The faded grandeur of a burned-out neighborhood cinema hall is no match for newer Delhi multiplexes.

It was the end of March, Delhi was heating up after a brief winter, and revolution was in the air. Even the festival program knew it: There is a revolution in the air,” it said. “A great democratic vista of the people’s work is opening up.” Digital video, that most subversive of tape formats, had finally come to India, heralded by the apostles of independent film. And the 2001 Digital Talkies International Film Festival was to be its showcase, its forum, its Mecca. The assembled moviegoers were critical, but ready to escape the tyranny of Bollywood epics, to see new stories told by new authors, to give up, at least temporarily, the dreamy quality of celluloid for the grainy and gritty drama of digital video.

For Delhi’s up-and-coming generation of filmmakers, digital was more than just another film format. Digital, in a word, meant democracy. Consumer digital video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars less than 16mm or 35mm film cameras, use cheap tapes as opposed to costly film stock, and create footage that can be edited on a home computer and easily distributed on DVD or over the Internet. Though criticized by some for its granular, unbeautiful look, digital video was clearly a cost-effective way of shooting, ideal for strapped filmmakers breaking away from Bollywood.

And break away they did. By most measures, Asia’s first-ever digital film festival was a huge success. The sponsorship was generous, the jury internationally acclaimed, and the screenings full. Digital Talkies, the festival organizer, saw two of their own features win awards. The company was ready to pursue distribution full tilt: in theaters, on TV, and via broadband Internet. The shackles that kept Indian film from experimentation, from innovation–from anything not involving an extravagant dance number shifting from Egypt to the Alps with every refrain–were finally being unlocked, and it seemed there was no looking back.

Yet something went wrong. Two years later, digital video’s promised democratization of the Indian film industry has yet to happen. Some filmmakers say the blame lies with Digital Talkies. After the smashing success of its 2001 festival, the company lined up even more films for the following year. But the 2002 festival was postponed to March 2003. Then, abruptly, it was canceled. And the new generation that Digital Talkies had helped inspire–filmmakers who truly believed that digital was the “next generation” of entertainment–suddenly discovered their work no longer had a venue.

Indie filmmakers embrace DV, commercial concerns hold back–the tale is a familiar one. In the United States, critically acclaimed films like Dancer in the Dark, last summer’s The Fast Runner, and this winter’s Personal Velocity (awarded best cinematography at Sundance) have racked up decent profits in art-house box offices. But despite the messianic attempts of George Lucas, who shot and distributed his latest Star Wars film digitally, Hollywood has been slow to bank its celluloid infrastructure on the promise of a digital future. Theaters have been reluctant to invest, scared off by the $100,000-plus price tags of digital projectors. And even digital-friendly chains like Madstone, which planned to open digital theaters nationwide, have ended up sticking with more traditional products in order to stay afloat.

Hollywood, of course, is no Bollywood. India is the world’s largest film producer, releasing over 800 features a year. It boasts a strong industry infrastructure, three billion tickets sold annually, and a proliferation of multiplexes in urban centers. India is also diverse, with 70 percent of the population living in rural or remote areas and over 18 recognized languages. There is no end of new stories to be told. Whether these stories make their way to film, however, is a different matter. The struggle over digital video in India has become a struggle over who gets to tell the stories.

So far, the revolution has stalled. While Hollywood looks for ways to cash in on the U.S. indie craze, the appetite for art-house films in India remains restricted to urban areas and a certain cultural elite. Independent film in India has been around since Satyajit Ray made his famous Apu trilogy in the 1950s, and “parallel cinema” is still supported by the government. But filmmakers in India have yet to convince mainstream audiences, especially the majority living outside the big cities, to try something other than masala, the tried-and-true Mumbai mix of action, family tragedy, and song and dance.

Masala is the mush you’ll find in the 200 features that Bollywood puts out every year. Each costs an average of Ru 50,000,000 ($1 million), lasts around three hours, and allows little room for anything that smacks of originality. Those who can afford Ru 150 ($3) see these films in plush multiplexes that rival any suburban movie theater in America. Alongside imported Hollywood hits, films like Kabhi Khusi, Kabhi Gam (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness) show the same big stars rearranged in different poses. The stadium seats recline, the surround sound embraces, cell phones interrupt, and at intermission, you can even eat nachos.

