“The world is just quieter in the morning,” says Silas-Butler.
While many of us spend our mornings whacking the snooze button and ambling toward our coffee makers, she spends hers working (researching and brainstorming) or relaxing (reading autobiographies, her favorite, or watching the morning news).
She cherishes those quiet predawn hours. As executive director of Project GRAD Akron, an educational reform program to increase high school and college graduation rates in some of Akron’s lowest-performing public schools, the rest of the day can get, as she puts it, “hairy.”
“No day is predictable,” she says.
There are four elementary schools, one middle school and a high school in the low-income Butchel Cluster of Akron Public Schools. And Silas-Butler extends Project GRAD’s programs supporting literacy, math and college readiness to all of them. This means she could be teaching reading skills to kindergartners on Monday, doing an in-classroom evaluation of a cooperative discipline management system for elementary school children on Tuesday, and visiting the home of an at-risk ninth-grader to sign a learning contract that could lead to a $4,000 college scholarship from Project GRAD Akron upon graduation on Wednesday.
More than 100 students have received these scholarships since Silas-Butler became executive director of Project GRAD Akron in 2006. Most of them, she says, came from families that, for one reason or another, had never considered college a viable option for their children. With just a little perspective, she was able to change that.
“If that’s not your background [to consider college], or if you’ve never been exposed to college opportunities, then you just don’t think about it,” says Silas-Butler. “It’s all about changing that mind-set.”
This is just one of Silas-Butler’s special abilities. It’s a little like X-ray vision — to see through the assumptions most people make about those who are less fortunate.
To her, it’s simple: Children learn what they live.
“When I was a little girl, I used to go to the pediatrician’s office a lot,” she says. “There was this poem [on the wall] called Children Learn What They Live. ”
Written by Dorothy Law Nolte in 1954, the poem’s 19 lines include, “If children live with hostility, they learn to fight,” “If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty,” “If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence” and “If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.”
“I used to think about that poem a lot,” says Silas-Butler, especially early in her career, when she worked for eight years as a magistrate in juvenile court. Then, while handling abuse and neglect cases involving children, she used to think about that poem “over and over again.”
“You try not to be judgmental,” she says of her work as a magistrate, where she often had to remove children from abusive homes or send parents who owed child support to jail.
“I was fair,” she says. “I didn’t agree with what [the parents] did, but I listened to them anyway.”
Listening would sometimes reveal another way to solve the problem, she says, like the time she sentenced a man who was delinquent in child support payments to attend adult literacy classes (instead of 30 days in jail) after he confessed he didn’t know how to read.
“We said, ‘OK, if you can’t keep a job because you can’t read, then we’re going to help you help yourself,’ ” says Silas-Butler. “If this was the only thing keeping you from taking care of your kids, then we had to figure out what to do in the best interest of the child.”
Silas-Butler credits law school for her analytical approach to problem-solving, and those who know her say it’s one of her best assets.
“She has such interesting perspectives,” says Tycene Edd, who works with Project GRAD on a national level and was on the search committee to fill Silas-Butler’s Akron position three years ago.
“There’s so many ways to look at a problem and so many different ways to find success in a situation,” Edd says. “I’ve watched Jackie pull victory out of the jaws of defeat, over and over again.”
Silas-Butler left the legal world more than six years ago when she was asked to serve as executive director of Caring Communities of Summit County, an organization that provides after-school enrichment and tutoring programs for K-12 students and their families.
“There was never a dull moment,” she says of her three years with Caring Communities, during which she wrote grants to fund programs such as Grandparents on the Rise, which provides support to grandparents raising children in urban Akron. One of the most rewarding experiences with Caring Communities, she says, was Piggy Banks to Portfolios, a financial literacy program for K-12 girls.
“We had a ball,” she says, remembering playing Monopoly with the girls and taking them on field trips to the bank. “We wanted them to understand that if you went to work, you don’t keep it all for yourself. We were trying to teach them to be less dependent and more self-reliant.”
Her attention to women’s financial literacy translated well into her work as chair of the cotillion at the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in Akron, where she designed a nine-month curriculum for debutantes that emphasized business and social etiquette, academic excellence and job readiness.
“They teach the young women so much,” says Edd of the cotillion. Sometimes when she and Silas-Butler are together, they’ll run into some of the young women who were former debutantes in the cotillion. “They have so much respect for her,” says Edd.
Respect is a big thing for Silas-Butler, and it’s been good to her over the years. As magistrate, she respected the voices of parents in juvenile court and found solutions that strengthened broken families. As a woman, she respects the joys and challenges of a work-life-balanced world and prepares young women to excel in it. And as a community leader, she respects the perspectives of at-risk children and gives them what no one else bothers to — the confidence to succeed.
“She’s truly dogged,” Edd adds. “Her tenacity is what makes her such a great advocate for children.”