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The Extra Mile

At 27, Bill Kappenhagen became his student's guardian, altering the course of both their lives.

By Carol Pogash

Students often peer curiously at the 4-year-old photograph behind principal Bill Kappenhagen's (D.C. Region '96) desk. The picture shows three grinning boys on the day of their high school graduation from one of the country's elite boarding schools. There, with his charismatic smile, stands the principal's son, Amir, dressed in white pants, navy jacket, Groton tie, and straw hat.

The kids at Phillip and Sala Burton High School in San Francisco are usually baffled by the math. How can Mr. Kappenhagen, who looks younger than his 34 years, have a 21-year old son?

Unlike most father-son relationships, this one was born in the classroom and strengthened over the last seven years.

When kids are in trouble, Amir Paul says, they threaten, "'I'm gonna tell my momma,' 'I'm gonna tell my daddy.' I never had that. I never had anyone to stand up for me. Until Bill."

In 1999, Amir Paul was an inquisitive seventh grader at Paul Junior High School, in Washington, D.C., where his
English teacher was Bill Kappenhagen. Middle school, Kappenhagen believes, is the time when kids are on the fence. "My job was to push them over to the positive side," he says. "My strength in the classroom was creating an environment where kids felt cared for and felt they belonged to something larger than themselves. That's one of the things that drove me in school—not the subject matter, but the relationships."

Kappenhagen practiced the Socratic method, asking questions and facilitating rigorous debates among his students. Much of the work was done collaboratively. And no matter which group Paul was assigned to, "that group would always rise to the top," Kappenhagen recalls. "Amir had an uncanny way of getting along with people and getting them to do things."

Sometime that fall, Paul started showing up after school to wash chalkboards, help Mr. Kappenhagen grade papers, and organize the classroom library. "We were just two guys in a room talking to each other," Kappenhagen says. "We would talk about homework, about weekend plans," and about problems Paul might be having with a teacher, a classmate,
or a girlfriend.

Frequently, Kappenhagen would organize outings for a bunch of students, taking them to McDonald's, the movies, the Smithsonian, or the Baltimore Aquarium. While many would say they'd come, sometimes only Paul would show.

When Paul wasn't involved in after-school activities, the two played basketball and racquetball. The student taught his teacher to play chess. "A nice, cool, organic relationship developed between us," Kappenhagen says. In time, Paul opened up about his troubled family life.

One of the reasons Paul says he loves school is that he was deprived of it early in his childhood. His father, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from paranoia, wouldn't let his children attend school. Paul lived with his parents and three siblings in a oneroom apartment without a working toilet, stove, or sink. Food was often scarce. Taught to read by his mother and older sister, Paul remembers reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Richard Wright.

"If my father came home upset, he would find a way to beat us," Paul says. When the beatings got worse, Paul, then 10, ran away with his older brother and sister. He lived with his maternal grandmother on and off for the next few years, alternating between foster homes and group homes when she would make her annual trip to Jamaica. He started school in the fifth grade.

By the time he was in middle school, he had lived in eight homes and had worked with three social workers and four therapists. He had been shot at four times. "I'm a survivor," Paul says. "Some people focus on past pains, and they use it as an anchor; I use it as jet fuel."
Friends thought it strange that Paul chose to spend lunches hanging out with Mr. Kappenhagen. Paul didn't care. "Amir felt I was challenging him. The cool thing about it is that I felt he was challenging me," Kappenhagen says. "It came up in every conversation
I had with him. I would go down one path of thinking, and he would go down a divergent path. His insights helped me relate to students in ways I wouldn't have."

Paul helped his teacher understand why some students acted out. "I could never figure out how people get in fights," Kappenhagen says. "But Amir had a whole system of rational
thinking to explain why you don't back down from something like that. You live in the community and have to face these people every day."

Paul had other insights, too. "He helped me understand why certain kids don't aspire to do their homework and what I needed to do to inspire them," says Kappenhagen, who realized that many of his kids felt hopeless. He came to believe it was his responsibility "to rekindle that trust" and help them understand "that it may not have worked out for your mom, but it very well may be able to work for you."

"Middle school is when you lose boys to drugs and girls to pregnancy," says Charlotte Cureton, who was assistant principal at Paul Junior High when Paul and Kappenhagen were there. Paul, she says, was full of ambition but didn't know how to get where he wanted to go. "Bill gave him the path." Things shifted in the fall of 2001, when Kappenhagen returned from a trip to find that Paul was no longer in school. He tried calling home, but no one answered. That week, Paul's grandmother had left for Jamaica, and he was placed suddenly in a group home. When he returned to school the following day, a distressed Paul explained that his social worker "couldn't find anybody to take me." Kappenhagen had recently been asked to find top students for Project Match, an innovative program that funnels students of color from
Washington, D.C., into the country's top boarding schools. He made a decision: "I'll pull Amir into that circle." Paul took his first airplane ride, to New England to visit Groton and Phillips Exeter. For the first time in his life, he encountered white kids. Until then, he says, the only Caucasians he knew were cops, lawyers, teachers, and social workers.

