Where to next? While their parents contemplate the next step, students get to work at Bolton Hill Nursery school. (Nicole Leistikow)
Opting out of the "experiment"
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 dream of a neighborhood school
Opting out of the "experiment"
The school on the wrong side of the street