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Leith
Yetman: A Study in Perseverance |
Ask Leith Yetman what is the formula for success and her inevitable answer would be 'peseverance,persevarance, perseverance'. Indeed sheer perseverance is what typifies this Jamaican immigrant whose school, the the New York Institute of Business Technology, celebrated its 20th anniversary on April 26 in front of a gathering that included a range of VIPs.
Started in 1981 with one student, the school now has 650 students, many of them Latin American, East European and Asian immigrantsSubjects include English as a second language, computer literacy, accounting and word processing. It recently moved to more spacious space in Manhattan's Garment District on West 35th Street. There are 30 classrooms with three computer labs and 33 teachers.
Yeitman recently opened another school, Grace Institute of Business Technology - named for her mother - on Coney Island Ave. in Brooklyn.
Leith Yetman is one of those persons who know what they were born to do as soon as they become articulate. And for Leith teaching it was. .
"I realized all along that my role-in this life was to teach, direct and instruct," says Yetman. She was born in the town of Kellits in the parish of Clarendon, to Grace and Percival Augustus Yeitman. Her father, a farmer, died in 1954, a year after the last of the couple's children was born.
"It was very, very hard on my mother, raising us alone," Yeitman said. "She struggled. I remember seeing her crying at night, and crying with her even though I did not know what she was crying about."
Like almost every Caribbean parent, Grace Yeitman believed education was way to a better future and she drilled that idea into her children.
Leith Yeitman finished public school the year her father died and went to work as a probationer - a teacher who has not taken any college courses - to help support her family.
Then one day in 1962, Yetman ran into a friend who was heading to the American Embassy in search of a visa to emigrate to the United States.
"I thought that I could do more for the family if I could go to the U.S.," Yeitman said.
Even with no bank account - visa applicants were required to show that they had savings - she finagled a visa and was soon U.S.-bound.
Once settled in with friends on St. James Place in Brooklyn, Yeitman quickly discovered that American money wasn't as easy to come by as she thought it would be.
"Those people who came back home to Jamaica with polished nails and stylish clothes never told us that they were cleaning people's houses and cutting sugar cane up here for the money," she said.
With no credentials to teach, Yeitman got a job as a maid, first with a family in Scarsdale and later in the Dakota on Central Park West.
One of her employers sponsored her green card application, and in 1972 she received permanent resident status.
Working during the day, Yeitman went to Baruch College at night, earning a B.A. in elementary education in 1976. Two years later, she got a master's in education from Teachers College of Columbia University.
All the time she kept her dream of opening a school. Now working at a law firm, she checked with the state Education Department in the late 1970s and was told she needed a curriculum that was approved by the department and a building with a special certificate of occupancy to show that it had proper entrances and exits for a large number of students as well as handicap accessibility.
On top of that, she needed a $20,000 insurance policy and $20,000 in the bank as collateral over and beyond indebtedness.
I didn't have one red penny," she admits. "I didn't know where to turn to."
That's where perseverance came in.
Yetman placed ads in the New York Times looking for investors. She encountered more than one "money broker" who would take hundreds of dollars from her (often her entire week's pay at a time) in exchange for the promise of finding her investors-only to disappear.
A relative she thought would lend her the money refused, asking her whether she thought she was Rockfellar and saying, "Women are no good in businessI don't trust you"
She was also told that she had no ambition "being in Brooklyn". (Incidentally that same relative later went to Leith to borrow $20,000. "I lent it to him interest free, " said Leith Yetman. "And also helped provide housing for the family.")
That rejection, in a way turned out to be a positive force for leith, "I was determined to prove him wrong," she said.
Leith recalls that when he got off the phone. After speaking to the family member, his son Ricky, then 12, turned to him and said, "Oh mom I wish I had a key to the bank". The lad was under the impression that he could just go into the bank and get money.
By this time married with five children - though her husband had returned to Jamaica - Yeitman was steered to the Small Business Administration, which approved a $50,000 loan.
Twenty-eight landlords refused to lease her space before a friend helped her secure space in the Actors Equity Building, where she opened the-originally called the New York Institute of Word Processing - W 46th St.
But starting the school was not the end of her problems. In fact the journey has been "up and down".
Leith recalls one year when bills were due and she ahd no money. A Polish immigrant who cleaned up at night saw her crying at her desk one night because she had no money and bills were due.
The cleaning woman, Irene, listened, then told Yeitman that she ahd $3000, and she would lend her $2,000. It was enough to keep the school running - and it has been running ever since.
"I paid that woman back every cent with interest, but I still can't believe that she did that for me," Yeitman said. "It was because she was there for me that night that I am still here today."
Initially started as a comemrcial entity the school was transformed into a non-profit entity in 1995 after grants were taken away from for-profit schools. That was another low for Leith as school enrollement plummeted with students unable and she had to let go many teachers. "I thought I was going under," she said.