Kwabena Bempah Tandoh has dreams, and he is making them happen. Among K.B.’s biggest aspirations?
“I want to start an inner-city boarding school,” Tandoh said. He said that the school would provide college preparatory education for males ages 12 to 18.
Tandoh, who “wanted to stay in higher education” after earning his college degrees in urban and community studies at the University of Connecticut, has started this year as a residence hall coordinator at Saint Louis University’s Marguerite Hall and is taking his first classes toward a doctorate in educational leadership and higher education at SLU. With a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and a master’s degree in social work, Tandoh has been cultivating his plan to help educate urban students for years.
Tandoh said that he has written a 25-page proposal for the school program and is “in the process of writing the proposal to set up a foundation to fund the program.”
Though he once lived in Ghana, he has spent time in 28 states, mostly East of the Mississippi, and London, and said that he hopes his proposal for a boarding school could be put to use in “any city in the world.”
Tandoh operates from the principle that “prevention is better than cure.” He attended a boarding school in Ghana and “learned discipline and honor,” he said.
He wants to offer a boarding school to young urban males because “most problems [concerning urban youth] happen between 3 p.m. and 3 a.m..” The school, he said, would provide a “totally free, safe learning environment to bring [the students] up to speed” before college.
Tandoh is also interested in diversity training. Along with SLU’s Campus Ministry, he hopes to run a “Diversity Spring Break Bus” to tour different places in the northeastern United States.
It will be “like a diversity classroom but on the road,” Tandoh said. “[We will study] the different fabrics that make together what we call America.”
Tandoh has traveled far from his birthplace in Ghana, where he lived until age 17. He said that in 1996, when his father was given U.S. visas for their family through a diversity lottery, they moved to Connecticut, where their extended family had been living for 15 or 20 years.
“I had always wanted to study abroad,” said Tandoh. But while his father and some of his nine siblings eventually returned to Ghana, Tandoh made connections in the U.S. While he finished high school and began college there, he lived with Gary LeBeau, a Connecticut state senator.
“I still call him my American dad,” he said. Later, as an undergraduate student, Tandoh found a maternal figure in his academic counselor at the University of Connecticut, Marie McCain, who helped him pay his graduate school acceptance fee.
Though he has visited Ghana only once in 12 years, Tandoh still has ties to the country.
“My wife and I were both born in Ghana,” Tandoh said.
His wife, Enyo, lived in London and he lived in Connecticut during part of their courtship, neither of them were present at their original marriage ceremony, which took place in Ghana. As a result, it served as more of a symbolic union between the two families than Tandoh or his wife. On the same day as the ceremony in Ghana though, he surprised his wife by flying to London from his home in Connecticut for a second wedding – a small, private affair at which they could both be present.
The couple celebrated a third ceremony, their officially documented U.S. union, in St. Louis on Aug. 31. Enyo is a registered nurse, and the two of them are quickly making connections in the St. Louis area.
Tandoh takes every opportunity to ask for the help and advice of others. He said he believes that wisdom gained by experience is indispensable, and suggests that students trust in the experience offered to them by others while they work toward their own dreams.
“We have so many resources around us,” Tandoh said. “If every teacher on this campus has a year of experience, that’s 1,000 years of experience. If everyone has ten, that’s 10,000.”
