Alumna creates path for students to visit the White House

Mary-Eileen Gallagher ’09 and some of the students at Sojourner Truth Academy in Minneapolis, Minn., stand in the school's new Gallagher-inspired “banquet room” lunchroom.

Students learn about dining etiquette and invite President Obama to their new “White House-motif” lunch room.

Fundraising underway to take kids to Washington D.C.

What was once a school lunch period marked by flying food and fists has at times become a place of manners and etiquette fit for the President of the United States, thanks to the creativity of alumna Mary-Eileen Gallagher ’09.

As a volunteer kindergarten assistant and lunchroom aide at an inner-city charter school in Minneapolis, Minn., Gallagher has inspired her students and helped them change their behavior.

Sojourner Truth Academy’s narrow, windowless basement lunchroom now has a chandelier, candle sconces, placemats, a White House dining room motif. And there is courteous behavior. Now, after eating, the students spend time learning about U.S. presidents and history or they write letters about their lives to Pres. Barack Obama and invite him to lunch – a major effort, about 2,800 letters, so far. They’ll continue until he accepts.

Gallagher, who is working at the academy during a year’s stint with Lutheran Volunteer Corps, says the experience has made her certain she wants a teaching career.

Gallagher said that after her first week in the lunchroom last fall she was “bewildered” about the fighting, food-throwing and bullying. “It was crazy.” She said many of the students’ lives are chaotic. But, believing that meals can be a time for community building, Gallagher decided the lunchroom could be the start to something beautiful.

“I imagined that lunch could be different. I wanted it to be safe and beautiful and fun. And because I love to love what I do, I knew I couldn’t just keep the status quo of chaos and ugliness at lunch,” she said. “And I knew our students deserved better and could do so much better.”

Gallagher said she recalled how her mother dealt with chaotic mealtimes by having etiquette drills “just in case the president of the United States ever invited us to the White House for dinner.” So, she proposed to the students they turn the cafeteria into a banquet hall and invite Obama to lunch there – and that until he replied to the invitation, they’d practice the kind of manners needed for the occasion.

Gallagher showed students pictures of White Housing dining rooms and at first the students didn’t believe she or they could accomplish this project since, they told her, they didn’t have a chandelier or other things needed … and that the president wouldn’t care what they had to say – comments that “broke my heart,” she said. “I just told them what I’d been telling myself: ‘You have to believe it, then you’ll see it.’” Proceed that way instead of society’s typical approach, which is, “When I see it, I’ll believe it,” she said.

Chandelier now hangs in the banquet room

She began coming in at 6:30 a.m. to work on this project. And the transformation began. She found a chandelier at a garage sale and beautified it, and the school’s “wonderful maintenance staff” put it up. Candle sconces and other White House type décor were other additions. Gallagher found placemats that had all 44 presidents on them, as well as state flags and information. She put vases of “flowers” on the tables, which were really pens for the students to write letters with state flowers attached. And she started “Manners Monday,” a weekly etiquette and respect lesson.

In a couple months of letter-writing, students have written and sent almost 2,800 letters. She said the effort for some has turned into a writing-from-the-heart journaling of their daily lives. She said students tell Obama about their lives, fears, how they hope he’s not sick. One asked if he could “make it a law that daddies have to see their daughters at least one day a month.”

The students received a letter back from Obama, but he hasn’t committed to a lunch date. Yet.

On April 23, Gallagher and a still-undetermined number of students – depending on how much money they can raise for the trip by their April 1 fundraising deadline – will go to Washington D.C. and the White House for a tour and to deliver a lunch invitation to Obama or a representative. Gallagher said the fundraising goal is $10,000 so they can take 10 students. So far, they have $3,000.

In the meantime, the students have gone to Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s office for lunch, and Barbara Johnson, the 4th Ward City Council president, came to the banquet room for lunch.

But some of the best developments of all are happening in the lunch room: Gallagher said that in the banquet room “pleases” and “thank yous” are routinely heard, now, and students are making good choices most of the time. After eating lunch, they’re writing Obama letters, or decorating envelopes, and Gallagher will hear students giving impromptu history quizzes to each other based on information from the place mats. Gallagher said there are still fights, “students aren’t perfect, and we all make mistakes sometimes,” she said.

Gallagher said lunchtime was crazy before this project, and “it’s still crazy, just ‘structured craziness’ – and meets more students’ needs for things to do after eating lunch,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher – who said a variety of experiences at Whitman College helped prepare her for volunteer service – said she almost cried the day a third-grader came up to her about a month after the program was underway and said, “Ms. G, it finally looks like a real banquet hall.”

It’s a place where the food often stays put, now. It’s the dreams that are flying.

“Every day it gets better … This has really brought the whole school together,” Gallagher said.