York. “So, when Christian communities say to people, ‘We love you, but we don’t love this thing that you do’ … what they’re doing is splitting people right down the middle.”
Changing perspective
Alexandria Alveshere thought she would probably go to hell when she realized she is attracted to women.
Alexandria Alveshere (left) poses with her wife Mandi. (Photo provided by Alexandria Alveshere)
It was a Friday evening during Alveshere’s sophomore year at Calvin College. She and a group of friends were sprawled on a couch, chairs and the floor of a dorm room talking. As she listened to a friend describe a guy she had a crush on, Alveshere realized she had those same feelings for a female friend.
She quickly left the room, not wanting to draw attention to herself as she sorted out her emotions.
“From the way I was raised, I grew up thinking that being gay was a choice and that all of the gays weren’t necessarily going to hell, but probably were going hell,” said Alveshere, now 24, who grew up attending Presbyterian and non-denominational churches.
Ever the academic, Alveshere said she began reading books and essays on the topic of same-sex attraction from a Christian perspective and looking for answers in the Bible. After praying about the issue, she eventually came to terms with her sexual identity.
“At no point did I ever just wake up one day and decide to put my gay pants on,” she said. “It was never something I chose.”
Alveshere, originally from Peoria, Illinois, was more worried about how her friends would react to expressions of her sexuality than how Calvin College’s administration might respond. She saw Calvin College as a good place to grow as a person in addition to getting a quality education, and she graduated in 2015 with a degree in chemistry. She now lives in Vermont with her wife.
Calvin College’s student conduct code prohibits sexual relationships “in conflict with biblical teaching.” The conduct code applies to all students, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, and violations of the policy are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, said Julia Smith, the sexuality series director at Calvin, which enrolls about 3,900 students in Grand Rapids and is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church.
Katie Howland | MLive.com
Smith pointed to Calvin’s Sexuality And Gender Awareness student organization and an LGBT+ support group run by college chaplain Mary Hulst as signs that all students are welcome on campus. The visibility of LGBTQ students on campus humanizes what otherwise could be limited to a theological debate, Smith said.
Alveshere came out publicly as a lesbian during her junior year. She thought it might negatively impact her chances of being elected president of Calvin’s choir, but it proved to be a non-issue, she said.
Toward the end of her time at Calvin College, Alveshere said there was more discussion about the role of LGBTQ people in the church and the campus community – which she said was both helpful and stressful.
Future of the LGBTQ church
SAU President Ellis says the university is not changing its policies. The best way to show students love is to help them obey the known will of God, he said, acknowledging that may be more difficult for people who experience same-sex attraction.
“Some people say love equates to license and acceptance, but Scripture is clear that love is obedience,” Ellis said. “We create an environment that helps all people try to figure out what that looks like for them to walk in obedience to the will of God.”
The belief that people who openly identify as LGBTQ cannot be Christians tends to push people who defy that dichotomy to one of two extremes.
Some renounce their faith and walk away from the church.
“You can only feel marginalized for so long before you don’t want anything to do with those people and what they’re doing,” said Scott Greife-Wetenhall, a gay 2009 SAU graduate raised with Christian beliefs who now identifies as agnostic.
Others like Stout, the SAU graduate, and Deeb, the Concordia graduate, are propelled into ministry because they want to give other LGBTQ people a better experience than they had at their Christian schools.
“It reinforced that’s not how the church should be and it’s not how the church should treat people,” said Deeb.
Stout has become increasingly outspoken in advocating for equality for LGBTQ people in Christian higher education, since she came out publicly on her blog in June 2017. Spring Arbor was a natural choice for her since she lives nearby in Jackson and wanted a Christian education.
Now, the top priority for pro-LGBTQ students at Spring Arbor University is to get the university to drop the clause of its policy that says students cannot promote, advocate for or defend activities that violate its student code – including homosexual activity.
“We’re not asking them to change theology or anything like that, but just make it so these conversations can happen,” said Stout, who recently received a full-ride scholarship to Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, where she will begin a master’s program this summer.
Seeing LGBTQ people go to seminary gives Stout hope for the future of the church, but she is not optimistic that Evangelicals or institutions like Spring Arbor University will change.
“But they are only one tiny, tiny sect of the church,” Stout said. “The church is a rainbow, and there is room at Christ’s table for everyone. I think that queer Christians will be the ones to preach that good news to the rest of the world.”
Lead reporter Leanne Smith contributed to this report.
This piece took third place for best enterprise reporting in the 2018 Michigan Associated Press Media Editors awards and honorable mention for most innovative storytelling in the 2018 open class Michigan Press Association awards.
ANN ARBOR, MI – With tears streaming down her cheeks, Elise Boyd crept down the hall to kiss her brother goodbye in his bed, knowing that in a few minutes she would swallow enough pills to kill herself.
Her plan was in place for weeks. The 14-year-old had stored up antidepressant and anxiety medications provided by her psychiatrist – collecting 90 pills in all, because “it had to be an even number.”
If she followed through on her plan, Elise would become part of some grim statistics: The suicide rate among teenage girls in the United States climbed to reach its highest level in 40 years in 2015, the most recent information available from the Centers for Disease Control.
In Washtenaw County alone, 17 people ages 15 to 24 died by suicide in 2016, the highest number since the county’s medical examiner began keeping track in 2004.
Graphic by Milton Klingensmith
What is causing them to take their lives? Experts say anxiety is replacing depression as a culprit as young people feel pressure to succeed.
In Elise’s case, the blonde gymnast from the Livingston County community of Howell had tried to conceal her feelings of intense anxiety and depression.
She explained away the cuts on her wrists and arms as a byproduct of practicing on the bars in gymnastics, rather than evidence of self-mutilation. She purposely burned herself, and then said it had been an accident from chemistry class.
