Ty'sheoma Bethea went to the public library in this struggling South Carolina town Tuesday night to write a letter to Congress about the economic stimulus bill.
The 8th grader had never thought about writing to Congress before. She didn't even have a clear idea what a "stimulus bill" is. She went to the library because her family has no computer at home, and the handful of computers at her crumbling middle school — hand-me-downs once used by felons in the state prison system—were unavailable.
All the 14-year-old knew was that powerful people in faraway Washington were debating something that might directly help her school, where stained rugs cover holes in the floor, rain pours from the ceiling, classroom temperatures hover in the 50s in the winter and freight trains passing along nearby tracks shake the building so violently that the lights go out several times a day.
She sat down in front of a computer and typed out a single-spaced letter which began, "Dear Congress of the United States."
In rough but passionate prose, the teenager beseeched the faceless representatives to help her school, in Dillon South Carolina (J.V. Martin).
"People are starting to see my school as an hopeless, uneducated school which we are not," Ty'Sheoma wrote. "We finally want to prove to the world that we have an chance in life just like other schools and we can feel good about what we are doing because of the conditions we are in now we can not succeed in anything."
The next morning, Feb. 11, Ty'Sheoma gave her letter to Amanda Burnette, the principal of the school. Burnette promptly scanned it and e-mailed copies to South Carolina's representatives in Congress, as well as the White House. I featured Ty'Sheoma's letter in the story I wrote that night about the J.V. Martin school.
President Obama was already familiar with the extremeley dire conditions at the school, which was built in 1896 and has been partially condemned. He visited J.V. Martin twice during the presidential campaign and mentioned it again during his first presidential news conference.
