Teaching Strength in Adversity - Multiplatform Long-form Feature Story

April 22, 2018

Rona Roberts enters a doorway at the end of a white, cinderblock hallway, and the sun enters behind her, highlighting a path that she follows at a drifting pace.

The hallway doesn’t appear outwardly awestriking.  She walks toward the center of it, and as she passes each room she is greeted, and she gives hugs and small waves as though she missed them in their short time away.

She walks as though she is carrying something that can only be revealed in her past.  Her face is serene, and she carries an energy that can be found in a person’s deepest moments of peace.

Roberts makes her way to a room in the middle of the Marietta Student Life Center hallway where she turns right into her office.  The smell of chai tea and chocolate give an aroma to this room that warms you to your core, and the light is dimmed to give a most comforting ambiance.

She sits at her desk and she exhales.  It’s been a long day.  Students have passed her one-by-one requesting her time, and they have spent hours sitting across from her desk seeking her advice.

Her guidance goes beyond counseling, beyond suggesting.  She seeks to empathize with each person she meets; to share, to understand, and to give love in a way that makes people feel heard.

A student comes into her office crying in a way all people have and all people need – a hard cry, one where you can physically feel your heart’s pain.

She offers a hug to the student, and then a heart to confide in.  The door is shut, and the room is filled tight with emotion and deep breaths.

The student asks her if she knows what depression is, and without a blink or a lasting breath she answers, “I absolutely know what it is. I will be depressed for the rest of my life.”

The student asks her why she is depressed and she looks down with a quick, painful flash of memory behind her eyes and answers, “Because my heart was broken into a million pieces and my brain has tried to make sense out of those pieces, and so my brain then has to be broken to make sense out of it.  And a broken brain can make sense out of nothing, and that’s the way it’s going to be forever.”

The MSLC is a place Roberts finds healing in helping other people.  An aerial view of this place would look like a shoebox divided into rooms.

A café, radiating with bright colored murals and booths full of high school students reaching across tables and messing with one another.  A dimmed room with navy blue walls and couches fixated around the perimeter, with a counselor and 15 students working through behavioral issues.

A laundry room, with a turning washer and shaking drier, and clothes hung along three walls.  A food pantry where students with shopping bags are sorting through the fridge for their next meal.  A room with clothing donations for pregnant teens who are expecting.

Classrooms that are filled with tutors and students working on improvement.  A small room, with a broken-hearted girl seated across from a counselor, describing the struggle of her eating disorder.  A similar room with a boy writing an apology for stealing food for himself and his homeless siblings.  And the office of the MSLC director, where pain is being shared on wavelengths felt in brokenness and in loss.

Roberts knows loss on an intimate level.

In 2013, Roberts lost her only daughter to leukemia.  Leah Marie was 7 years old when she lost her lifetime battle with cancer.  “Time is definitely a concept experienced by all organisms – yet differently.  For me, five years is a heartbeat ago,” said Roberts.

Roberts lived in an Atlanta children’s hospital for seven months.  “[Living through this experience] taught me resiliency,” said Roberts.  “You never overcome something like that, but you learn how to cope, which is what many of our students have to do,” she told the Marietta Daily Journal.  “God gave me one child, but he sends me a couple hundred more each year.”

Roberts has been in the Marietta City Schools system for 23 years.  Since 2010, Roberts has been at Marietta High School where she has taught a remediation class for the Georgia High School Graduation Tests for social studies, as well as U.S. history, economics, American government, sociology, psychology, IB psychology and IB theory of knowledge.

Since July 17, 2017, Roberts has been the director of the MSLC, succeeding the founder and former director Leigh Colburn.

Responding to the power of student voice, the MSLC at Marietta High School provides services in terms of academic, behavioral, social-emotional, and social support services.

“Focusing on the whole child, we collect, organize, and analyze data that is more robust in terms of students’ home lives, their likes and dislikes, and their learning preferences to ascertain students’ immediate needs.  We then determine which best interventions are necessary to support the student in school, in their home, and their community,” said Roberts.

The MSLC provides safe space for students and families of students facing food insecurity, homelessness or generational poverty, and for students dealing with mental illness, behavioral issues and trauma.  Additionally, the services at the MSLC include academic tutoring, college readiness, and career coaching.

Roberts’ strength in overcoming the adversity in her life has allowed her to reach students on a unique level.  “When I can tell a student that I know what depression is and I look them in the eye and I say ‘I know exactly what it is, and I know that I will be depressed the rest of my life,’ and I can tell them that, they know it’s genuine.”

In a heart-wrenching visit with a student struggling with loss, Roberts described her pain.  “For me, depression is being arrested,” said Roberts.  “The word ‘arrest’ in its true sense is, for me, being unable to do what it is that I want to do and it’s not by my will, and so my feelings depress me.”

Roberts shares her experience with students, day in and day out, to ensure each broken person never feels alone in her presence.  For this purpose, Roberts said that students can walk in her door any time they want.

The MSLC responds to student voice by issuing a survey to the student body, with questions varying in style.

Of the 501 survey responses from students in 2018, 97 percent of students said the MSLC is an important part of Marietta High School, 92 percent of students said the MSLC staff is available when they are in need, 97 percent of students said they feel welcomed in the MSLC, 97 percent of students agree that the MSLC offers programs that are helpful, and 96 percent of students would recommend the MSLC to a friend.

Half of the students surveyed use after-school programs including tutoring, wellness groups, therapy groups, and so on.  About 12 percent of students who responded to the survey use therapists, clinicians and counselors at the MSLC, and about 15 percent of surveyed students utilize the clothing closest/laundry machine and food pantry.

An anonymous student shared their affection for the MSLC in a survey response: “I love the overall support from everyone in there, the times where I needed a comforting space to calm down or simply needed to just speak to someone, the MSLC was always my go to place.”

The MSLC’s initial site is located at Marietta High School, with an additional site that opened in February of 2018 at Hickory Hills Elementary School.  Leigh Colburn, former director of the MSLC and current co-founder and consultant for The Centergy Project, reported that seven Georgia districts are working to open centers in the fall of 2018 or 2019.

“Centers will also be opening in Illinois, Virginia and New York.  The concept is definitely spreading,” said Colburn.

The services provided by each Student Life Center differ according to the specific school community’s needs.  Nonetheless, each site is characterized by responding to student voice, availability before and after school hours, open-door policies, and partnerships with dozens of community agencies.

“I hope that the Center at Marietta High School is setting a foundation and helping to assist the roots of sustainability so that this continues for many many many years to come,” said Roberts.

Roberts hopes to grow strong roots in the Marietta school system where the Center is able to help students, who will one day become community members, understand how to build stronger communities.

“Building those stronger communities starts with self,” said Roberts.

Roberts didn’t use emotions to describe her position as director of the Student Life Center, but described it as one that allows her to serve her students broadly and individually.

“Someone once told me that I was trying to be everything to my students,” said Roberts.  “I responded, ‘Why would I not be everything to my students?’ Because sometimes students need what they’re not getting.”

“This position is amazingly fulfilling,” said Roberts.  “For me personally, in this setting, it’s about love.  It’s a love story.  You give love and you give it genuinely.  And at each stage that I’ve been in, it’s about serving someone else.”