Yet all is not well in Bollywood these days. The sure-fire formula has fared poorly in recent years. Last year, 90 percent of big releases were box office flops.

So in the summer of 2000, when two twenty-something scions of commercial empires, Pia Singh and Hari Bhartiya, started chatting during a course at New York University, there seemed at least as many reasons to float a digital production and distribution company in India as in America, where similar startups were magnets for venture capital. The two returned to India, teamed up with director Shekhar Kapur (The Four Feathers), and recruited a luminous board of advisors, including Mira Nair, director of the crossover success Monsoon Wedding. By March 2001, with the backing of the goliath India Tobacco Company, they had organized the first Digital Talkies International Film Festival.

Two girls take time out from begging near a multiplex in South Delhi.

‘He’s a policeman. How can he be homosexual?’

Yamini Tiaari, Digital Talkies’ head of production, is still in her twenties, a hipster who trades the traditional Hindi “accha,” the equivalent of “okay,” for a breezy “coolio, coolio.” Ensconced in her office in the back of a yet-to-be resurrected cinema hall in Old Delhi, Tiaari describes the 2001 festival as history in the making. “It was brilliant, a huge huge success. Even the 10 a.m. screenings were full.”

Tiaari’s exuberance is not unwarranted. Of the roughly 175 films submitted to the 2001 festival, 40 percent were Indian. Before plans for the follow-up 2002 festival were scrapped, organizers had already collected 150 entries from India alone, 75 percent created with the Digital Talkies competition in mind.

Yet as early as that first festival, there were signs that digital video might not fare so well in India. Two features–both produced by Digital Talkies and intended afterward for domestic distribution–did not receive the censor’s sanction to be shown.

India’s Central Board of Film Certification tightly controls which domestic films are distributed for public viewing. The board’s definition of obscenity tends to disallow novel and/or realistic portrayals of romantic relationships, while lascivious dance sequences and even rape are easily approved. The latest round of films to be rejected included Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace, which criticizes India’s nuclear weapons program. Most filmmakers don’t bother fighting the censors; Patwardhan’s willingness to wage a costly court battle against the board is an exception.

When the board nixed their features at the last minute, Digital Talkies was in a bind. Divya Drishti, about a quack fortune teller’s involvement in a suburban community’s sexual intrigues, and Urf Professor, a profane flick about a Mumbai hit man, were quickly moved to the British Council’s auditorium, thus temporarily evading Indian law. Though they saved their star projects from getting no play at all, Digital Talkies had to make do with inferior projection and limited seating of 150. Any hopes of future distribution in India were firmly squashed.

Festival organizer Siddarth Kumar was outraged. In his eyes, Indian films were singled out unfairly for censoring while foreign films escaped. “I showed pornography at 9 a.m. that came from Czechoslovakia,” he says. Then there was the board’s hypersensitivity to the portrayal of a gay police officer in Divya Drishti. Fellow organizer Ankur Tewari describes their objection: “He holds a very responsible position in Indian society. He’s a policeman. How can he be homosexual?”

Digital Talkies’ unforeseen brush with censorship wasn’t the only blow to the fledgling company. Though the 2001 festival created a great deal of enthusiasm, it broke even and didn’t yield the profit-making deals the organizers had hoped for. Still, the second annual festival was planned for March 2002. But by the time that date drew nigh, access to broadband Internet (which would have allowed digital films to be beamed to theaters and even viewers at home) was still spotty throughout the country, and India-Pakistan border tensions were discouraging sponsors. Frustrated entrants were postponed for one month, then two, then an entire year for a festival which has yet to materialize. Essentially, Digital Talkies pulled the plug. Critics accuse them of canceling the entire movement in the process.