To avoid the paranoia she felt simply by classmates looking at her, she would eat lunch in the bathroom or a teacher’s empty classroom. Her parents’ marital difficulties and her father’s adverse reaction to her brother coming out as gay caused deep tension in their family dynamic.
It became difficult for Elise to maintain a facade of happiness. She withdrew from her friends and eventually admitted to her mother that she didn’t want to be alone for fear she might harm herself.
In seventh grade, she was hospitalized in a pediatric psychiatric ward in Grand Rapids. While there, she attempted to strangle herself with her hoodie in one of the 10-minute intervals between hospital staff checking on her. A nurse found her unconscious, and staff performed CPR to revive her. When Elise regained consciousness, she was angry that she didn’t even have enough control over her life to end it.
“I thought, ‘This is my life, why are you trying to control what I do with my life? How can people tell me I can’t die?’ I was really angry at everyone trying to help me at that point. I just wanted out,” she said.
As her eighth grade year at Highlander Middle School came to a close, Elise again grew fed up with struggling to make sense of the world around her.
She thought by dying she would be doing herself and her family a favor.
“I was like, ‘Clearly there is nothing out there that can help me. I’ve tried medicines, I’ve talked to different people – this is just how I am,'” she said. “‘I can’t live like this, no one should have to live like this. I’m doing myself a favor, I’m doing my family a favor.’ You just think you’re doing it to better the world, better your life, better everyone’s life. So you talk yourself into it being a good thing.”
Elise Boyd pets her dog Kama, as she relaxes in a sun beam by the back door in her family home in Howell. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News
On a spring night in 2013, Elise pulled out the old first aid jar where she’d stored the pills and poured them onto her bed. She crafted letters to her family and friends and tucked them under her pillow, ready to die.
But then fate intervened.
When she entered her room after saying goodbye to her brother, half of the pills were missing. Her dog, Kama, had eaten them.
The dog stood by the bed coughing. Elise screamed for her mother and admitted what had happened. In the moment she reserved to take her own life, Elise instead was hysterical that her pitbull-collie puppy might die.
The family rushed Kama to a vet clinic, where the dog was given medicine to induce vomiting and get around 50 pills she had swallowed out of her system. The dog – and Elise – were saved. Nicole Boyd refers to that night as a “blessed interruption” of her daughter’s plan.
Elise finally had a breakthrough after her third hospitalization following that suicide attempt. She connected with noted clinical social worker Gigi Colombini, who specializes in suicide prevention. It was a departure from more “informal” conversations she had with psychologists at hospitals, and Elise said it forced her to face her issues head-on, rather than simply block them out through medication.
Today, looking back at her transformation, Elise, now 18, talks about looking forward to starting her freshman year at Grand Valley State University this fall and a mission trip this summer to Nicaragua. She described how Colombini helped her understand that she wasn’t alone in wrestling with feelings of depression and anxiety.
“She completely laid out what was going on in my life and knew how I was feeling,” Elise said, smiling frequently even as she described her painful past. “It was crazy to know that someone knew what was going on with me. I thought I was the only person who was having those feelings.”
Suicide rates rising
As Elise Boyd looks forward to the future, others aren’t as fortunate.
State and national suicide rates for people ages 15 to 24 have been on the rise for years, and surveys show many young people have contemplated death by suicide.
Graphic by Milton Klingensmith
About 15 percent of ninth and 11th graders in Washtenaw County seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous 12 months, according to a Michigan Department of Education survey from the 2015-16 school year.
One-third of college students seeking mental health services reported they had seriously considered suicide in the 2015-16 school year, according to a 2016 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.
As recently as June, a seventh grader died by suicide in Dexter. Other high school and college-aged students who have died by suicide in Washtenaw County since the beginning of 2016 include:
A 15-year-old from Ann Arbor who played hockey and football.
A 26-year-old University of Michigan student from Illinois who was majoring in computer science and had a history of depression
A 17-year-old from Milan taking college courses at Eastern Michigan University.
A 15-year-old artist, writer and social justice advocate from Ann Arbor who battled depression and anxiety.
A 17-year-old on the Chelsea High school robotics team who enjoyed video gaming.
A 17-year-old mechanically-inclined artist from Chelsea who loved cats.
A 14-year-old from Ypsilanti who loved comics and UM football.
A 15-year-old from Ann Arbor who liked spending time outdoors and playing guitar and drums.
Each case has its own circumstances that led to the person’s death. But experts say there are some common themes that come up when discussing suicide involving young people.
The vast majority of suicide attempts are linked with some type of mental health issue, said Dr. John Greden, founder and executive director of the University of Michigan Depression Center in Ann Arbor.
Young people face unique pressures that can affect their mental health at a time when the peak onset of clinical depression occurs, Greden said.
“Suicide is the culmination – an endpoint, if you will – for negative view of self, negative view of world, negative view of future. ‘I don’t want to go on living,'” Greden said, adding that those feelings are often linked with depression, anxiety, stress, sleep disturbances or substance abuse. “Those are often not picked up and treated.”
Stephanie Salazar, program coordinator for outreach and education at the Depression Center, said student anxiety continues to come up in her conversations with educators.
“I would agree with our school partners in terms of the pressure (on students) to succeed academically and be in a million extracurricular activities and get all A’s,” Salazar said.
Statistics from University of Michigan Student Government Mental Health Taskforce
Chelsea High School counselor Jason Murphy said he sees it as well.
“I think that’s a big piece of why our kids are struggling so much – we tell them to relax, but we don’t teach them how to relax,” Murphy said. “There’s a lot of pressure to do well and (college admissions) is more competitive. There’s no down time because they’ve always got to be doing something else.”
Pressure to achieve
Marquaun Kane is a high-achiever who will be a senior at Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School this fall. He has enrolled in multiple AP classes his junior and senior years of high school, holds two or three part-time jobs at a time and is in involved in advocacy work related to school discipline reform, homelessness and other social justice issues. The 17-year-old wears suits most days.
