Retired Teacher Inspires At-Risk Youth
by Valerie Shaw

"I got it, Mama Hill. I got it!" says squirmy and giggling 12-year-old Lonnie, in response to a complicated Algebraic word problem. No, this is not the Sylvan Learning Center, but rather Mama Hill's Help, a home-based tutorial program near Watts, on East 92nd Street, in one of the most notorious gang areas in South Central Los Angeles.

There's a whole lot of learnin' going on behind the walls of the tiny white stucco house that sits back from the street like a tidy country church nestled in a grove of trees. For retired L.A.U.S.D. teacher, Millicent Hill, (affectionately known as "Mama Hill") the house is a refuge for the 20 students [age 5 to 18] she is helping to bring up to speed in reading comprehension, phonics and basic paragraph structure.

Lonnie, for instance, was insecure about being two years behind her grade level when her grandmother, a neighbor of Mrs. Hill, discovered that the 40-year veteran teacher was accepting students for her tutorial program. "Today Lonnie is reading at her grade level (or above) and is," according to her grandmother, Virginia Germany, "confident about her ability to learn."

Mama Hill's Help is a satellite of the Unity T.W.O., Inc. Gang Intervention Program and most of her students are there by referral. But now that the word is spreading, with the test results of her charges reflecting her efforts, there is a waiting list for her tutoring services. There are times when Mama Hill and her small staff (whom she pays out of her pocket) serves 30 students and their eager families. To date, she has never turned one away.

"The children love it here because they feel successful," says the soft-spoken, diminutive little firebrand of a teacher. Mama Hill, whose last job assignment was at Crenshaw High, where she taught for 18 of her 40-year career, says, "There is no such thing as a slow child. Every child has a gift to give to the world and it must be written on the heart with knowledge. Once a child obtains knowledge he is happy to share his gift."

Along with improved test scores, the students who receive Mama Hill's Help become more responsible, happier, eager to learn independently, socially and academically competent.

Millicent Hill's competency doesn't come by accident. The life-long teacher has had a distinguished career, starting as the first black baccalaureate speaker, in 1958, at the mostly white John Muir High School in Pasadena. Fluent in French and honored for her poetry, Hill graduated from Fisk University with honors, intending to go to medical school and become a physician, like her late father, J.W. Moore.

But along the way she fell in love with the teaching profession. She has received numerous city, state and national service, professional and Teacher of the Year awards and she is a USC/UCLA Writing Project Fellow. Hill is most proud of mentoring other teachers and co-founding the Martin Luther King, Jr. Museum a decade ago on the campus of Crenshaw High School.

Although she retired from the District in 1999, teaching is a gift, she says, she will always use.

Millicent Hill is over 60 and severely arthritic, but, she says, with a wide enchanting smile, "My mind is at its highest speed of functioning right now and I know what my teaching methods can do to insure our children's success."

Frustrated by her inability to serve all of the young people who come to her for help, Mama Hill's goal is to expand her program-paying her small staff, purchase supplies and snacks for the kids and teach her method to other retired and disabled teachers. "If we have the money to incarcerate a youth," she says sweetly but firmly, "shouldn't we have the money to save one?"

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For other works by Valerie Shaw please see:

Valerie Shaw
offerings of an urban woman

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