A St. Paul educator discovers secret to unlocking student 'superpowers'

On a recent summer afternoon in St. Paul's historic Rondo neighborhood, Mercedes Yarbrough — "Mizz Mercedez" to her students — passed out magazines to her comic book class.

A giant cartoon of Sonic the Hedgehog smiled down at the soon-to-be fourth through sixth graders. Mercedes, who drew the character in dry-erase marker, added the speech bubble, "Don't worry, be happy."

(Mercedes says she prefers to go by her first name, as her last name was handed down from the family that enslaved hers generations ago.)

In her comic book class that day, her apparel, too, showcased her cartoon skills: Her T-shirt featured the cover of her latest Black history comic book. Today's activity is vision boards, she explained to the class.

"You're going to look around and look for pictures that symbolize the goals that you guys wrote down," Mercedes said.

She pointed to a collage a previous student created. "I loved how creative she was with the different colors when she was writing," she said. "She even wrote her name in a cool, creative way."

She then listed the student's goals: Become a baker, read a new book, improve at gymnastics. "And then she wants to invent a new candy, so I thought that was really cool," Mercedes added.

"I like to work on things that focus on helping them with their future," she said. "I just want to inspire this generation of dreams and teach them how to dream. Because a lot of them don't know how right now."

Mercedes, 32, has plenty of dreams of her own. Over the summer, she teaches at Freedom School, a free program through St. Paul Public Schools with roots in the civil rights movement. As the school year starts up again, she'll go back to work as an intervention specialist at the district's Jie Ming Mandarin Immersion Academy.

But she's also a cartoonist, a video-game designer, a social media producer, a sneakerhead, and a mother of four boys. Her goal is to make learning fun for kids. That means creating a cartoon on seeing the bright side of a difficult situation through "magic glasses" and social media videos spotlighting students' talents.

This year, Mercedes has published two Black history comic books, filled with fun facts about the past and Black entrepreneurs of the present. One of her animated creations is "Black Girl Magic," a "Cinderella"-like tale about building self-acceptance and confidence.

She got her start in education young. Really young. She rode the bus to Central High School as a baby with her 15-year-old mother. As her mom completed her high school education, Mercedes attended a daycare inside the school.

She instilled the value of education in Mercedes from the outset. "She says school saved her life," Mercedes said.

Mercedes's mother, Naomi Taylor, went on to earn a doctorate in education, and became a teacher herself. She's now the director of intercultural life at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, one of Minnesota's most elite private schools.

Taylor recalled that Mercedes was a stubborn, humorous child who loved sports and drawing. She showed her creativity from a young age.

Once she got to junior high, though, school became less fun. Mercedes, who has Black, white and Indigenous heritage, recalls she was often the only brown girl in her advanced classes.

"I did not feel like I belonged," she said.

She left college after she got pregnant with her first son. Taylor, then a professor at Hamline University, encouraged Mercedes to apply for a position with the Minnesota Reading Corps.

"I started to get confidence as a teacher," Mercedes said.

In the fall of 2013, she became a special education teaching assistant for fifth grade. Many of her students had been diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders — a label disproportionately given to Black and American Indian students in Minnesota.

"That fifth-grade group probably got 30% of what they were supposed to learn that year because of behavior distractions," Mercedes said.

But as Mercedes got to know her students, she started to understand the root causes of their behavioral challenges. All of the students labeled with an emotional or behavioral disorder faced serious problems in their home lives: a parent in jail or coping with addiction. Many of her students had fallen into the foster care system.

Mercedes spent eight years in classrooms in St. Paul and Spring Lake Park before starting at Jie Ming in the fall of 2020.

She took her cartooning and entrepreneurship talents to the education field. She wrote an animated cartoon called "Black Girl Magic," about a Black girl learning to be confident in her hair and skin. Another cartoon, "The Magic Glasses," shows a young girl looking at her neighborhood following the George Floyd uprising. Through her magic glasses, she can see a more positive future.

She uses the cartoon as an educational tool, encouraging students to draw comics about things in their communities that they can change.

"When you have confidence, that's a superpower: You can do whatever you put your mind to," Mercedes said. That's what she teaches her students: "They are superheroes with superpowers."