Pioneer High School senior Marquaun Kane poses for a portrait in the school. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News
Kane also has been haunted by thoughts of suicide for years. It started when he was in seventh grade and felt helpless to do anything about his tumultuous home life.
“Starting back in middle school, I just thought about it, the concept of it. I never picked up a knife or a gun or anything like that,” said Kane, who grew up in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. “It was just something like, ‘Oh my gosh, man, if my teachers can’t help me and no one can help me get out of my situation, I feel as if this is the only way out.'”
Those suicidal thoughts became more frequent and intense as he got older.
Kane does not talk to his mother about his suicidal thoughts. He recently began seeing a new therapist, and he said meditation helps to calm his anxiety. He has found hope through the support of his middle school teachers, parents of his friends and people he’s met through Peace Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit for those with socio-economic problems.
Kane struggles at times to see how what he learns in class relates to work he’d like to do tackling issues like climate change and poverty, and feelings of helplessness set in again.
“Here I am a young kid trying to help save the world because people have tried to save me,” said Kane, who speaks with an eloquence that would serve him well in the political career he hopes to pursue. “I can’t do all of that because I don’t have that circle of influence. So there’s that trade-off because I see all this going on and I know I can’t do anything, so I feel helpless. I feel hopeless, and it makes me think, ‘What is my worth?'”
His activism gives him a purpose in life, but also adds to the pressure he feels of people’s high expectations for him.
“Sometimes I feel as if I have to deliver, I have to be that black kid from the ghetto who goes to Harvard University or something like that. That’s kind of what everybody throws at me,” Kane said.
“I feel as if I were to just go and say, ‘I’m struggling with this,’ they kind of would say, ‘Take a break, kid,'” he said. “Which would make sense, but the thing is, that’s been stopping me from committing suicide – finding meaning in the world around me.”
Anxiety fueling problems
Historically, depression was the primary reason students sought services offered by the University of Michigan’s Counseling and Psychological Services, known by the acronym CAPS.
But about a decade ago, CAPS Director Todd Sevig noticed a shift to anxiety being the No. 1 reason students sought help. Since then, anxiety has been the top reason CAPS has set up one-on-one, group therapy and crisis appointments for UM students.
This shift could reveal some of the inherent issues students face when trying to live up to UM’s noted “Leaders and Best” slogan, Sevig said.
“This notion of ‘Leaders and Best’ is a wonderful part of our identity and who we are as a university,” Sevig said, surrounded by mounds of books and paper inside his office on the third floor of the Michigan Union. “At the same time, there are some students that experience that with this high, somewhat unrealistic expectation to be top-notch almost all the time, without being able to fail, explore or let themselves relax.
“So this really led to the idea of let’s be ‘Leaders and Best,’ but let’s also be leaders at their best, where you can perform really well and take care of yourself emotionally and psychologically,” he added.
A similar trend is evident at universities across the country, according to the 2016 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. Anxiety was the top mental health concern reported by college counseling centers, the report found, applying to 61 percent of clients. Depression was the next highest, at 49 percent, among 44 listed concerns.
Kevin Wehmhoefer, a clinical social worker and outreach coordinator for mental health services at Harvard University, said there’s no doubt students are experiencing an increase in anxiety related to the pressure to achieve.
Statistics from University of Michigan Student Government Mental Health Taskforce
High-achieving high school students can become singularly focused on being accepted to a prestigious university, Wehmhoefer said — often at the expense of maintaining a sense of balance in their lives.
Once in college, those students may receive the first B+ of their lives or go through a break-up, and they’re facing those challenges without the support system they had at home, he added.
Add to that a desire to avoid admitting they can’t handle what’s asked of them – something Wehmhoefer calls the “Harvard game face” – and many students will delay seeking help to address their anxiety or depression, he said.
Social media and other factors
The spike in suicides among 15 to 24 year olds in Washtenaw County last year was “alarming,” said Dr. Jessie Kimbrough Marshall, medical director for Washtenaw County Public Health. But it was not a new development, she added, noting that the suicide rate for that age group has been rising in recent years.
Graphic by Milton Klingensmith
A health department specialist took a closer look at data from the past decade and found the number of single-parent households, the number of substantiated child abuse cases and the poverty rate had increased during the same timeframe as the rise in deaths by suicide among adolescents, Marshall said.
That correlation does not equate to causation, she emphasized.
“We certainly aren’t saying the profile of youth who are suicidal is coming from an impoverished background. This correlating data says something more broadly about the society that we live in,” Marshall said. “While we don’t have any concrete answers, we do think we know some of the underlying circumstances. One being that we know that resiliency and coping skills is something among our adolescents that needs to be addressed.”
Greden also pointed to untreated mental health conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder; substance abuse; bullying, which often affects people who identify as LGBTQ; and the availability of guns as contributing to the rising suicide rate.
Social media adds to pressure on teens and young adults, said Murphy, the counselor at Chelsea High. The online connections mean students are never fully alone with time to process their emotions. The internet also opens them up to cyberbullying, Murphy added, and even positive social media posts can lead to students comparing themselves with others and feelings of inadequacy.
While social comparison in general has always impacted children and young adults, CAPS Associate Director of Community Engagement and Outreach Christine Asidao said college-aged students are sometimes forced to confront those comparisons on a daily basis through a number of different social media platforms.
“I think with the rise of social media, though, it is so much more available to them, not just to check on a group of their friends they see every day, but maybe thousands of people they may be friends with online,” she said. “That does influence how they perceive themselves and what they think is sort of the standard, and maybe that standard is skewed, because most people only put the good things out there, so that’s not necessarily based in reality.”
Beyond social media, factors contributing to suicide across all ages and demographics were recently explored by southeast Michigan film director Keith Famie in the 2016 PBS documentary, “Death is NOT the Answer.”
In it, Famie speaks with many people impacted by suicide, including Elise Boyd, who has shared her experiences to encourage others who may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety. Elise said she was glad to be part of the project.
