Lesson on the Links
Rick Lipsey
Sports Illustrated
April 17 1995
It's Quarter to eight on a sunny Tuesday morning at the Chi Chi Rodriguez Golf Club in Clearwater, Fla. Old men are putting and chatting on the practice green. Maintenance carts are zipping around. A gaggle of golfers gathers next to a long line of carts at the first tee.
Meanwhile, on a patch of grass in front of the pro shop, 36 fifth-graders and four adults stand ramrod -straight at attention around a flagpole. They observe a moment of silence. A boy and a girl raise the U.S. flag, and everybody repeats the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the group marches single-file toward a one-story stucco building about 100 feet away that houses two classrooms and the Nicklaus Family Center, a large, multipurpose room.
"Those are the luckiest kids in the world," says Ben Davis. 71, while taking a few practice strokes on the putting green. "Imagine, going to school on a golf course."
The school on a golf course is the Modesta Robbins Partnership School, a one-grade, privately funded public school for what educators call "discouraged learners." As Uncle Sam slashes the public education budget, privately funded public schools are becoming an increasingly viable alternative. In Florida's Pinellas County, which includes Clearwater, there are six such partnership schools.
Modesta Robbins exists because the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation pays the costs of construction, maintenance, administration, classroom materials and the salaries of two assistants. The Pinellas County Board of Education supplies two teachers and a principal. The board and the foundation select the students from a pool of kids who have had serious problems in regular schools.
What makes Modesta Robbins unique is its golf-based curriculum. Students shadow the golf club's staff in the pro shop, snack bar and business office. To study flora and fauna in science class, students sometimes don wetsuits and wade into the course's swamps and lakes. Classes have used Babe Zaharias's autobiography, This Life I've Led, as a textbook, and issues of Golf Digest and Senior Golfer constitute reading units. Posters in which Snoopy illustrates golf etiquette adorn bathroom doors. And, of course, everybody can play golf daily.
"All schools should be like ours," says John Hauser, an honor-roll student. "They give us work that makes us learn, and we get to play golf every day. I love coming to school."
I love coming to school. This from a boy who last year , in the fourth grade at one of Clearwater's regular public schools, had grades so poor that his mother thought he was a lost cause. "I was in tears all year," says Cathy Hauser. "He was a lump and a compulsive liar. I thought I'd lost him. But this school has saved his life."
Saving lives was the intent of the school's founder, Bill Hayes, 47. He grew up in Helensburgh, Scotland, where his father had been transferred by a U.S. manufacturing company. Hayes took up golf at the age of eight, playing mostly at the renowned Gleneagles golf resort. When he was 13, however, Hayes was sexually assaulted and dumped into a well by a pack of teenage boys. He was rescued by a passerby who heard his cries for help.
"The attack scared me to death," says Hayes, "but it also made me wonder how I could change the world."
In 1970 Hayes graduated from Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y., and, at 22, moved to Florida to become a golf pro. He took a job at the famous Seminole Golf Club to work on his game, and over the next five years he played a number of mini-tour events. But in 1975, as he was planning a tryout for the PGA Tour Qualifying School, Hayes was involved in a freak accident in which another player's golf club struck him under the chin, fracturing his neck at the sixth cervical vertebra. The injury was not crippling, but Hayes says, "That was the beginning of the end of my playing career."
That fall Hayes enrolled in a graduate program in education at the University of Tampa, which he paid for by working as a counselor at the Pinellas County Juvenile Detention Center in Clearwater. It was there that Hayes first used golf to help troubled kids. "I snuck clubs and plastic balls into the center," he says. "We'd play tournaments through the halls, using toilets for holes. That was were I discovered that golf gets kids' attention.
Hayes started taking youngsters from the center to golf courses and teaching them to play. He bought them clothes and equipment. He taught them manners. And he gave them math lessons, solving problems based on shaft lengths, club-face lofts and pounds of fertilizer needed per square foot of turf.
In December 1979, Hayes took a group of kids to watch Chi Chi Rodriguez play a practice round at the J.C. Penney Classic in nearby Largo. Hayes and his charges introduced themselves to Rodriguez, who agreed to give a talk that night at the detention center. Hayes and Rodriguez hit it off, and the following May the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, with Hayes at the helm and Rodriguez as the marquee fund-raiser, was officially opened.
By 1983 the foundation was running after-school and community-service programs for 200 youths, and in 1985 the foundation won the National Golf Foundation's award for the best youth program in the country. But Hayes wasn't satisfied. His goal was to create a school for disadvantaged, at-risk kids. "I want to start a privately funded public school on a golf course," Hayes said during an interview about the foundation on ABC's World News Tonight in November 1986. Bill Bennett, then Secretary of Education, saw the interview and called Hayes late that night. Two day later, Hayes was in Washington, giving a three hour presentation at the Department of Education.
Despite this hopeful start, there were seven years of intense wrangling before the school opened. Hayes had to convince Pinellas County and Florida state department of education officials that a curriculum based on golf would work. He had wanted a full-fledged elementary school, but setting up a separate curriculum for each grade proved too daunting.
It also took awhile to raise the $2.8 million to construct the school's buildings and golf course. And there was another problem: Hayes wanted the school to be racially diverse, and he wanted to put it at the Chi Chi Rodriguez Golf Club, which is in a mostly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. Local homeowners and the Ku Klux Klan weren't pleased.
Hayes refused to back down, and the KKK and the homeowners' associations have been silent since the school opened in September 1993. Doubters on the school board also have come around. "At first we were skeptical of the idea," says Howard Hinesley, the superintendent of public schools in Pinellas County. "But skepticism quickly became enthusiasm. It's one of the most successful startups I've seen in 27 years as an educator."
Students thrive under Modesta Robbin's hands-on, real-life curriculum. "Now I can help my mother run the cash register at the bowling alley where she works," says Adam Harvey, 12.
Science, taught by Doug Boyles, the course's horticultural manager, is the most popular class. Almost every flower, plant, tree and bush on the course is, at some point, tended by students. "Instead of working out of a science book, we get to do this," said Tiffany Myers, 10, as she repotted plants at the course's nursery one day in February.
Perhaps the only problem with Modesta Robbins is that it has only on grade. A lack of money is not the issue. Besides contributions from Rodriguez's foundation, there are other sources: In February, for example, Jack Nicklaus, Ray Floyd and billiards legend Steve Mizerak joined other celebrities at a fund raiser for Modesta Robbins that boosted the amount pledged over five years to $6 million, including $5 million from Nestle.
But given that public school administrators are slow to embrace new ideas, Hayes will be happy if he gets approval to add a sixth grade by the fall of '96. "We'll take whatever we can get," he says.
Teachers, students and parents want more. "I wish they had all grades," says Matt Summer, 12, class of '94. Before Modesta Robbins, Matt spent three years in a dropout-prevention program. Last June, as one of two top students, he was awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.
"He's back to struggling a bit now in a regular school," says Matt's mother, Deborah Summer. "But my son's been blessed. He's like a flower that finally bloomed."
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