“‘Go out there and make your film, we’ll help you in every way we can’–that was the premise that Ankur and I tried to market,” says Kumar, who is now running his own production company with Tewari. In the festival program, Digital Talkies promised as much–to “help independent filmmakers tell their stories, and to ensure a pathway for those stories to an audience.” But, today, the company’s stance has changed. “We are not in a position to aid digital filmmakers at this time,” goes the official line. Digital Talkies says it is focusing on producing ads for television on film and Digibeta (a video format used on television), creating an MTV sitcom, and developing a fleet of traditional cinema halls. From Kumar’s perspective, the move is a betrayal. “Instead of a movement for independent filmmakers, DV has become a cheap way for people to produce the same shit they have been producing all their life,” he says. “There’s very little activity left now because the support that Digital Talkies promised was dropped when they realized that there were no immediate returns to be made.”

“Business is business,” says Vijaya Singh, Pia Singh’s twenty-nine-year-old cousin, a former banker who now oversees Digital Talkies’ production house and festival. “We really believe in the concept [of digital video], but maybe we’re a little too early. We had to get from this idealistic platform onto the reality bandwagon.” Those who “don’t see the virtue of morphing” with the times, Singh says, “exhibit a childlike behavioral pattern.” She offers this advice for future filmmakers: “Do what you want to do but don’t be foolish. There is no point wasting money, effort, and aspirations.”

Kumar describes his old group at Digital Talkies as “dukandars,” Hindi for “someone who keeps a shop.” “That’s anathema for an independent filmmaker, he cannot associate himself with someone who is a shopkeeper,” he says. Yet Kumar is no impractical idealist. He wouldn’t mind being a dukandar himself, so long as he can devote himself to independent rather than mainstream pursuits–sort of like an Indian Harvey Weinstein.

In spite of all that’s happened, Kumar still sees profit in DV. “You could have done the festival a second year with other sponsors for half the cost because now you had expertise. You might have made some money if you took that content and represented it and made deals abroad to sell it, especially in Europe.” He points to the Karachi International Film Festival as an example of what can be accomplished with fewer resources and greater determination. “It’s not that there is less censorship in Pakistan, it’s just that those people have proved themselves to be a more committed bunch than us. They started [their] festival in 2001, nine months after ours, and they managed to do it a second time. That’s key in a festival.”

Other filmmakers have fewer regrets. Sidarth Srinivasnan, director of the banned film Divya Drishti, doesn’t put much stock in digital video changing the playing field. “Whatever revolutionary change is going to happen,” he says, “is going to come from the commercial arena.” Though DV helped him break into the industry with his first feature, Srinivasnan questions the benefit of setting the masses loose with the technology. “If thousands of people who harbored dreams of making movies were able to make them on DV, you’d have loads of shit,” he says. “The thing with 35mm is, it automatically distinguishes the boys from the men.”

Lining up for a Bollywood blockbuster outside a classic cinema hall.

Telling a different story

Though chastened, the prophets of digital video have not yet given up on India. Twenty-seven-year-old grassroots activist Venkatesh Veeraraghavan is one of the true believers. The founder of a cooperative of like-minded digital producers, he is campaigning to expand audio-visual curriculum offerings in schools and is working on an experimental film from footage shot in a North Delhi slum.

Veeraraghavan can often be found in front of his Macintosh computer, “the finest of species,” in an understatedly cool South Delhi studio that doubles as his living quarters. Black-and-white track-lit portraits of Gandhi, Snoop Doggy Dog, and Courtney Love look on as his hands orchestrate the techno score he has created to accompany shots of poor and beautiful children celebrating Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.

The frames are mesmerizing, granting access to domestic scenes that as yet have no place on the screens of Indian theaters: a six-year-old cleaning a spoon with sand, two eight-year-old girls smiling uncertainly at the intrusion of a camera, a bold boy twisting the lens 180 degrees so he can watch himself grimacing into the viewfinder. Veeraraghavan’s children belong to a laboring community from Uttar Pradesh that relocated to Delhi for work. His camera follows them closely, jerking frequently, at one point letting loose in an ebullient spin. Pinks and greens stand out, giving the shots a painted quality. As the sun goes down and the children light candles and sparklers, the limitations of natural light evoke memory, emulating the home footage of a childhood birthday party.

