| 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." Pounding the pavement The dream of a neighborhood school Opting out of the "experiment" The school on the wrong side of the street |