Elise Boyd poses for a photo with her dog Kama, as her cat sneaks by in the backyard of her home in Howell. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News
“I had shared my story so many times. I never realized the effect it had, just telling my story,” she said. “When I went to the first viewing (of ‘Death is NOT the Answer’), there were parents there whose kids were depressed or they had lost children and so many people came up to me and thanked me for sharing my story. I just thought, ‘How could that make such an impact?'”
YPSILANTI, MI – The Ypsilanti Community High School football team found itself in unpleasantly familiar territory on Friday, Oct. 21, down 30-0 against Pioneer High School at halftime.
The team didn’t lead many games in its 2016 season, which ended 2-6. For whatever reason, the Grizzlies didn’t turn up the intensity until they had to come from behind.
Coach Fred Jackson, who previously coached running backs at the University of Michigan for 23 years, tried to motivate the student-athletes in the locker room during halftime of their final game.
“They right now are going in the locker room and saying this game is over. … They think it’s over, man,” Jackson said. “But we have something to say about when the game’s over. We have something to say.”
Sophomore Kamal Hadden, a wide receiver and defensive back, interrupted Jackson to make his own vehement plea to his teammates.
“We gotta have heart. I know y’all don’t want to keep losing, man,” he called, his voice echoing across the locker room. “Damn, don’t y’all get tired of this? Come on! I’m tired of losing, man!”
“‘Bout time somebody stepped up,” said assistant coach Thomas Guynes as he and some of the other coaches and players applauded Hadden’s passion.
The Grizzlies did lose. But they built some momentum and scored 13 points while holding Pioneer scoreless in the second half of the game.
Jackson told the players after the game he was proud of how they’d fought for a comeback.
“The heart is in this team. … That’s the thing that we did today that I will never forget, I just want you all to know,” Jackson said.
‘Those who stay will be champions’
Jackson’s ongoing struggle this season – his first as head coach at YCHS – has been trying to establish a sense of unity among the athletes to the point where they will do whatever it takes on the field to win for their teammates.
That means a departure from the team’s current dynamic where there’s still a divide between the players from the former rival Willow Run and Ypsilanti districts, where parents heckle coaches from the stands during a game and some players take off their helmets and sulk on the bench when things aren’t going their way.
It’s a cultural shift taking longer than a three-month season to complete.
In many ways, Ypsilanti Community Schools as a whole is fighting a similar battle since the district was established three years ago.
YCS also has had to come from behind, formed from the consolidation of Ypsilanti and Willow Run, two financially and academically failing schools districts.
The stakes are higher than a 30-point deficit on a scoreboard though. The education of about 3,500 students is on the line.
YCS is paying off $18 million of debt from the two former districts that carried over in the merger. The new YCS has had to build itself from the ground up since the 2013-14 school year, trying to establish systems that will boost the low academic performance that plagues the school system. YCS also has to find ways to meet the unique needs of its student body, providing supports that go well beyond the classroom.
It has to do all that with fewer resources each school year.
Michigan’s 20-year-old Schools of Choice policy allows students to enroll in a school other than the district where they live, and each Washtenaw County student who transfers takes between $7,511 and $9,230 in state funding with them. As Ypsilanti schools’ enrollment continues to drop year after year, so does its revenue from the state.
In addition to putting YCS in a precarious financial situation, school choice also has divided school districts across racial and socio-economic lines, said YCS Superintendent Ben Edmondson. Not every family has the means to take advantage of school choice, so those who can afford to transfer do and those who can’t are left behind in under-resourced schools.
About half the public school students in Ypsilanti’s school district attended school elsewhere in the 2015-16 school year, and the students who remain at YCS represent a disproportionately high percentage of low-income and minority students, compared to the rest of the county.
“Those that can leave, will leave. Those who can’t, they’re stuck. I think the trends are very clear on who’s able to leave and who isn’t,” said Edmondson, who came to YCS in the 2015-16 school year after working as a principal in Ann Arbor Public Schools for several years. “It’s clear it falls across race and class lines, further stratifying districts. I think it’s polarized districts, I think it’s polarized schools and it’s stigmatized schools.”
For YCS to secure a more stable future and a shot at long-term success, it needs to find a way to attract more students to the district. It’s fitting the school district has embraced former U-M head football coach Bo Schembechler’s famous “Those who stay will be champions” quote this school year as part of welcoming Jackson to the YCHS football program.
Over the past three years, YCS has introduced new academic programming and made other efforts to change the culture of “persistently low expectations” Edmondson says he has observed too often in the district since he was hired.
It’s been a gradual process, but Edmondson also is determined to get it right. He’s tired of seeing Ypsilanti lose off the football field, too.
Competition does more harm than good
When Jackson thinks about inequities among local public schools, he starts with a football field.
There’s a difference in the athletic facilities at YCHS and Saline High School, for example, where Jackson’s youngest son Josh played football his junior and senior years. School choice allowed Josh to transfer to Saline from Ann Arbor Public Schools, and he now plays for Virginia Tech after graduating from Saline in the winter of 2015.
Jackson was impressed by Saline’s two turf fields, two grass fields, modern weight room, designated strength coach and multiple locker rooms to accommodate the football team.
He didn’t find that at YCHS when he was hired as dean of students going into the 2015-16 school year.
Jackson led many practices this summer and fall on the makeshift football field behind the high school. Outside donors and Washtenaw County’s Parks and Recreation Department partnered with YCS to install new goal posts and get the grass at Shadford Field in good enough shape to play on this season. Contributors to the football team’s new student development program also purchased new helmets and shoulder pads for the team this year, in addition providing other luxuries the school district couldn’t afford
While some would say athletics and the associated expenses are secondary to a school’s core mission of educating students, Jackson sees it all factoring into students’ collective high school experience.
And because of the Schools of Choice policy, schools have to be competitive.
