Drama / true story
2011  / 95 minutes
RATING: 8/10

This is different sort of Hallmark – no royalty, no baking of any kind, and not a budding romance to be seen. Beyond the Blackboard  is based on the true story of Stacey Bess and her very first job as a teacher in one of the toughest settings imaginable. Bess was assigned to replace a teacher mid-school year, and was expected to cover Grades 1 through 6 in a public school so new and so neglected it didn’t even have a name. Her students? The children of homeless parents sleeping in their cars, or being put up at a the city shelter in which her classroom was also housed. And on her first day she discovered the expectations for her students were non-existent – there were no text books, no curriculum, and hardly anything but a TV and VCT. She wasn’t expect to teach; only babysit.

But teach is what she was determined to do. And with the help of her very supportive husband, and despite the lack of support from the public school system administration, Bess transformed her classroom, and gave her students a chance at learning what they’d need to know to rise out of the poverty their parents seemed stuck in.

Cautions

There’s two minimal concerns I’ll list, and the first is just for the overall Hallmark gloss given to Stacey Bess’s life. Her husband is incredibly understanding, even as her job takes more and more of her time, and her students turn into an obsession for her. Her own two children are incredibly well-behaved, and her homeless students only give her trouble her very first week – after that they become Bess’s biggest fans, because they know how much she loves them. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop – sometime downturn to happen before the inevitable triumph occurs – but it never really happens. So… very suitable for kids, but they should be told that it couldn’t have been this simple.

The other caution would be that, even as this is a very low tension movie, what tension there is is mostly front-loaded. In the first couple minutes  we see Bess as a small girl in bed as we hear her parents off-screen yelling. Then we jump forward and hear her adult voice narrate that she quit school at 16 because her and her high school sweetheart married young. It isn’t stated, but doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to understand that she got pregnant before marriage. But… that happens, as we explained to our own kids. And kids under 10 probably won’t even make that read.

Conclusion

While it opens with Bess starting her life off in a less than ideal way, that fits well with a story about others who are in less than ideal circumstances. This is fun inspiring story that’s safe for the family. It shows how much one person can impact those around her…. at least if those others around her are interested in being helped.