Bolanle Ambonisye knew she had stumbled onto something when parents began using her name to get their children to behave.
“Lil’ Johnny was acting up last night. I told him I’m going to tell Mama Bolanle and he straightened right up,” she recalled parents telling her when she was a teacher at the Frederick Douglass Institute.
Ambonisye didn’t take it as a compliment.
“It’s backward,” she said. “I’m supposed to tell that child if you don’t straighten up, I’m going to tell your mom or your dad.”
The experience helped shape an idea Ambonisye would eventually turn into U&I-RISE, an education business offering parenting programs, books and training for schools and educators, with a particular focus on Black families.
Nearly three decades after she began developing her approach, Ambonisye has taken the business from parent workshops to public school contracts and educator training. Now she’s working to expand its reach online.
Ambonisye didn’t come to her theories by chance.
After traveling extensively with her military mom, Ambonisye, then Kelly Andrea Moore, left Germany with her mother and settled in St. Louis in 1979. She was in eighth grade with ambitions of becoming a teacher.
That dream was dashed at Clinton Elementary, now closed, and Roosevelt High School, where she said disrespectful and unruly classmates led her to believe she’d “wind up behind bars” if she taught in city public schools as an adult.
After a stint at Florissant Valley Community College, Ambonisye became pregnant with her first child, Folami, and vowed her child would never attend a public school.
She was later introduced to the Frederick Douglass Institute, a tuition-based independent school centered on African-centered education.
“I got immersed in ‘Black stuff,’” she said with a laugh.
Ambonisye enrolled Folami there while taking an evening course for parents on African-centered education. She said the school’s founders were so impressed with her homeschooled daughter that they asked Ambonisye to bring what she had done with Folami into the classroom.
She became a full-time teacher certified through the Council of Independent Black Institutions.
As the years passed, experiences like the “Mama Bolanle” comments led her to conclude that “as parents, we had given away our power.”
“We were undermining our power without even realizing it,” she said.
Ambonisye came to believe parents needed to “teach their children to obey them,” helping children develop the self-discipline needed to pay attention, cooperate, and do well in school.
“At home it’s called ‘obedience,’ everywhere else it’s called ‘following instructions.’”
In 2007, she turned those ideas into her first educational program and parenting guide, “Tapping Our Parental Power (TOPP) In A Nutshell.” Rather than focusing primarily on children’s misbehavior, TOPP asks parents to examine their own actions.
In a testimonial posted on U&I-RISE’s website, Brandi J., the mother of a teenage son, said TOPP taught her “patience” and how to deal with her son’s emotions while learning to “get myself together first.”
“I am and will be a better parent,” she said.
In 2011, Ambonisye founded U&I-RISE with the admittedly ambitious purpose of helping solve “Black community and family problems.”
Public schools became customers. She marketed parent-engagement workshops first in the Ferguson-Florissant School District and later in St. Louis Public Schools.
Securing contracts was one thing. Getting parents to participate was another.
Ambonisye said many Black parents reacted to a stigma associated with seeking parenting education. Looking for solutions, she took a job as a family support specialist at Bertha Knox Gilkey Pamoja Preparatory Academy, an African-centered SLPS school.
With the superintendent’s approval, the school required parents to participate in her orientation workshop before their children could enroll. Some responded begrudgingly, she said, but attendance improved. The requirement remains in place today.
Over the years, U&I-RISE expanded into school-home engagement and educator training.
One program is FLARES, a classroom management system that Ambonisye developed with Rashida Chatman, an SLPS curriculum specialist. Chatman said it was designed to help educators create “cohesive, manageable and safe classroom spaces for students who look like us.”
DeAndria Wallace, assistant principal at Pamoja, praised Ambonisye and FLARES.
“She is very organized and in tune with the needs of the community,” Wallace said. “Her program is easy to follow and implement, and it gets results when done with fidelity.”
The marketplace has changed considerably since Ambonisye started. Parents can now find parenting courses, videos, social media groups, and other resources online, including programs specifically for Black families.
That leaves Ambonisye working to carve out an online niche for U&I-RISE’s African-centered, Black parent-focused material. She continues using feedback from parent groups and workshop participants to hone and promote her courses, books and workshops.
The delivery methods may have changed, but the mission she set for U&I-RISE remains the same: helping solve “Black community and family problems.”
Based on reporting by St. Louis American.
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