“It’s important, just like it is in college. Let Ohio State get something new and see how fast it takes for Michigan to do, because it’s competition,” Jackson said. “The kids want to be in a great situation. The kids want to go to a school that’s got the elite programs, that’s got the elite weight room, that’s got the elite academic facilities and got the elite fields. … You need it because if you want to filter kids into your school system, you’ve got to have something that’s going to sell them.”
Many educators think the competitive environment is detrimental to traditional public schools.
“It destroys the local districts because parents school shop,” said Laura Frey-Greathouse, director of staffing, student affairs and teacher retention at YCS. “It’s not just detrimental to the district, it’s detrimental to the children because when we track the students who have stayed in the system, they achieve. When we track students that are in and out of systems, they don’t.”
John Austin, president of the state board of education, says he hasn’t seen any evidence that competition has improved the overall quality of public education in Michigan. In fact, in some ways, it’s had the opposite effect because more school districts are competing for fewer students, he said.
“It doesn’t make schools better,” Austin said. “It means they’re all at a loss for the resources to educate kids well.”
Of the 7,854 public school students who live within the boundaries of the Ypsilanti school district, only about half of them attended YCS in the 2015-16 school year. The majority (2,560) of Ypsilanti students enrolled outside YCS attend charter schools. Another 1,373 Ypsilanti students have transferred to other traditional public schools, with Ann Arbor Public Schools drawing the lion’s share of 776 students in 2015-16.
The number of Schools of Choice students YCS enrolls has dropped steadily over the past four years, with the district enrolling 292 transfer students in 2015-16.
Uncertainty when YCS formed in 2013-14 prompted some families to leave, and instability within the district since then hasn’t helped. AAPS raised its cap on Schools of Choice to 750 seats in 2014-15, and YCS saw an additional 1,102 resident students transfer out of the district going into the 2014-15 school year.
But even before the merger, the former Ypsilanti and Willow Run school districts each experienced declining enrollment as they struggled financially and academically.
With the Ypsilanti students who transferred elsewhere in 2015-16, $30.8 million in per pupil state funding left YCS. In the 2015-16 school year, expenses at YCS exceeded its revenue by $2.4 million, and early projections of the 2016-17 budget also predict deficit spending this school year.
The 2016-17 budget anticipates the district will end the school year with $3.3 million in its fund balance, which is about half of what YCS had in its reserves at the end of the 2014-15 school year.
Board president Sharon Irvine predicted in June that YCS could spend down its fund balance and go into a deficit in four years unless the district somehow reverses its financial trend.
“School choice has been promoted as a way for all students to get quality education, based on the idea that competition will improve school quality. Unfortunately, the competitive advantages are with communities with the size and socio-economic scales to provide expanded and stable educational options and with charter schools that have low overhead costs and flexible operational infrastructures,” Irvine recently wrote in an email to MLive. “School choice has disadvantaged districts that carry extensive fixed costs and socio-economic stress.”
Edmondson said the disparity in resources offered at public schools also has a negative effect on the psyche of minority children who see they’re given less than their more affluent peers.
“You start to accept that, that I’m never going to be, that this is all we’re ever going to have, there’s nobody in my community that’s successful who comes back,” he said. “There’s no investment in our schools.”
Tying state funding to students who have the option to transfer schools at any time traps districts like YCS in a downward spiral, officials say. Declining enrollment leads to budget cuts that limit academic offerings and other student supports, which makes the district less attractive to families, so more students leave and YCS has to cut its spending again.
All public school districts face this same challenge, but for districts like YCS, Detroit, Flint or Holland – which are already struggling – it’s tough to compete.
“The way we do Schools of Choice in Michigan has created this death spiral,” said state Rep. Adam Zemke, D-Ann Arbor, who sits on the House Education Committee. “We are essentially incentivizing bad behavior on the part of school officials, frankly. We’re inadequately funding schools right now, and then we’re saying to school boards that essentially you can get more money if you try and steal students from other districts. When you’re starving, you tend to act more desperate.”
Self segregation
It’s understandable why a family may look at Ypsilanti Community Schools’ student performance record and prefer to send their children to a district where more students consistently meet proficiency benchmarks and graduate from high school prepared for college.
Brian Jacob, a professor of education policy, public policy and economics who also is co-director of the University of Michigan’s Education Policy Initiative, says place of residence and proximity to a school are the main factors families take into consideration when deciding where to enroll their children.
“The other thing I think there is – both for white and non-white families – is some preference to kind of be in an environment where there’s at least some families like them,” Jacob said. “Prior research has shown that black and Latino families would love to go to a school that was integrated where it wasn’t all black or Latino, but they might be more reluctant to go to a school that was essentially all white. There are social dynamics that explain that.”
The main caveat of Schools of Choice that contributes to socio-economic segregation is that parents have to provide their own transportation if they want their children to attend somewhere besides their neighborhood school.
Technically, Michigan public schools aren’t required to offer transportation at all – and many charter schools don’t. Most traditional public schools provide busing for their in-district students, but those who live outside the district typically need to find their own way to get their children to school.
That puts school choice out of reach for families without the means or access to reliable transportation.
Some YCHS football student-athletes needed bikes donated through the student development program because they didn’t have another way to get to practice in the summer. Finding transportation to another school district every day is out of the question for those students.
“It has become a classist system unless you equalize the ability for kids to actually get (to school),” Zemke said. “Taking out the question of whether school choice is something that should go on, the way we do school choice in Michigan – without requiring these other things – has basically said to those who have less, ‘You’re on your own, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to pay for it.'”
A study released in August by EdBuild, a nonprofit that highlights inequities in school funding, pointed out the 50 most segregated school district borders in the country, with the boundary dividing Detroit Public Schools and Grosse Pointe taking the top spot.