Veeraraghavan doesn’t own the Sony Digital 8 he uses to shoot the children. He borrows a friend’s camera on the weekends, then spends the rest of the week editing the film on his Mac. It took two months for his subjects to get used to a stranger, but it helped that he had no dollies, no lights, no crew to get in the way–just a camera the size of a shoebox.

While Verraraghavan toils away on his experimental film, other digital filmmakers have settled for now on less ambitious uses for their high technology. The more market-minded duo of Kumar and Tewari are using digital video to shoot documentary footage that they hope to sell in Europe. Their production company, Framework, is banking on hopes that Indian culture will become the latest exotic fashion in countries like Sweden, where Tewari believes “Asia is the flavor of the next three seasons.” Even Digital Talkies insists it hasn’t left the digital-video market just yet. Vijaya Singh talks about making space on the schedule for a “Digital Film Month” at one of their local theaters, with donated or sponsored equipment.

The sad truth is, even if there were digital theaters in India, there wouldn’t be enough digital content to show. Yet developing that content seems impossible without access to audiences. Resolving this chicken-and-egg scenario may take several years. But India has several things working in its favor: a growing film audience, a relatively light (and thus easily replaced) investment in standard projectors and other traditional technology, a well-established and skilled filmmaking industry, a large information technology sector, and the potential for establishing broadband networks that could bring digital video into every Indian home.

What happens next may depend on the fate of Let’s Talk. By director Ram Madhvani, it’s the first Indian movie to be shot on DV, transferred to film, and distributed to domestic audiences. The novel story, with only two rooms and two characters, portrays a young woman struggling to inform her husband that he is not the father of her baby. Let’s Talk was released in December to a limited number of cinemas. Will it win over audiences used to panoramic song-and-dance numbers? Bollywood will be watching.

Story Index

CONTRIBUTORS >

The writer
Nicole Leistikow, Inthefray.com News Editor

ORGANIZATIONS >

Catalyst Fusion Lab
Delhi-based cooperative of digital filmmakers.
URL: http://www.catalystfusionlab.org

Digital Talkies
URL: http://www.digitaltalkies.com

Karachi International Film Festival
URL: http://www.karafilmfest.com/home.htm

Madstone Theaters
Site of the upscale, art-house U.S. theater chain.
URL: http://www.madstonetheaters.com

National Film Development Corporation
The Mumbai-based Indian government agency that subsidizes and supports independent film.
URL: http://www.nfdcindia.com

PEOPLE >

Satyajit Ray biography
A short bio of Ray, arguably India’s best-known independent filmmaker.
URL: http://www.upperstall.com/people/satyajitray.html

TOPICS > BOLLYWOOD >

“Bollywood”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
URL: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood

TOPICS > DIGITAL VIDEO >

Digital Cinema Magazine
Los Angeles-based magazine of the digital video industry.
URL: http://www.uemedia.com/CPC/digitalcinemamag

Dogme95
A Danish collective of film directors who typically shoot on consumer DV cameras.
URL: http://www.dogme95.dk

“India’s First DV Film Deserves Kudos”
By Deepa Gumaste | Rediff Movies | November 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002/nov/26mami.htm

Let’s Talk
Official site of Ram Madhvani’s latest digital film.
URL: http://www.letstalkmovie.com

“Methods: Film or Video”
Unhollywood Guide to Movie Making
URL: http://unhollywood.com/film-vid.htm

“

Nicole Leistikow

“So where’s Marcus going to school?” Since Sara S. first enrolled her then two-year-old son at Bolton Hill Nursery in Baltimore, the question has become more and more frequent. (The pressure has grown so uncomfortable, in fact, that Marcus and Sara are not their real names.) Now that Marcus is turning five and starting kindergarten in the fall, Sara is starting to avoid the neighbors and acquaintances who broach the subject at nearly every opportunity. To Sara, the judgment in their words and tone is explicit: “It doesn’t imply, it says, these people are going to judge us by the decision we make.”

