A good haircut can be transformational. For the young boys who spend their evenings at O’Neil’s Barber and Beauty Shop the first Monday of each month, each haircut yields more than just a style change.
Those evenings the owner of O’Neil’s, 36-year-old O’Neil Curtis, opens his doors on his day off as part of Line 4 Line, a literacy and arts education program connecting underserved two to 13-year-old boys with male role models.
The program, founded in 2014 as a subsection of the LSU Museum of Art’s Neighborhood Arts Project, is now an independent nonprofit operated by Curtis. The organization developed when Curtis and then-Museum of Art education curator Lucy Perera realized students in underserved Baton Rouge communities were performing below average in reading.
Perera and the Museum of Art had already formed relationships with the community through NAP and recognized there was an opportunity to further serve, said Museum of Art communications coordinator Brandi Simmons. Perera based the program on popular Barbershop Literacy Project events across the country and a partnership was born, she said.
The program exploded in popularity quickly after the inaugural event.
At each event, boys are offered a free haircut, during which they chat with Curtis and three or four of his barbers who provide mentorship to the children. While talking, they’ll also read a book to build their reading comprehension and pronunciation skills.
Before and after the haircut, the boys enjoy catered snacks, play basketball outside O’Neil’s shop and participate in art projects with volunteers from the Museum of Art, Curtis said.
Reading is a foundational subject and sets kids up for success in other areas. When they’re performing well in reading, it makes it easier for the other subjects to fall in line, he said.
Curtis said his goal is to make reading a fun experience and dispel ideas that intellectual growth isn’t cool.
“That’s the problem kids are having today. When they’re young nobody wants to be labelled as smart. Everybody wants to hide that, so we try to make it fun for them. It’s all right to be smart. It’s all right to take honors classes and challenge yourself,” Curtis said.
To increase the boys’ connection to the readings, the program focuses on books that feature African-American history and African-American characters, Simmons said. The theme of representation and timeliness also carries into the art projects the Museum selects, which typically reflect things happening in the community or at the museum, she said.
Arts education, like reading, is a tool that helps children bridge the gap between different subjects, said Museum of Art education curator Rebecca Franzella. Art helps children recognize relationships between the past and present, develop empathy and constructively channel their emotions, she said.
“Art can help them see that the world is much bigger than anything they might be struggling with in their lives,” Franzella said.
Using art to serve the community is a core tenant of the museum’s mission. Making the children comfortable both with art and the museum opens them to more resources in the future and increases their success in school, Simmons said.
Oftentimes the best way to offer this service is to meet the community members where they are, she said. Museums can have a reputation for being stuffy and elitist, but the Museum of Art’s goal is to have more community involvement with the museum and its future.
Though the museum belongs to the community, visiting the downtown location can either be unachievable or intimidating. Going into the community to discuss and make art helps break down barriers and dispel misgivings about art, Simmons said.
When the University and its various branches come into the neighborhood, the children take note, Curtis said.
“LSU plays a big part in the city, just like Southern,” he said. “My big thing is when everybody works together we can make things happen. We don’t have to be divided by this school and that school. [The children] think LSU won’t come in the minority neighborhoods or something like that, but we can work all together for one cause.”
For Curtis, there’s no better cause than helping the neighborhood children. He said it feels like a calling and children have always taken to him naturally.
He uses his natural rapport with the area children to get them to open up about their grades, behavioral problems in school and other things they’re struggling with. Sometimes they open up to Curtis when they won’t talk to their parents, he said.
He often receives calls from parents asking him to set their children straight when their grades are sliding. Having a successful male mentor outside of their immediate family adds weight to directives to work hard in school and stay out of trouble, especially for children in single-parent households, he said.
Curtis said he wants to expand the program’s reach to serve more area children.
In 2016, Curtis and several of his barbers broadened the program to include visits to East Baton Rouge elementary schools. The groups goes zip code by zip code and selects schools with low reading scores, setting up a portable barber shop in the auditorium with free haircuts and books once a month, he said.
His next plan involves taking the program into more barber shops. It’s a tricky business, because not everyone is naturally good with children and you
need men who are enthusiastic and invested for the long haul. Curtis said he’s talking with two childhood friends who share his vision and own barber shops in the city, and hopes to use donations to the nonprofit to expand to their locations soon.
Finally, he wants to expand the nonprofit to include programming for young girls. Curtis said his 10-year-old daughter, O’Nya, wants to participate and he wants to provide other girls like her opportunities to achieve better literacy skills.
It’s funny, he said, because his journey with literacy and the University began when he enrolled O’Nya in University reading programs as a toddler. Now it’s like they’ve come full circle since then.
“I guess it was just meant for me to do this,” Curtis said.
