By Clem Richardson New York Daily News Apr 05, 2012 | 4:00 AM
As Paula Martin was growing up in West Harlem — about six blocks from where she now lives — her mother decided the local schools might compromise her daughter’s future.
Frances Martin served in the Woman’s Army Corps during World War II, and was adamant that the daughter she was raising alone would get the best education she could afford.
“My mother was really insightful and visionary as far as education was concerned, for someone who had not had a lot of education,” Martin recalled of her late mother. “She determined when I was going to elementary school that I would not go to the local public school because the kids in the neighborhood did not seem to be doing well or know a lot.”
Which is why Martin would attend Riverside School, Hunter College High School, Syracuse University and earn a master’s degree from Columbia University Teacher’s College.
Now she’s taken her mother’s message and made it a career. As executive director of the Harlem Center for Education, Martin, 65, and her staff help low and moderate income middle school, high school and adults qualify and prepare themselves for college study.
Harlem Center provides a broad range of free services – SAT preparation courses, computer training, college, career and financial counseling — in its’ 1 E. 104th St. offices and a neighborhood adult outreach center at 2161 Second Ave.
Some 1,000 adults took part in the program last year to either enter college for the first time or to go back and get supplemental training to improve their job prospects, Martin said.
Harlem Center counselors also augment college and career counseling programs at four high schools – Manhattan Center for Science and Math, Norman Thomas High School, the High School for International Business and Finance and the High School of Law and Public Service.
Counselors also work with students at nearby IS 171, getting the middle school students acquainted with testing techniques and even sponsoring field trips to colleges to familiarize the students with the process.
“We run an after-school program at IS 171 Monday through Thursday, where our staff goes to the school and runs a supplemental math and English instructional program for the students,” Martin said. “We provide recreational activities, homework assistance, and take them on trips. We help the students and their parents through the high school selection process.
“We start an early intervention program with them,” she said. “We try to get their heads wrapped around the idea that there is something after high school.”
Together the different Harlem Center programs serve about 1,800 children and about 1,000 adults annually, though Martin noted that cuts in federal grant allocations — federal money makes up about 90% of the Harlem Center’s annual budget – have meant fewer people can be helped.
Martin came to what was then called the East Harlem College and Career Counseling Center in 1985. “I intended to come here just temporarily,” she said. “Here it is 27 years later and I’m still here.”
The board of directors changed the facility’s name to Harlem Center for Education in 1998 to reflect an expansion of the non-profit group’s service area.
Martin made the jump after working as coordinator of the Upward Bound program at Columbia University for 12 years, where she, like the Harlem Center, prepared mostly minority students to enter college and professional life.
“Columbia was frustrating because there were so many layers to go through to get anything approved,” Martin said. “And we could not fundraise with foundations or corporations without approval from the development office. Just about everybody you wanted to approach they would tell you no you can’t because they were already approaching them for their capital campaigns.”
Martin is a child of the ’60s who seldom backed away from protest. A member of the Syracuse Class of 1968, she recalls that she and several other black students sneaked Ku Klux Klan-style white sheets into a hall where then- presidential candidate and avowed segregationist Gov. George Wallace had been invited to address a group of fraternities.
“At one a point during his speech we all put these sheets on and walked out,” Martin said. “As we were walking out all these confederate flags came out in the balcony. That’s when I realized some of the racism that existed in the school.”
She and other Syracuse students, including the late documentarian Saint Clair Bourne, used the black student organization to invite Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee head Stokely Carmichael to campus.
They also helped persuade the school president to close the college for a day after Martin Luther King Jr.,’s assassination.
After earning a psychology degree, she moved to Columbia University in 1969, where she took part in demonstrations that shut down Teacher’s College to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
“Again, it was my mother’s influence,” Martin said. “She was an activist, but not an organizer. But she was one who felt the need that if there was something that was not right you had to participate somehow in making it right.
Martin is a child of the ’60s who seldom backed away from protest. A member of the Syracuse Class of 1968, she recalls that she and several other black students sneaked Ku Klux Klan-style white sheets into a hall where then- presidential candidate and avowed segregationist Gov. George Wallace had been invited to address a group of fraternities.
“At one a point during his speech we all put these sheets on and walked out,” Martin said. “As we were walking out all these confederate flags came out in the balcony. That’s when I realized some of the racism that existed in the school.”
She and other Syracuse students, including the late documentarian Saint Clair Bourne, used the black student organization to invite Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee head Stokely Carmichael to campus.
They also helped persuade the school president to close the college for a day after Martin Luther King Jr.,’s assassination.
After earning a psychology degree, she moved to Columbia University in 1969, where she took part in demonstrations that shut down Teacher’s College to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
“Again, it was my mother’s influence,” Martin said. “She was an activist, but not an organizer. But she was one who felt the need that if there was something that was not right you had to participate somehow in making it right.