Sara’s situation isn’t as familiar as it sounds. She’s not just another hyper-competitive urban mother whose child’s future will be plunged into non-Ivy League darkness if not accepted into the perfect prestige kindergarten. The pressure on Sara is of an entirely different nature — a vocal group of parents in the middle-class Bolton Hill neighborhood is encouraging her to enroll Marcus in an experimental public school in one of the nation’s most maligned school systems.

If Baltimore City Public Schools was a brand name, its image would require a massive reinvention. Among many middle-class parents in the city and its suburbs, the mere mention of BCPS evokes incompetence, inefficiency, academic stagnation, and physical peril. Like many cities across the country, Baltimore is experimenting with new ways to restore faith in its schools. Though Maryland is not among the thirty-plus states that have passed legislation allowing charter schools, it did approve the New Schools Initiative in 1995. The nine public schools created under this mandate, like charter schools, have more flexibility in curriculum development and student and staff selection, and are run by outside operators contracted by the school board.

Hardly any of the young professionals buying bargain houses in Baltimore want their children to go to their local public school. This is no less true in Bolton Hill, a gay and arts-friendly neighborhood of nineteenth-century brick townhouses on Baltimore’s predominantly black and poor west side, than in less progressive parts of the city. The idealistic dream of becoming part of a renaissance and moving back to a city where “white flight” has not yet slowed, stalls out on the subject of education. It remains to be seen whether Baltimore’s New Initiative Schools will be able to sell themselves to these middle-class parents, whose needs have historically been met by the city and county’s numerous private schools. And alternative public schools still need to address the generations-old problems of race and class that still divide some parts of Baltimore into a black/white city.

In Bolton Hill, a growing group of parents are deciding whether to return to the public school system. Midtown Academy, a New Initiative School, is gaining converts from the ranks of Bolton Hill Nursery, a popular daycare and pre-kindergarten school. Besides Midtown, there are two other options: the traditionally public Mount Royal Elementary and a host of private schools anywhere from fifteen to ninety minutes away. For Bolton Hill parents, shopping for schools before their child turns five is an agonizing process complicated by a wide variety of practical concerns, moral and political values, and social aspirations. The stakes are high, sometimes pitting dearly held convictions about the value of public school in a democracy against the intense fear of not doing right by a child. One’s choice is closely monitored in this small community, and judged accordingly.

Pounding the pavement

Much of the pressure on Sara S. and other parents comes from Bolton Hill resident John Lau. The ringleader of a campaign to fill the ten kindergarten slots reserved for Bolton Hill kids at Midtown Academy, John lives with wife Iris and daughter Hannah just a few blocks away from both Sara and Bolton Hill Nursery. The upright piano and violin in the corner of their small living room attest to their interest in playing chamber music with friends. Hannah, one of Marcus’s classmates at the Nursery, has her own little desk in the dining room, on which her current projects are neatly organized.

Till now, Bolton Hill has scorned Midtown, with most of the slots going to residents of Reservoir Hill, a blacker, poorer neighborhood whose children mostly attend Mount Royal, a larger K-8 school of 850 students. (The other ten slots of Midtown’s twenty-person incoming class are reserved for Reservoir Hill; any remaining open spaces are filled by lottery.) Midtown is much newer and smaller that Mount Royal, with only one class in each grade. Since it opened in 1997 with grades kindergarten through third, the school has added one grade a year, and will offer eighth grade starting in the fall. John guesses that the upper grades “are probably 90 percent African American, the lower grades probably 70 percent,” and that kindergarten this fall “could be up to 50-50” if the mostly white parents in Bolton Hill follow through on their promises to enroll their kids. “The school’s trying to diversify, but no one wants to be the first,” he says.

John, who first experienced American public schooling when he immigrated to Tennessee from China at age fourteen, is determined to change Bolton Hill’s under-utilization of Midtown. It was he who convinced Iris, who came to America from China only when she was ready to get her MBA, that public school could be valuable. “I think a little adversity is good for kids,” he explains. “I would like for Hannah to be able to see that there are people struggling, that life is not just everything given to you, and appreciate what she has, and that she has to work for it.” He also thinks Bolton Hill’s kids and their well-educated, well-off parents are the key to the school’s success. “I would say that maybe half of the reason [we’re sending Hannah there] is because…we want to see the school succeed.”

