Just past 7 o’clock Monday night, the Tivoli Theatre filled with enthusiastic supporters of Normal Park Museum Magnet School, local television personality and past Normal Park board chairman Alison Lebovitz posed a stunning question to the audience: “Can you imagine an elementary school without a gym?”
The reality is, Normal Park’s Lower School hasn’t had a gym for any of the 14 years that principal Jill Levine has so brilliantly run this city’s finest example of public education.
“I like being busy. I know that sounds weird; it’s like saying, “I like fundraising.” But some people get that stressful feeling if they’ve got a lot going on. Really I get that stressful, uh-oh feeling if I don’t have something going on.” – Alison Lebovitz“For years, these kids have kicked balls and thrown balls and wrestled around on a stage at the Lower School because that’s all they had,” Lebovitz said. “We need to change that.”
They’ve changed everything else so much since Levine arrived in 2002 to find a school with only 214 students, failing test scores and a building that probably was on its way to being condemned. But teachers, parents, grandparents and supporters enthusiastically cleaned and painted and landscaped the place in time for fall classes that first year.
One makeover of the Upper School took just seven days. Levine said proudly, “Even Ty Pennington (of Extreme Home Makeover fame) couldn’t believe it.”
And with that community pride has come stunning national test scores, a student body now north of 800 and such respect for Levine’s wonderful work that she was a named a 2013-14 Principal Ambassador Fellow of the U.S. Department of Education, spending a year in Washington, D.C., in hopes of lifting all of public education to the level of Normal Park.
Yet through all her achievements, Levine could never escape this message to future students: “The only drawback is we don’t have a gym.”
So come Monday night at the Tivoli, the school brought in a couple of pretty heavy hitters to help raise the $500,000 that Normal Park Lower School needs to build a gym capable of developing healthy bodies as well as the school has long produced healthy minds.
“It’s an opportunity to do something good for a community I care a lot about,” said former Tennessee football coach Phillip Fulmer, the first to address the audience. “Obviously, it’s a really special school. A lot of passionate people are in this auditorium tonight.
“And building this gym isn’t just about athletics. We really need to provide more exercise opportunities for all our youth. They’re all sitting in front of a screen too much. They’re all busy exercising their minds but not their bodies.”
Then David Epstein, author of the national bestseller, “The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance,” took the stage. A walk-on runner at Columbia who once was told during his college days that his oxygen levels during exercise looked like someone in the “early stages of emphysema,” Epstein wound up competing in the U.S. nationals in the 800 meters and earned All-East honors in Division I.
“I’ve gone to China to study the greatest diving team in the world,” Epstein said. “And you know where they train? In a community pool. The best in the world in the same place as kids just starting out. And it’s a fine facility now. But when they started it was neglected, filled with algae, a mess.”
Epstein also spoke of the need to let kids grow at their own pace, and through multiple sports, and the need to have fun.
“We’re learning,” he said, “that kids who have been exposed to three different sports (during childhood) will pick up any sport much easier for the rest of their lives.”
He also noted that our best athletes are now coming out of our smaller communities, that the top producers of professional baseball, basketball, football and women’s soccer players in this country are towns with populations between 50,000 and 99,000.
The theory, according to Epstein, is that those communities are more nurturing and less into specialization of their athletes.
Fulmer seemed to support that belief when he said that the longer he was at UT he found that recruiting athletes who’d played at least two high school sports often produced better players.
Because he was the Big Orange football coach during part of the time covered in the recent lawsuit charging that a culture against women has long existed at UT, Fulmer was asked about the lawsuit and his former quarterback Peyton Manning, of whom he said, “We didn’t win a national championship with Peyton, but we won one because of Peyton.”
Of the lawsuit, the father of three daughters and one son said, “I really don’t have a comment. Just let the legal system work its course. I do know from my time there that the University of Tennessee is a wonderful, caring place.”
On Manning: “Peyton is a wonderful ambassador to the university and one of the greatest leaders I’ve ever been around.”
But because his real mission this night was to help raise $500,000 for a gym, Fulmer closed his time on stage as perfectly as he ever closed the deal on one of those multisport recruits that delivered him the 1998 national championship.
“Count your pennies,” he said. “But also make your pennies count. You have an opportunity to do something big for young people tonight.”
Something that should put an end to having to imagine the best public elementary school in our city not having a gym.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com