Alan Page is a retired justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee. In 1988, he and his wife, Diane, started the Page Education Foundation, whose mission is to encourage Minnesota’s youth of color to pursue post-secondary education. We are proud to announce that Justice Page will be a featured speaker at Kids In Need Foundation’s Champions For Education event in November.

 

As a child growing up in Canton, Ohio, Justice Page’s parents taught him a very valuable lesson.

“My parents made sure I understood the value of education. I understood that if I was going to have a better life than they had, I had to be educated. I had to be a good citizen. My parents taught me the importance of seeking excellence – being good at what you do so you can achieve your highest potential. It wasn’t about being better than someone else or having more money than someone else. It was all about reaching your highest potential.”

For Justice Page, helping children reach their potential has become his life’s work. He believes access to a good and equal education for all children is a civil right – a societal necessity – and is a cause he will continue to champion.

During his time on the bench as a justice in the Minnesota Supreme Court, Justice Page saw too many children who had fallen through the educational cracks. 

“In my years on the bench, I saw firsthand, in cases involving juveniles, an inability to think critically and analyze a problem,” said Justice Page. “For them, 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Their thought process is scattered. It’s hard to make good decisions when you can’t work through a problem. Education gives you choices. It lets you choose which path you will take. It’s also something nobody can ever take away from you. You get to decide which doors you open and which doors you walk past. But when you lack education, when you’re not prepared, somebody else is controlling where you go and what you do.”

This lack of access and opportunity has often been called the “Opportunity Gap.” But for Justice Page, that simple term masks the harsh reality of its roots and its long-term implications.

“I tend not to refer to it as the ‘Opportunity Gap,” said Justice Page. “I tend to refer to it as ‘adults’ failure to educate children,’ because the disparity in performance between children of color and poor white children, and their middle class peers, is really, from my vantage point, a failure of us, as adults, in ensuring that every child has the opportunity to learn. We see these disparities, and they’re widespread, and we say they are unacceptable. Yet, we have, for decades, accepted them.”

• • •

Justice Page often thinks about a speech given by a friend of his many years ago, when the friend said:

“For those of us who have had the good fortune to have ridden the elevator up to success, we have an obligation not to just simply get off the elevator. We have an obligation to send the elevator back down.”

“It’s something that I believe wholeheartedly,” said Page. “It has always stayed with me.”

Justice Page is grateful for his good fortune and has spent his life trying to pay it forward. In particular, this has meant a laser focus on issues around equality in education.

For Justice Page, it all started when he was asked to speak to groups of students while he was playing football in the NFL. He noticed that many young athletes, who were stars on the field, were not finding the same level of success in the classroom.

“I was seeing young people who were great athletes in high school. Maybe they went off to college, but after their playing days were over, they were unemployed and unemployable,” he said. “That didn’t make any sense to me because as I understood it if you were smart enough to be a good athlete, you should be smart enough to perform in the classroom. Yet a lot of these young people weren’t performing in the classroom. That conundrum worried me. It troubled me.”

Given that Justice Page grew up in the 1950s, and was a child when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided, he knew that education was a tool that could be used to overcome discrimination, to achieve your dreams. But he saw that many children lacked access to this important tool. 

“That failure to educate all children, at least in the context of athletics, didn’t make sense to me. Over time as an athlete, I was asked to talk to young children about the value of education and academics. I spent a lot of time in schools, over the last 60 years, talking with young children about the importance of education.”

Eventually, Justice Page decided he wanted to do more than talk. He wanted to act, to make a real difference, and help move the needle when it came to opportunity and equality in education. So in 1988, he and his wife Diane started the Page Education Foundation, which provides financial assistance to encourage, motivate and assist young men and women of color to pursue education beyond high school. It also requires that grant recipients work with young children as tutors, mentors, and role models.

Justice Page sees this work as critical for economic and social change.

“Every child who gets left behind is a diminished employee, a diminished customer, and a diminished taxpayer, with the increasing likelihood that they would become a burden on society. This is something we can change. I know of no other tool we have that can solve some of the most difficult problems we face as a country. We’ve got to figure out how to educate individual children so that everyone can reach their fullest potential - whatever that is. We don’t do that now. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s why I’m in this for the long haul.”

• • •

Words into action. That simple concept is a cornerstone of Justice Page’s lifelong mission to ensure all children have access to an equal, high-quality education. He believes this access is a civil right, one that carries with it an incredibly powerful ingredient for success - hope.

“Anything we can do to create hope in young people, it seems to me, is well worth the effort,” he said.

He believes programs like those offered through Kids In Need Foundation (KINF) are crucial when it comes to leveling the playing field and providing resources that can change the course of a child’s life. 

“Kids In Need is critical in terms of providing resources so that the overall work we are doing to transform education is possible,” said Justice Page. 

“When I stop and think about it, this is all about creating hope. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said - and I paraphrase - ‘When people have hope, they want to build a community around them. When people lose hope, they tend to want to destroy it.’”

“If you look at what’s going on with the children we are leaving behind, they are losing hope. An organization like Kids In Need, like the Page Education Foundation, we are building and creating hope and in the process, changing the future, making it better than what it might otherwise be.”

Much of the work Justice Page is doing in the field of education aligns with Kids In Need Foundation’s vision - to ensure that every child in America has equal opportunity and access to a quality education. Don’t miss out on the third - and final - installment of our interview with Justice Page, when we will learn more about his vision for the future.

Register now for KINF’s Champions for Education event on September 14 where Page will be a featured speaker.