The line between Ypsilanti Community Schools and Plymouth-Canton Community Schools – located east of Ypsilanti – was ranked the 33rd most segregated boundary in the state, according to the “Fault Lines” study. The boundary between Ann Arbor Public Schools and YCS was ranked the 64th most segregated in the state – out of 484 Michigan rankings – and the line between YCS and Van Buren Public Schools was considered the 134th most segregated in the state.
With the exception of Lincoln Consolidated Schools, YCS has a significantly higher concentration of poverty than its neighbors.
The Fault Lines study looked at segregation based on childhood poverty rates in each school district, and racial segregation often follows closely.
“People don’t want to talk about race and class. It’s uncomfortable. … It’s an emotional topic, but I would love to have the conversation to say these practices contribute to where we are now,” Edmondson said. “Poor and minority together, in this country, they’re almost synonymous. People look at things differently when you’re district that’s seen as poor or a district that’s seen as minority. When it’s put together – poor and minority – then people really just would rather opt out. Those that can, have.”
With its 3,868 students, YCS enrolls 8.4 percent of the total public school student population in Washtenaw County. However, YCS students account for 17.5 percent of the county’s minority students and 22.1 percent of the county’s low-income students.
Saline Area Schools – located 8 miles from Ypsilanti – has a disproportionately low population of minority and low-income students. Saline schools account for 11.5 percent of Washtenaw County’s total public school student enrollment and only 3.9 percent of the county’s minority students and low-income students.
Ann Arbor Public Schools – located between Saline and Ypsilanti – splits the difference between the two school districts in terms of diversity. AAPS enrolls 37.3 percent of the county’s students, and the district’s enrollment accounts for 46 percent of the county’s minority students and 28 percent of the county’s low-income students.
The graph shows the percentage of Washtenaw County’s public school enrollment that each traditional public school district accounts for and how that compares to their minority and low-income student enrollment.
Dexter Community Schools and Chelsea Public Schools educate a disproportionately low population of minority and low-income students, while Lincoln Consolidated Schools joins YCS in having a disproportionately high population of those students.
School choice is one reason for the disparity.
In its three years of existence, YCS has seen a 14.8 percent overall decrease in enrollment. White students left the district at a faster rate than black students, with the populations declining by 23.7 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively. The population of other minority students at YCS grew by 17.7 percent during that time, and the population of low-income students declined at a slower rate, by 8 percent.
“It’s even more specific and narrow in some cases than just white kids leaving or non-poor kids leaving,” Jacob said. “Especially with charter schools, kids with a lot of the most severe special needs recognize that they can’t be served well in charter schools. So you have kind of the easiest to serve kids – ones without the expense of special needs – that leave these home districts. … The kids who are kind of easier and less expensive to serve, even if they are poor and black or Hispanic, they can go to charter school and be accepted or served there.”
As white, more affluent students have left YCS at a higher rate, their minority, low-income peers are left behind.
Kirk Profit, a former state representative and Ypsilanti High School graduate who is coordinating the football team’s student development program, thinks the divide between Washtenaw County’s school districts was foreseeable when the consolidation that formed YCS was first proposed. He’s optimistic local leaders will come together to make things more equitable for the school districts.
“I don’t think this is who the community is,” Profit said. “I don’t think we want to define ourselves as a community or region as accepting a segregated concentration of poverty. I think the community will respond.
“I think the real issue in regionalism is, ‘Will you let my kids go to school with yours?'”
– Tenth in a series of reports on the Ypsilanti football team and work to make its members successful. Read the rest of the series
Ypsilanti’s STEMM Middle College graduate Diana tears up as she addresses her class as the 2016 valedictorian at Eastern Michigan University’s Convocation Center on Tuesday, June 7, 2016. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News
YPSILANTI, MI — Diana was one face in a sea of black-and-gold gowns and caps gathered for Ypsilanti Community High School’s commencement ceremony the evening of Tuesday, June 7.
Diana, the Class of 2016’s valedictorian for Ypsilanti’s STEMM Middle College, draped honors cords, an Upward Bound stole and more than half a dozen medals from robotics and her various other accomplishments around her neck.
It was a long way from her early upbringing in Mexico. More than a decade ago, her mother uprooted her family and moved to the United States – without a visa – in search of a better life.
Today, Diana, her mother and two of her six younger siblings remain undocumented immigrants. Diana was 8 years old when her mother decided to take her and her two younger siblings, then 6 and 2, to America.
Undocumented immigrants do not have legal protections for their right to live and work in the United States. A public K-12 education and emergency medical care are afforded to them, but they cannot take advantage of other types of government-funded assistance.
Diana dreams of greater opportunities for herself beyond high school and plans to study biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn beginning this fall. Yet the fear of deportation still weighs on her and her family.
Although she’s currently allowed to legally live and work in the United States, she doesn’t have any good options to become a permanent resident or a U.S. citizen.
So despite her academic success, her future is in doubt.
“It’s a great country, where I feel like a prisoner in a way,” Diana said.
Diana graduated first in her class at STEMM Middle College, one of three small learning communities within the high school. She graduated with summa cum laude honors, maintaining a 3.95 GPA.
That’s a far cry from her early experiences in the United States as a first grader who couldn’t speak any English, felt isolated from her peers, cut off from her extended family and faltered in her will to live through middle school.
Once Diana reached high school and enrolled in the STEMM Middle College, though, she felt accepted for the first time and connected with teachers and students who supported her in her drive to achieve.
“I just met the right people that inspired me in a way,” she said. “I have this in me that I want to be successful, and they were the right people to meet who would kind of fulfill that something I was missing inside of me.”
Today, Diana, 19, would say her family found that better life in Ypsilanti, but it took several years of struggling in school and longing for her home in Mexico before she came to that conclusion.
The trip to America
They left Mexico abruptly one day. Her mother wanted to escape Diana’s abusive alcoholic father, to leave behind the dangerous neighborhood they lived in and to give her children the chance at a good education. She had been to Michigan with her brother before and knew a man there, so that was their end destination.