The dream of a neighborhood school

John’s optimism seems shared at Midtown Academy itself. Principal Diane Isle is stern as she passes a few stragglers stepping out of line on their way to art class, but her overall effect is that of a determined and enthusiastic cheerleader. Her purple headband, blue velour jumpsuit, and bouncy blond hair don’t hurt either. She shows off her small building proudly. An art room displays models of Grecian pottery that students are attempting to replicate. An English room sports the sign “The Biggest Sin in Writing is to Be Boring!” Most classrooms have at least two adults, twenty-two or fewer kids, and a surprising amount of one-on-one instruction. Part of the explanation is that Midtown has excellent relationships with teacher training programs in the city and benefits from a core of interns. Isle actively courts Bolton Hill parents and knows that a high teacher-to-pupil ratio is a strong selling point. And Midtown, like all schools in Baltimore, is focused on raising its Maryland State Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) scores. This year the school did well, averaging 41.9 (the goal is an average score of 70 out of 100), nearly twice the average for the rest of Baltimore City’s public schools.

Midtown’s ninety-hour-per-year parent volunteer requirement also virtually ensures that high-powered parents will be directly involved in maintaining the school. At the same time, this requirement may put pressure on poorer, less available families to either shape up or ship out. But for now, the main problem is a lack of space. They’ve been efficient with what they have — their physical education program, for example, is focused around Tae Kwon Do taught in the cafeteria. However they desperately want to expand and are being hampered by some resistance in the neighborhood, primarily from nearby residents who don’t appreciate the sounds of children getting out of school.

But for John, a neighborhood school — noise and all — complements his vision of an ideal city life. He has been in Bolton Hill for six years and describes it as “real community that you can’t find anywhere else.” He imagines the suburbs as a place where “you just drive up and your garage door opens, you pull your car in and the garage door closes, the TV turns on and that’s the end of the day.” So John carries out his campaign, whether at the local swimming club or at the Hidden Bean, the local corner coffee shop. Because there are only ten slots, assigned by lottery, John jokes about being too successful in his efforts to convince other Bolton Hill parents to give Midtown a try. “It’s ironic that we’re now thinking that maybe we should apply to private schools as a back up,” he says, but finishes with a genuine “but that’s good!”

Although Mount Royal is also a neighborhood school only two blocks away from the Lau family, they aren’t considering the predominantly black school, not even as a back up. If Hannah’s “the only person of only one race then she may not feel too comfortable,” says John. “Just to be honest.”

Opting out of the ‘experiment’

WHERE TO NEXT? While their parents contemplate the next step, students get to work at Bolton Hill Nursery school. (Nicole Leistikow)

Sara S. has a smiling brown face and doesn’t hesitate to voice her opinions. An attorney for the state of Maryland, she calls herself “an older mom” at age forty-six, is well-established in her career, and is dedicated to driving Marcus to extracurricular activities such as gymnastics (though she wishes Marcus’s dad would do some of the chauffeuring as well). Her kitchen has been taken over by Marcus, who is building extensive highways for his Hot Wheels out of masking tape. Both the kitchen and the dining room feature elaborate collections of his artwork, toys, and projects. There is a comfortable messiness about the place, a feeling that one could begin a special project, and others would respect it, even if it got in the way, as much as practicality allowed.

In a recent conference with Marcus’s teacher at Bolton Hill Nursery, Sara learned that her son sometimes “refuses to speak in circle time,” an evaluation that has furthered her resolve to consider a private school. “[Marcus] is not pushy,” she explains, “so if someone gets in front of him, most of the time that person can get in front of him.” She was frustrated watching one of his Saturday gymnastics classes. “My kid was constantly overlooked in a class of eleven because he’s quiet and no trouble,” she says, citing “inexperienced teachers” who spent all their time wrangling ill-behaved children back into line. Marcus, Sara says, missed one turn on the rings, one turn on the trampoline, and two turns doing somersaults.

