After Capitol Visit, Teen Returns to S.C.with National News Media in Her Wake

February 26, 2009

COLUMBIA, SC – February 25, 2009 – The effect was immediate.  As soon as she walked into Washington’s Reagan National Airport today, South Carolina teenager Ty’Sheoma Bethea started drawing stares and comments: That’s her!  That’s her!  The same thing happened two hours later when she walked through Columbia Metro Airport after the short flight home.

Yesterday the 14-year-old was an unassuming student at J.V. Martin High School in Dillon District 2.  But after being spotlighted last night in President Barack Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, she become an instant celebrity with requests to appear on national TV talk shows.

Ty’Sheoma was invited to join the First Family for the address to Congress after she sent a letter to Washington seeking help for her school, which is located in South Carolina’s rural Corridor of Shame.  Her letter – written on a computer at the Dillon public library – came after the President mentioned J.V. Martin in his first press conference earlier this month as a symbol of inadequate schools that would be helped by the federal economic stimulus plan.

On Tuesday night, Ty’Sheoma and her mother, Dina, sat with First Lady Michelle Obama during the president’s address.  Near the end of the speech, the president pointed her out in the gallery.

I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina – a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom, Obama told House and Senate members.  She has been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this room.  She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. 

The letter asks us for help, and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world.  We are not quitters.’

Today Ty’Sheoma appeared on ABC’s Good Morning, America in a taped interview from Washington.  South Carolina TV crews met her at Columbia Metro Airport upon her return, and other interviews followed with CNN, Inside Edition and the CBS Evening News. 

Back home in Dillon, students at J.V. Martin welcomed her home during an afternoon assembly at the school that also drew crowds of news reporters.