“We had struggles, so my mom kind of decided that coming here would be the best option for our future,” Diana said. “Everything happened so fast. … It wasn’t a fun experience.”
Diana’s father died one year after they left Mexico, and she remembers speaking to him briefly only twice after they left.
“Now I understand why, but at the moment I felt like I disliked my mother because of how she took us away from my father,” she said.
At first, their plan was to walk across the desert and find a way over the border. Diana recalls her mother struggling with three young children in tow to cover as much ground as possible. One night armed robbers threatened them, which prompted Bernal’s mother to seek a different way.
She came up with some money to have smugglers transport her and her children across the border, but somehow in the process Diana and her siblings got separated from their mother.
“I don’t remember exactly how it worked. I just remember that we got here and at this point my mother wasn’t with us,” Diana said. “It was my two siblings and I living with strangers. We had no idea who people were. We had no idea where we were going. We didn’t see our mom and we were asking for her.”
In her scared 8-year-old mind, Diana couldn’t tell whether days, weeks or a month passed without her mother, but the strangers made the long drive to bring the children to Michigan. They were dropped off with the man her mother had planned to meet there, and so their new life began.
“It was just a strange situation for us,” Diana said.
School was hard for Diana, who didn’t speak English when she enrolled in first grade at Carpenter Elementary School. She was pulled out for English as a Second Language classes until seventh grade, when she tested as proficient in the language.
“I just felt out of place. I didn’t feel like I belonged,” she said. “I didn’t feel like that was my world. I missed my home back in Mexico, and I just kept wondering why I was here. I didn’t understand at that point.”
Living in fear
Deportation was talked about as a threat in her household from the time Diana’s family arrived in Ypsilanti. They heard about friends of friends who had been deported, leaving behind U.S. citizen children.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 235,413 undocumented immigrants in 2015, 62 percent of whom were Mexican citizens. In 2014, 1.02 million people across the country were granted lawful permanent residence through various avenues, according to the most recent data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics.
Visas allowing people to legally live in the U.S. are granted to relatives of U.S. citizens, people who have a job offer in the U.S., refugees and others who qualify for special immigration programs.
Immediate family members — parents, spouses and unmarried children younger than 21 of U.S. citizens — do not have to wait for visas to become available. But for extended family members, the current wait time for a visa for a Mexican citizen is a long as 23 years.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, granted to eligible children who entered the country when they were younger than 16, offered Diana an avenue to avoid deportation, but her mother was afraid for her to apply.
She didn’t want Diana to risk identifying herself as an undocumented immigrant even for the chance at a more secure status.
In limbo
Diana eventually sought and was granted DACA, but U.S. citizenship is out of reach.
“It’s getting to the permanent residency that’s the challenge,” said Marva De Armas, an immigration attorney in Ann Arbor. “You’re legally present here, you’re not going to get deported, but you don’t have lawful status. Those people are going to spend their entire lives here, not getting deported, ICE knowing that they’re here, getting work permits, paying taxes, but they will never be able to adjust (and become permanent residents).”
DACA provides Diana with a work permit and exemption from deportation for two years, with the option for renewal. She still would need additional documentation to travel outside the country, with no guarantee she could re-enter the United States. So she doesn’t know when she will see her extended family in Mexico again.
“I mean, don’t you feel great when you’re able to visit your family?” she said. “I just can’t wait till I go back. I don’t want to go back to Mexico to stay, I just want to go back to visit.”
Diana’s legal status also means she cannot apply for any federally-backed student loans or fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
By applying for numerous local and privately funded scholarships, she has amassed about $18,000 to get her started at the University of Michigan-Dearborn this fall, where she will study biomedical engineering with the hope of a career in research or designing prosthetics or artificial organs.
Ypsilanti Community Schools staff, parents and community members came together Tuesday evening to celebrate the graduating seniors in the Class of 2016.
She is determined to capitalize on the opportunities the U.S. promises.
Diana watches her mother work two low-paying jobs as a cook to support her family, frustrated there are no better options for someone without legal status.
“I don’t want to be in my mom’s place. I don’t want to be working two jobs where I’m earning little money and working super hard. She’s killing herself just to move us forward,” Diana said. “I want to be successful and to also say that my mom’s reason for bringing us here had purpose, had meaning. I look at the future, and I want a bright future.”
Diana wants to believe in the idealistic America her mother sought, the “greatest country” where everyone has a chance to succeed. But she struggles to reconcile that with the America that calls her a criminal and says she doesn’t belong here.
“It’s tough. You don’t know how to express yourself without being judged,” Diana said, tears spilling down her cheeks as she thought of all her mother has sacrificed for her. “If she brought us here illegally, she didn’t have the resource to bring us here the right way. People may blame her or say something about it, but I feel like I’m not a criminal. I didn’t have a choice. She had a choice, and her choice was for our better future.”
This piece took first place for best government/education reporting in the 2016 Michigan Press Association awards.
Jacq Kai Tchoryk, 7, poses for a photo in classroom at Cornerstone Elementary School, Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Dexter, Mich. (Junfu Han | The Ann Arbor News)
ANN ARBOR – Jacq Kai Tchoryk and Sydney Tchoryk giggled Saturday as they chased each other around the sunny backyard of their family’s home in a well-kept cul-de-sac northwest of Ann Arbor.
Their father, Pete Tchoryk, emerged from the house late that afternoon with an aluminum bat and bag of baseballs. Sydney, 10, turned cartwheels in the yard while Jacq Kai took his turn at bat. Their mother, Sarah Tchoryk, stood near the deck offering words of encouragement. If there’s one thing she wants her children to know, it’s that she supports them.
