Aisha Demby tutors a student in English Thursday during the summer remedial program at Kings Community Center. (C. Todd ShermanThe Vicksburg Post)

[06/20/03] It wasn’t for her, Aisha Demby thought.

She didn’t see herself in the “family business” of education.

“I guess because I didn’t want to deal with other people’s kids who didn’t behave,” she said.

But that’s where she is now as a tutor in a remedial program at Kings Community Center and where she will be in August as a ninth-grade teacher at Vicksburg High School.

It was a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer that changed her mind, the 23-year-old said. She tutored first- through fourth-graders at Dana Road Elementary School, and she saw what her family had seen for years.

“You feel good at the end of the day when one child understands what you’ve been trying to get them to understand,” she said.

Demby graduated from high school in Atlanta and from Alcorn State University where there’s a Demby Hall named for her great-grandfather with an English degree in May 2001. She began pursuing a master’s in business administration three months later. But she needed to work, so she took a job as a tutor through AmeriCorps for the Vicksburg Warren School District. Her work began at Grove Street, where she tutored in a remedial learning program. From there, she moved to Dana Road in the fall.

“Being around kids and seeing the impact I made and other teachers made, and the feeling I got when a child understood a certain concept” helped cement her decision.

Demby’s grandfather, William Demby Jr., was a football coach at Rosa A. Temple for two years. Her grandmother Mary Prater Demby also taught at Temple for two years before she moved to teach in the Compton, Calif., Unified School District.

Aisha Demby was reared by her great-aunt and uncle, Dr. Allene and retired Army Maj. John Gayles, also educators.

John Gayles taught in Chicago Public Schools before retiring as the supervisor of that district’s ROTC program. Allene Gayles plied her trade for 36 years in Corinth, at the former Hinds County Agriculture High School, a community college near Chicago and at Chicago State University.

“She has my full support,” Allene Gayles said. “I told her it’s a good job if you’re looking for rewards and not the money.

“I think she’s going to be a good teacher,” she said. “I think, for one thing, she’s very caring, and I think that’s what we need in schools.”

As a tutor this summer for remedial programs at Grove Street and at Kings Community Center, Demby said her job can be difficult.

“Some of them don’t want to learn,” she said. “They come to me because they have to be tutored.”

Demby said she finds herself telling students the same thing teachers and professors told her not long ago.

“The day you stop learning, I feel like, is the day you die,” she said. “Life is just a learning process.”

And that’s the philosophy she has for herself she hopes to return to school someday to pursue her original career goal, becoming an attorney.