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I was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 3rd, 1966, and was given up for adoption just five days later. My parents, Marian and Roger were very young at the time and they did not feel that they could give me the best home, so they made the gut-wrenching choice to give me up to a loving family who could give me the life that they wanted me to have. Five years later, my biological father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Ever since I can remember, I knew that I was adopted. And although I had a wonderful family and was a happy, secure kid, I always thought about my birth mother. Since the time that I was very little, I had a wish that some day she would find me. My adopted mother and father moved our family to San Diego when I was ten years old. My brother Charlie was mentally retarded and California offered better social services and education for the mentally challenged. I became a guide and mentor for Charlie when I was very young. From that time on I knew that I was going to become a teacher. Every year around my birthday I would think of my birth mother. By the spring of 2002, my wish to connect with her became stronger than ever. I was blessed with a wonderful husband, son, and my dream job as a vice principal at Central Elementary School in San Diego. I knew that there was a woman out there somewhere who had given up her daughter because she wanted more for her. I felt that she should have the honor of knowing how well I was doing, how happy my life was, and how many young lives I was touching in my work. I picked up a book called, “And Then She Found Me” by Eleanor Lipman. It was a fiction book about an adoptee who was found by her birth mother. As I read, I was stunned by the similarities between the story line and my own life. The main character was born in Chicago, Illinois, was given up for adoption to a Jewish family, and had later become a teacher. This prompted me to enter my birth information on an adoption website. There were no other listings that matched my date of birth so I left my information on the site and forgot all about it. Four years later, just a few months before my 40th birthday, I received an email from the adoption website. At first I thought it was just junk mail but when I opened the email I read, “Dear Cindy, I registered on your site this morning and based on the information you provided we seem to be a match.” I sat there in there in stunned silence, barley breathing. I read on, “I am jumping out of my skin with anticipation so I decided to email you right away. My name is Marian and I hope and pray that I am your birth mother.” After exchanging emails and phone calls we determined that she was indeed my birth mother. I decided to fly to Chicago to meet her. As I was leaving school for the airport I saw a penny lying on the ground. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I arrived in Chicago and drove to the hotel where we were to meet. The moment finally arrived and when I saw her walking toward me I realized that my lifelong dream was finally a reality. We were both choked with emotion as we embraced for a long time. We had so many things to say to each so we found a coffee shop where we could talk. I looked down on the ground near our table and saw three pennies. “Oh, more lucky pennies,” I thought and put them in my pocket. I had always believed in wishes, but at that moment I knew that wishes really do come true. When I got back to school after my life-changing trip, I found pennies and coins everywhere. I began a campaign to teach the children to believe in their own wishes. I added the phrase, “Dream Big” to our school motto. The kids loved the addition and chanted, “Work hard, Be Kind, Dream Big!” I knew that I had put all the components in place for a successful school, but the one thing that had been missing was belief. The kids needed to believe in something before they could see it. The children and teachers were very excited about all the pennies I was finding and began finding them everywhere too. They found them all over the school and in parks, alleys, and grocery stores. We were all mesmerized by this because it was very uncommon to find money lying around in such a poor neighborhood. The kids made “dream jars” and we put one in every classroom. Every day several children came running excitedly toward me, “Mrs. Martin! Mrs. Martin! I found a penny!” Together we would go into the nearest classroom and the child would make his or her wish and drop the penny in the jar. Central Elementary is classified as a one-hundred percent title one school, which means that virtually all of the children are considered socially and economically disadvantaged and at risk for poor school performance. Eighty Five percent of them speak English as a second language, which means that many of them have great difficulty on standardized state tests. I insisted that they understand that it didn’t matter where they came from, or what their family life was like, they could do well in school and could be anything they wanted to be. After we added “Dream Big” to our school motto and included dream jars in the classrooms, we received an unexpected gift: Our school-wide proficiency score rose from eighteen percent to twenty-nine percent. Our English learners had an enormous jump in test scores from a proficiency rate of just ten percent to twenty-six percent. Every since I had been at Central Elementary we had experienced steady growth, but a jump in scores that large could only be attributed to the fact that the children believed, like I did, that wishes really do come true. Comment on this story on our public message board |
