Native Son Back in City

Herald News
By DENISA R. SUPERVILLE

Pelosi’s chief of staff speaks to kids at Garrett Morgan

PATERSON — Hadit Reyes was curious about one thing: Did John Lawrence, Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, know Barack Obama?

Lawrence, who has worked for the speaker of the House of Representatives for three years, proved that he did. He pulled out the BlackBerry attached to his hip and scrolled through the contents to show a photograph of him at a meeting with the Democratic presidential candidate.

“He’s a great guy,” Lawrence told the 15 or so students around him as they peered into the phone.

Lawrence, 59, who was born and raised in the city, returned on Tuesday to receive an award from the New Jersey Community Development Corp. for his work on federal policies that affect the lives of city residents. Since going to Washington in 1975 to work for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., Lawrence has worked on legislation dealing with special education, foster care, adoption and workplace compensation.

He started working for Pelosi, a Democrat, in 2005 when she was still the House Minority Whip.

On Tuesday, Lawrence spoke to juniors and seniors at Garrett Morgan Academy, a public school on Spruce Street that is operated by NJCDC, the local non-profit that runs educational and social service programs.

Robert Guarasci, NJCDC’s president and CEO, said he hoped that Lawrence’s journey from Paterson to the Capitol, working for the most powerful member of Congress, would inspire the students.

Lawrence, the son of a doctor and nurse, grew up in the Eastside section of the city and attended School 13, School 20, and Eastside High School. He graduated from Eastside in 1966.

“We view him as a success story for the city of Paterson,” Guarasci said. “And we believe that Paterson deserves more success stories like John — people who work hard to obtain an education, dedicate themselves to public service and strive to make the world a better place.”

After talking for about an hour about how the federal government works, the importance of the elections and the challenges facing the country, Lawrence fielded questions from the students. They wanted to know the one thing in the country he would change immediately if he could (health care); why the United States is at war in Iraq (because we made a big mistake); the size of the national debt ($10 trillion); and how he feels about President Bush (looking forward to him being the former president).

Lawrence told students that the world they are growing up in is vastly different from his.

“Most of those big issues that I talked about — whether it’s the war in Iraq, terrorism, the national debt, what we are going to do about our cities, what we are going to do about pollution, what we are going to do about the energy situation, how we are going to modernize our economy — those are issues that are going to affect you and affect you for the remainder of your lives,” he said.

He told them that they were not too young to get involved in politics.

“Throughout this country, there are millions of people your age and, frankly a lot younger, who are working in this election to influence what happens, making phone calls, going door to door, running computer operations, organizing meetings, helping at rallies,” Lawrence said.

Reyes, 17, who wants to be a guidance counselor after graduating from college, said it was great that Lawrence came back to Paterson.

“In Paterson, not everybody goes to college, and not everybody turns into something big like that,” Reyes said. “He has an important job. When you see people like that, you don’t really think of them as being from a place like this. It made a lot of us more open-minded.”