She believes that the small class size and higher teacher retention rate of a private school will be best for her son’s personality, and she seems to relish having the option of sending her son to prestigious McDonogh, the $14,000-a-year private school that’s their number one choice. McDonogh’s campus emulates a university’s, with a separate library and an indoor swimming pool. Sara’s own educational experience was “in an insolated, lower middle-class African American environment. Up until the time I was a teenager I don’t think I ever had, except for in youth orchestra, any regular contact outside of the black community in D.C.” She’s glad Marcus is growing up in a more diverse, more “realistic” setting.

Midtown Academy is Marcus’s parents’ number three choice, after the private Grace and St. Peter’s. Sara was insulted when a white colleague, who had struggled to send her own kids to private Roland Park Country Day, advised her to check out Midtown. Seeing her associate’s suggestion “as some kind of classist-slash-racist statement,” she resented the assumption that because she is black, she doesn’t have the resources to send Marcus to a private school. “She has two girls that she had to raise by herself, but she struggled to send them to a private school,” says Sara of her co-worker. “She stretched it, but I should just settle for this public school? She’s never been and she knows nothing about it, except for what she’s read.” The ability to consider a private school signifies an important advantage to Sara, especially in this city. Even if Midtown were “the number one [public] school in Baltimore City,” she says, “I still would have concerns and still would consider sending him somewhere that I thought he’d be a little bit more protected.”

Sara echoes the refrain of many parents when she says, “I don’t want to experiment with my child.” Though she is in favor of public schooling in general, and although Midtown offers many advantages that Mount Royal does not, it hasn’t been around long enough for Sara to see it as reliable. And she resents pressure from people in the neighborhood “who feel this experiment is the right thing to do, supporting the public school system, and if you don’t do that, you’re doing something that is not the right thing to do, as in wrong, as in politically incorrect and maybe morally also.”

Although Sara has a friend in the school system who told her not to overlook Mount Royal because of its strong reputation and high standardized test scores, she did not seriously consider it for Marcus. She echoes the sentiments of many Bolton Hillers when she says, “I have seen the kids coming back and forth from Mount Royal and I haven’t been particularly impressed with their behavior in public.” Because of resident complaints that the students litter and are rowdy, the school developed a “character education program” and stationed volunteers at problem intersections to supervise children’s behavior on their way to and from school. Despite these efforts, relations with the neighborhood remain somewhat strained.

The school on the wrong side of the street

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD”: Students on their way to Mount Royal Elementary in Bolton Hill, a Baltimore neighborhood. (Nicole Leistikow)

Few Bolton Hill parents bring up the topic of Mount Royal voluntarily, or can boast of having actually set foot inside the building. And though the school is only a block away from Midtown, one woman located Mount Royal “on the other side of the neighborhood.” It may have been a slip of the tongue, but others also exaggerate the geographic distance of the school. Indeed, there is a cultural and class distance between Bolton Hill and Mount Royal, and that may be what many in the neighborhood unconsciously perceive.

Mount Royal principal Mark Frankel actually isn’t much interested in why Bolton Hill parents, as a rule of thumb, do not even consider Mount Royal as an option. Frankel, in his early fifties, is short and dapper, and looks more like a winning lawyer in his suit and glasses than an elementary school principal. His humor and charm serve him well, because he doesn’t mince words. He is blunt in his surmises about Bolton Hill’s lack of interest in Mount Royal, which he says is 99.8 percent African American. “I think parents want their kids to be with children like them,” he says. “Certain schools are better calling cards.” In Frankel’s ideal world, the main determinant in school choice should be high standards.

And Mount Royal’s high standards have delivered. The school performs in the top 5 percent of schools receiving Title 1 funds (federal monies for disadvantaged institutions). Though 80 percent of its students receiving free or reduced lunch, the school’s MSPAP scores averaged 38.8 this year and its fifth graders typically score first in the state in math. Classes sizes are eighteen and under in the lower school, and twenty-five in grades six through eight. Linda Eberhart, Baltimore City’s teacher of the year, teaches at Mount Royal and touts the school at every public appearance. And while Frankel’s school has had positive coverage on CNN and NBC, Bolton Hillers still aren’t convinced that there’s a jewel hiding in their midst.

