It was thirty years ago. It seems like it was a different time, a different life, a different world. Nixon had resigned. The country was licking its wounds after Vietnam. I was a high school student getting my first taste of politics. I went to Mount Greylock Regional High School; a school that I had been told was one of the best public high schools in the country. I was proud of my high school and the education I was receiving there.

We were not a well to do family in Williamstown. I had friends who came from very well off families. I also had friends who came from less fortunate circumstances than myself. There was a program at our school called, "A Better Chance". Highly qualified students from poor communities around the country would come to great schools like Mt. Greylock to get a good education and, a better chance.

Like so many public school districts people from outside the district could attend the school if they paid a fairly steep tuition. The tuition had always been waived for ABC students. Then one year some members of the school board fought to have the tuition waiver revoked. Students and teachers were up in arms. There were protests and walkouts. There were heated letters to the editors and board meetings. I don't remember whatever happened exactly. I think the tuition waiver was revoked for a year or two, and then the board members that fought to have it revoked were voted out of office.

I learned from that the importance of speaking up for what you believe. I learned the importance of the small political races.

Now, I pay my taxes to support public education. I wish there were more programs like A Better Chance, and every now and then, I hear about ABC in one context or another. I often wonder what happened to some of those ABC students.

Yesterday, I received an email that brought a lot of this back to me. It is the story of one ABC student who is a few years older than I and who went to a different school. Perhaps his story is a little different from other students, but it many ways it epitomizes why ABC is so important.

Deval Patrick grew up in a tough part of Chicago, living on welfare, sharing a single bedroom with his mother and sister. He became an ABC student at the Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. He went on to graduate with honors from Harvard, and went to a United Nations youth training project in the Darfur region of Sudan. He became a successful lawyer working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He sued Clinton in a voting rights case in Arkansas and through that developed a strong mutual respect. In 1994, Clinton appointed him Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. He later went on to serve as general counsel for Texaco and for Coca-Cola.

A lot of people complain about the cycle of poverty and talk about how welfare is failing to break that cycle. A Better Chance, in this case has done a great job in breaking the cycle.

I heard about Deval from a friend who is trying to help build a strong grassroots campaign to elect him Governor of Massachusetts. He is expected to announce his candidacy on Friday. Even if he is only half as good as his biography suggests, then he is the sort of elected official that our country desperately needs. I wish him well and I look forward to watching to see what happens.