Dedicated To “Coach” Leslie Fernandez

EduCage staff, circa 1981, Coach in bottom lower left. Despite this unexpected triumph, after his discharge Fernandez didn’t see himself in any better light. He hired on as a file clerk. During that post-enlistment period, Coach had a chance meeting that changed his life. Fernandez hadn’t known it, but his high school coach had seen something in him. So when the two accidentally met on the street one day, the young file clerk was surprised when he asked him, “Why aren’t you in college?” Fernandez answered truthfully: He didn’t think he could make it. Understanding him better than he understood himself, Fernandez’s former coach promptly walked him straight to the nearby admissions office of New York University. The G.I. Bill opened the door to college, something he had never considered. After college, the young man entered the New York City Public School system as an industrial arts teacher and later, guidance counselor. It was at his first school that he met Natalie; they were married within a year. As his family grew to include four children, Fernandez needed additional  income. Looking around, he learned about a local canteen and drop-in center for teenagers. The center wasn’t much, that’s for sure. A local entrepreneur paid the rent for an old bowling alley space. It was windowless, lit with fluorescent lights and sported a single amenity: a plywood slab held up by milk cartons that served  as a ping-pong table.   Originally dubbed The Sugar Bowl, the teenagers, whose rowdy, frequent fights often drew the police, renamed their space The Cage. The name stuck. The youths definitely needed supervision.  Community involvement provided the funds for someone to work at The Cage six nights a week. It turned out to be Fernandez. The teenagers were a challenge to Fernandez, who was then 34. Many were economically disadvantaged. But family pathology is an equal opportunity affliction. Destabilizing problems endured by many of Cage’s teenagers ranged from broken homes, alcoholism or drug addiction of one or both parents, to abuse and simple, garden-variety neglect. Many of the kids were described as hard-to-reach, alienated and hostile. Even Fernandez’s reflection about his first months working at Cage supported the description. His rueful remark: he wasn’t an animal tamer, after all. Not an animal tamer, but definitely a fighter. Fernandez had been a Golden Gloves boxer. The first Cage program he launched, which endured for decades, was in boxing. It was a smart choice, channeling the energies of many hostile youths. From that small beginning, and feeling his way all the way for the next three decades, Leslie Fernandez created EduCage, the first true alternative high school in New York’s Westchester County. It gave at-risk teenagers a meaningful chance to succeed in life. Significantly, the school that “Coach” Fernandez created also enjoyed one of the highest graduation rates in New York’s Westchester County. What made the EduCage difference? Leslie Fernandez always remembered his parents’ unconditional love and his former coach’s confidence in his abilities. Both made a positive difference in his life. He also remembered the cross of that “loser” feeling in high school when not a single teacher looked deeper. Those experiences informed his work in creating EduCage. But there is more. There was Leslie “Coach” Fernandez himself. As described by everyone who knew him, Leslie Fernandez, a man’s man, was also a mixture of compassion, empathy and strength. “Coach led me down a road of love and discipline,” says musician and music producer Steve Luongo. “Today when I work with other musicians, I try always to apply the lessons I learned from Coach to make them, and me, better.”   Author Devra Hall Levy used to walk across town from her high school, one of those typical one-size-fits-all curricula schools, to be at EduCage instead. “Coach found teachers like him: they cared about us,” she says. In addition, the small classes ensured that each student received individual attention. “All the EduCage teachers knew you, really knew you,” Levy recalls. “No one glossed over your problems, and some of us had big problems.” Indeed, the one feeling mentioned again and again by former students, especially the self-described troubled ones, is that they felt seen and understood by Coach. For many, it was their first experience of real caring from an adult.