But the stigma of being part of BCPS seems impossible to overcome. Parents like Sara, for example, cite concerns about violence at the school. In fact, Frankel had to fight to retain the school police officer — the expense was deemed unnecessary because no incidents had ever been reported. “We don’t market the school,” says Frankel of Bolton Hill. His decision not to focus on recruiting middle-class parents suggests he sees the effort as a losing battle.

Why don’t Bolton Hill parents, who are enthusiastic about public schooling, see Mount Royal as a brand they can trust? Or even a brand they want to know more about? Cindy Patak, who sent two daughters to Mount Royal and now has one at Midtown, suggests possible answers.

What goes unsaid

Cindy is a youthful-looking city planner in her early forties, with spiky hair and black leather jacket. Over coffee at the Hidden Bean, Cindy sighs in frustration. “I know a lot of people in Bolton Hill couldn’t believe I ever sent my kids to Mount Royal,” she says. “I’m just tired of hearing the same response or lack of response — they stutter and they look to find words that are acceptable. They kind of lament about education in the city of Baltimore as a whole.”

Cindy actually lives outside of Bolton Hill in Union Square, a small enclave of middle-class families situated around a green in SoWeBo (southwest Baltimore), which is otherwise one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. When she moved there in 1988, Mount Royal was accepting students outside its “zone” to its Gifted and Talented Program (since disbanded). She is satisfied with the education her two daughters, Eleina and Lela, received there, though by the time Lela graduated from eighth grade the school was experiencing some difficulties.

Cindy is adamant about her daughters’ right to a free public education, and did consider Mount Royal once again for her youngest daughter. But by that time, getting in from outside the neighborhood was virtually impossible. She is glad that seven-year-old Alicia is in second grade at Midtown, which may not be admitting kids outside the neighborhood this year if Bolton Hill fills up its ten slots. Although Bolton Hill’s previous reluctance to try Midtown may have benefited Alicia, Cindy is critical about neighborhood attitudes. “A lot of parents from Bolton Hill Nursery did not send their kids to Midtown, and while they used a lot of other words for it, I think a lot did have to do with race,” she says. “Everyone talked about how great [the school] was, and what a great idea,” but when it came down to it, only two children followed Alicia to Midtown from nursery school.

Yet Cindy, who is white, is more comfortable with Alicia, whose father is African American, at the more diverse Midtown. She feels Lela and Eleina, who are half Moroccan, may have suffered from an attitude at Mount Royal, typical in Baltimore, that insists on dividing people into black and white categories that don’t always apply. Midtown is more diverse, more bi-racial, and more open. This openness may be what is changing the minds of so many parents in Bolton Hill — parents who have been skittish about choosing a predominately black school for their children — for the first time this year. Midtown offers a convenient compromise.

A new year, a new class, a New School

Next fall, a new kindergarten class will enter Midtown Academy. And even if Bolton Hillers renege on their promises to attend, at least Midtown was in the running. Mount Royal was not. Despite high test scores, a strong reputation, and a principal who excels in obtaining resources, it is seen by many as simply a poor black school — and therefore, quite simply, not a choice. Unfazed, Mark Frankel is focused on serving his majority poor, majority black children and their parents. He does not intend to address middle-class fears, or to change his school’s image to something more attractive to Bolton Hill parents.

Midtown’s success in shaping itself into something more alternative and fashionable is a result of its ability to distinguish and distance itself from traditional public schools like Mount Royal — racially, culturally, and academically. Midtown Academy shows that middle-class parents will come back to the public school system, but only if courted appropriately. In that sense, the experiment has been a success. But for other public schools, it seems, all the work in the world may not change the minds of the middle class.

In the meantime, acceptance letters were mailed out last week. At least twelve Bolton Hill families — a record number — applied to Midtown Academy. For the first time in its history, the school’s Bolton Hill slots are filled, and some families had to be turned down. John Lau describes the competition this year as a “180 degree turn” from last year, when only two Bolton Hill kids enrolled. Hannah Lau was accepted, and her father will find out in the fall if his vision of a neighborhood school is shared.”

Nicole Leistikow