Baseball is one of the many sports Jacq Kai likes. The blue-eyed 7 year old is into Star Wars and he also likes building things, as evidenced by the “house” in the Tchoryk’s family room he constructed for himself. The lopsided wooden box is roughly held together with duct tape and filled with “dinosaur skins,” little pieces of foam Jacq Kai used for cushioning on the bottom of the box. His middle name, Kai, is written on the side of the house in duct tape. Jacq Kai worked hard for that name.
Jacq Kai is transgender, meaning he was born biologically female but identifies as a male. He knew as early as 2 years old that his sense of himself didn’t match his physical body, and his family has supported him through the past five years of figuring out how to express his true identity.
It’s going to be a lifelong process.
“It’s a process you never rush into,” said Pete, who is the CEO of Michigan Aerospace Corp. and Springmatter in Ann Arbor.
In light of the Michigan State Board of Education’s proposed guidelines to help schools create safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ students, the Tchoryk family felt compelled to share their story. They’ve offered insight for the state board based on their experiences enrolling Jacq Kai at Dexter Community Schools, and they want to promote more understanding about what it means to be transgender.
As Pete put it, “We want to show people this can work.”
“We have to tell this story. You look at what the stakes are if we don’t,” Pete said, referencing high rates of suicide attempts and self-harm among LGBTQ youth. “There’s a lot of fear and a lot of misconceptions out there. That’s the way we look at it now. Let everybody speak their minds and raise the fears. I want to hear it all now.”
Pete and Sarah, who have been married for 12 years, consider themselves “reluctant advocates,” carrying a sense of guilt that they were not better educated on transgender issues and the discrimination that community faces before it directly affected their family. As Sarah reflects on Jacq Kai’s journey so far in expressing his true identity, she becomes emotional when thinking of how long it took her to accept the concept.
“As soon as he acquired language, he said ‘I’m a boy,'” said Sarah, who is a fifth grade teacher. “Of course, we thought that he was confused because he was just learning to talk. We’d correct him and there’d be a major meltdown over it. So we stopped correcting him and we thought, ‘oh, he’ll figure it out.’ We ended up figuring it out.”
On July 23, 2008, Sarah and Pete welcomed their third daughter, Jacqueline, to the family. Their oldest daughter, Jessie, 25, is married with two daughters of her own. Sydney is in fourth grade.
As a toddler, Jacqueline started insisting she was a boy and rejecting any clothing, colors or accessories typically associated with girls. Sarah and Pete started calling their child Jackie — a gender neutral name — and purchasing girl’s clothing in gender-neutral colors.
That still didn’t satisfy Jacq Kai, who felt anxious and would often cry at his reflection in the mirror because he looked too much like a girl. Allowing Jacq Kai to get his hair cut like a boy when he was about 3-and-a-half years old was a milestone for the family and left him “jubilant,” Sarah said.
“People have said ‘We used to call that a tomboy in my day,'” she added. “But the intensity of it, it’s not the same. He doesn’t say ‘I like boy things and I like boy clothes.’ He says, ‘I am a boy’ and he’s always seen himself as a boy. … He’s not happy with all the parts of his body. It’s that intense.”
Even with the haircut, Jacq Kai still dreaded going to daycare or preschool most days. It would take an hour-and-a-half to get him out the door in the morning, Pete said, because something was always off.
Finally in October of 2012, Pete asked whether using a boy’s name would make a difference to Jacq, and he said it would. Pete and Sarah had already told school staff Jacq is transgender, and they decided to make the switch to referring to him as Jacq Kai and using male pronouns for him.
Having that affirmation of his identity made all the difference to then-4-year-old Jacq Kai.
“It’s like a light switch,” Pete said. ” All the despair, all the anxiety, all these painful symptoms he was exhibiting and the problems I had getting him out the door disappeared.”
Last September, the Tchoryks legally changed Jacq’s name to Jacq Kai Tchoryk, which was cause for the family to celebrate. Another milestone came last December when Cornerstone Elementary School Principal Craig McCalla spoke to Jacq Kai’s class about what it means to be transgender.
It’s all part of the process of normalizing their family’s experiences and educating people on transgender issues.
Since speaking out about their transgender son, Pete and Sarah received what they considered a disheartening amount of negative feedback, though they noticed online comments tend to be more positive when they talk about their personal experiences rather than the issue of transgender rights as an abstract concept.
Some of the main misconceptions they’ve run into are people who think gender identity and sexual orientation are the same, those who believe being transgender is a choice and the widespread bathroom debate, which argues that allowing transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity rather than their biological gender will lead to an increase in assaults taking place in bathrooms.
One state lawmaker says he plans on introducing legislation requiring transgender students to obtain written parental consent to use a bathroom or locker room that does not match their sex at birth
Pete’s analytical side shows as he recounts what he’s learned in all of his research on the topic and from speaking to numerous doctors and psychologists in reference to Jacq Kai.
“I try to put all these facts on paper. The fear has to be addressed head on,” he said. “You can see everywhere with these bathroom bills the kind of panic that this starts. The fact of the matter is transgender people have been using the bathrooms they identify with for decades. … There are healthy fears in this world and there are unhealthy fears. That is an unhealthy fear. That is not based on reality.”
The federal Title IX civil rights law protects students from sex discrimination in federally-funded schools, and legal experts say that covers students’ right to choose which bathroom they use. Jacq Kai uses the boy’s bathroom at school without issue.
Pete also pointed to research that shows making schools more inclusive and safer for LGBTQ students benefits all students. The Torchyk family is now committed to doing whatever they can to ensure all children have a positive, welcoming school experience.
“This is not something that’s going to help one subset of kids and all of a sudden put other kids in danger. … I’m kind of ashamed that it took for us to have a transgender kid to open our eyes,” Pete said. “We’re just marching through life as the privileged majority. … That’s another reason why we have to tell our story. It changed our world completely – for the better. It made us better human beings.”
This piece took first place for best feature story in the 2016 Michigan Press Association awards.
By Lauren Slagter and 
Lauren Slagter 