CARROLLWOOD, FL — Ross Anderson sees a real difference in the inner-city youths who return from a Camp Virginia Jaycee trip guided by former schoolteacher William B. Robertson.
“They’re all changed young men in the sense that they’re more appreciative just across the board,’’ said Anderson, a county resource teacher who founded Men of Vision, an effort to direct African-American boys away from the streets and into productive lives.
They seem eager to help others; they even hold doors for elderly people, he said. Inspiring inner-city kids by having them help the physically less fortunate was the brainchild of Robertson, a retired Sligh Middle School history teacher whose resume includes a stint as President Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistant Secretary of State for African affairs.
The 82-year-old Carrollwood resident leaves next week with a new group of Camp Virginia Jaycee junior counselors. This will be the sixth year he has taken a group to Virginia. He started doing it when he was a seventh grade history teacher. He noticed that many of the African-American students from the poor sections of Tampa didn’t even know much about their own city.
“It was almost as if they were trapped in their neighborhoods,’’ Robertson said. They needed exposure to the wider world, he thought, and they could get it by helping the counselors at the camp for intellectually challenged people, a camp Robertson founded 46 years ago as a statewide Jaycees project.
For many of the Tampa kids, it’s their first airplane ride. They arrive at a bucolic setting in the Virginia mountains, a sharp break from their everyday surroundings.
“For 10 days they forget what problems they have because they’re concentrating on serving others,’’ Robertson said.
It helps, too, for them to see “that someone who looked like them had achieved, had excelled, had been successful,’’ Robertson said. So he takes the students to nearby Bluefield State College, where he graduated. His awards, speeches, pictures with presidents are housed there.
Of the 56 students he has taken on the summer trips to Virginia, “we have not lost one to the streets.’’ They’re in high school, college or the military, he said. He has taken girls on the trips when he was able to recruit female chaperones, but most are members of Men of Vision.
He picks the 10 or so students from candidates’ essays. Anderson said the travelers are required to write about their experiences and impressions in daily journals.
Robertson started out paying for the trips out of his own pocket, he said, but had to give up the project when he retired in 2012. Donors, including Wells Fargo Bank and his fellow parishioners at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, enabled him to start the summer trips again last year.
One of his former students, Lamar Woods, 20, said the camp experience “changed the way I view things about life.”
Woods, a junior at Webber International University in Babson Park, said he was inspired by the attitude of the camp residents, who struggled with everyday functions and yet embraced life with enthusiasm and joy. It put his troubles in perspective. “Why should I complain when they smile every day?’’ Woods said.
Now working with at-risk kids for Florida Sheriffs’ Youth Services, Woods is aiming for a career as a high school athletic director. He owes much, he said, to Robertson, “a great mentor.’’
Robertson grew up one of eight children in the era of segregation in Roanoke, Va. He worked his way through Bluefield State College and started his teaching career at a one-room schoolhouse. He served as teacher, principal and supervisor of elementary education in the Roanoke school system, where he had volunteered to be one of the first teachers to integrate the white schools. He later served on the staff of Gov. Linwood Holton and is credited with getting Virginia’s first black state troopers hired.
As a Jaycee, he led a fund-raising drive to establish Camp Virginia Jaycee. He eventually worked in the White House administrations for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
He said education, family and community support of his family and community all started him on his path.
“That’s what my professors taught — service, service, service,” he said. “So I came out of Bluefield State College thinking that I could save the world, and over the years the Camp has helped 4,000-5,000 individuals with specials needs.”