"The schools loved him," Kappenhagen says, but they were wary of taking him because of his volatile home life. "[They said] 'We do all this work, and if he then goes back to a group home, then our work will be undone.'

"I loved this kid," Kappenhagen continues. "I was thinking whatever it takes to make this kid successful, I'd do."

Having just bought a four-bedroom house in D.C. near the middle school, the 27-year-old teacher offered to adopt his student. Paul, then 15, thought that sounded like too much control but agreed when Kappenhagen countered that he could become Paul's guardian."He showed me my room," says Paul, who had never had his own room. "He told me, 'You have to promise me this is it. There will be no moving out. We'll work through any problems you have. This is your final stop.' "

If Bill Kappenhagen had seriously analyzed it, maybe he wouldn't have gone ahead. No one warned him about parental anxiety or urged him to consider the lifelong responsibility.
When he conferred with his mother, Jean, who had taken to Paul after playing checkers with him when he was in seventh grade, and whom Paul already called grandma, she had one
piece of advice: "Go for it." Kappenhagen let Paul select his room's paint (white) and carpet (he wanted snow-white but settled for peach). Kappenhagen bought him a weight bench. And one day late in the spring, the then ninth grader showed up on the steps of Kappenhagen's house with a big garbage bag full of his belongings. Paul became Kappenhagen's family, going out for half-priced burgers on Mondays, playing cards with the teacher and his 30-something friends, and engaging in political discourse, as adults do in D.C. Kappenhagen even taught Paul to drive—"the most difficult teaching experience I ever had," he says. When Paul stayed out way past curfew one night, Kappenhagen tried to be the disciplinarian, but the dynamic
felt awkward. "I couldn't connect with him on a parent level," Kappenhagen says. Instead, he became more of a big brother. Not that there weren't father-son moments. Administrator Cureton remembers Paul complaining that he didn't want Kappenhagen to chaperone the senior-class boat ride on the Potomac. " 'Why does my parent have to go? Nobody else's parent is going,' " she recalls him saying.

Around that time, Cureton also remembers, Paul helped welcome sixth graders who soon would be attending Paul School. He spoke to them in English and then Spanish. When Cureton glanced at Kappenhagen, he was standing there, just like any devoted parent, "mouthing every word that Amir was saying." That fall, the two drove up to Groton, in Connecticut, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country. There Paul met a parade of kids in flip-flops and "lime green, hot pink, and yellow" polos whose names were trailed by Roman numerals. He found his social footing, but the academic transition was less smooth. One of Paul's teachers complained he couldn't understand him. "I was talking fast, in D.C. slang," Paul recalls. When he wrote, he failed to use paragraphs, and his handwriting was abominable. From his early years without schooling, Paul struggled with numbers. To compensate, his Groton math teachers worked with him every day after school. Kappenhagen fielded calls from concerned teachers, and every summer he hired tutors to help Paul catch
up. He missed his 10th high school reunion to attend parents' weekend with Paul, who introduced him as his foster father. Paul was having a hard time, but he couldn't admit it to himself, Kappenhagen says. "He thought he could do anything." Occasionally, Paul says, he would make a "morale call" home to Kappenhagen. "I'd get off the phone with him, and I had a reinforced sense that I could do it," he says. Though Groton classes were tough for Paul, he made time to become manager of the student-run diner, an admissions prefect, a peer counselor, one of the captains of the varsity football team, and to play basketball and lacrosse. He graduated with his class in 2005. Compared to high school, college
at Ohio Wesleyan University has been a breeze. Last year, Bill Kappenhagen became principal of Burton High in San Francisco, where he staunched the flow of kids fleeing to other schools.
He sees his job as helping kids who haven't been encouraged to do well. The school library, which had been closed for a decade, was reopened. Several hundred new computers were
purchased, replacing antique machines. Kappenhagen has also introduced afterschool
programs. From his experience with Paul, Kappenhagen knows the studentteacher
relationship can be pivotal. In addition to initiating weekly advisory meetings between teachers and students, he has "an open-door policy, whether I have a meeting or not. I'm here, working for the kids. I can be a model for the teachers." Like most parents and their college kids, Paul and Kappenhagen see each other several times a year, at holidays and other milestones. Kappenhagen even gets pleas for money via text messages that read: "Please help a poor child out. Donate to the Amir Paul Foundation." Now a college senior, Paul is president of Ohio Wesleyan's Democratic club, the rugby team, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters. He manages the difficult kids by following Kappenhagen's example: "I know I'm the spitting image of Bill," he says. He expects to graduate in May with a B average. appenhagen and his parents will be there. Paul plans to take a year off to work and then apply to graduate
school. He's interested in politics, business, and law. He knows what a difference Kappenhagen has made in his life. "If I had not lived with him, I'd be in a group home, doing criminal stuff," he says. "I wouldn't have gone to Groton. Who knows what would have happened? My chances of getting killed were fairly high. People shoot, and you can run
and duck only for so long. "Bill's family, and the people I consider family I can count on two
hands at most," Paul adds. "He's number one."