Charting a New Course
Roxbury Prep Redefines Urban Mission
By Hudson Sangree
Pacing the halls of his domain, Dean of Student Services Keith Motley pokes
his head into classrooms, huddles with top administrators, and passes out
warm greetings to students and instructors. "How you doin' today?"
he asks, squeezing shoulders, shaking hands. It's a typical day for Motley,
a towering man with a passion for urban education, except that the institution
in question is not Northeastern. It is the Roxbury Preparatory Charter
School, an innovative new venture for which Motley is chairman of the board.
The school's mission: to raise the aspirations of urban youth and prepare
them for college. "There is a mistaken assumption that you have to
lower your expectations for disadvantaged kids," says Motley, who
himself grew up as one of five children in a single-parent household in
Pittsburgh. "At Roxbury Prep, we do the opposite. We put standards
in front of the students that we are then going to help them achieve."
Situated near the crest of Mission Hill, a short ride on the E Line
from Northeastern, Roxbury Prep occupies a third-floor wing of the Edgar
Benjamin Healthcare Center, a nursing home. It is an unusual place for
eighty sixth-graders to attend classes, but like most other Massachusetts
charter schools, Roxbury Prep could not afford to be choosy in selecting
its site. Although largely financed by the state, charter schools must
often pay for their own facilities, and some have found economical homes
in such unlikely locations as a Cape Cod strip mall, a downtown Boston
high-rise, and a former Elks Lodge in Marblehead.
At Roxbury Prep, the classrooms and offices are spaced along a corridor
that is closed off from the rest of the nursing home. The school's portion
of the building, newly renovated, is bright and airy, with sky-blue carpeting,
modern furniture, and dozens of new computers. The students complement
their surroundings. Girls and boys alike are smartly dressed in blue oxford
shirts and khaki pants, the boys wearing ties.
Roxbury Prep's academic program is challenging. Classes are small, with
no more than twenty students per classroom. The school day is long. Academic
courses begin at 7:45 a.m., and afternoon "enrichment" activities,
such as designing Internet sites or learning Tae Kwon Do, last until 4:15.
Students then take home one to two hours of homework each night.
"We treat our kids just like any excellent private or suburban
school would," says Evan Rudall, an intense twenty-nine-year-old who
is one of Roxbury Prep's two codirectors. "There is an expectation
in those schools that their students are going to college, and nothing
is going to stand in their way. We have that same expectation here."
Roxbury Prep is neither private nor suburban, however. It is an inner-city
public school. All but a few of its students are African-American, and
most live in the struggling Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury,
and Mattapan.
"The vast majority of kids who go to the school have socioeconomic
issues," says Motley. "Our mission is to serve a population that
has long been underrepresented."
Motley, Rudall, and Roger Harris, the acclaimed former principal of
Roxbury's Timilty Middle School, developed the proposal for Roxbury Prep
nearly three years ago and moved it through the arduous charter school
application process. Their plan won approval from Massachusetts education
authorities in 1998, but the school's founders postponed its opening for
another year to more fully prepare and to put together the board of directors.
(The board now includes Roxbury Community College president Grace Brown;
state senator Dianne Wilkerson; and Donna Harris-Lewis, widow of the late
Boston Celtics and N.U. basketball star Reggie Lewis.)
Roxbury Prep opened its doors in September 1999 with a ribbon-cutting
ceremony by Governor Paul Cellucci. The school now comprises only a sixth-grade
class, but it plans to expand by one grade per year until it encompasses
kindergarten through twelfth. After next year, the school will require
a new facility since the current site is large enough for only one more
grade. While school officials are still looking for a new site, Rudall
says Roxbury Prep has done well in its fund-raising efforts, bringing in
private donations of nearly $500,000 to help pay for capital and operating
expenses not covered by the state. The school is on firm financial ground
for at least another year and probably longer, he says.
That's good news for parents and students, from whom demand far exceeds
the number of slots currently available at Roxbury Prep. The school's admissions
process works on a citywide lottery system, with those accepted drawn randomly
from among the applicants. Once admitted, students attend free of charge,
just as they would at an ordinary public school.
But Roxbury Prep's directors want the school to be less like one of
the city's ordinary schools and more like its three prestigious exam schools:
Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School, and the John D. O'Bryant School
of Mathematics and Science. "What is frustrating in Boston is that
if students don't get into an exam school, they're often not in an exciting,
rigorous program," says John King, twenty-five, Roxbury Prep's second
codirector. "If they don't get into an exam school, there is no expectation
that they will go to college. In modern American society, we can't have
that."
That is why at Roxbury Prep, students are given the message, loud and
clear, that they can and will go to college. Parents who have chosen to
send their children to the school say this message was key. Chrystal Kornegay,
for example, took her son, Elijah, out of another charter school to enroll
him in Roxbury Prep. A big factor in her decision was Roxbury's emphasis
on college preparation. "The expectation [that students will go to
college] is more explicit here. It's very clear that they're not just doing
this so you can get a high school diploma, or so you can conjugate a verb,
or so you can get a job. The whole expectation is that you are going to
college," she says.
Kornegay is chair of Roxbury Prep's Parent Involvement Committee, in
which she gets parents to help with voluntary projects to benefit the school.
Her job is not difficult, she says, because charter school parents tend
to be self-selecting: "The more involved and informed a parent is,
the more likely that they will send their children to private or charter
schools."
To reinforce this predisposition, the school actually requires parents
to participate. Before enrolling their child, parents at Roxbury Prep must
sign a contract vowing that they will abide by the school's rules and remain
engaged in their child's education. "All the research says that children
do better when parents are involved with the school," says Kornegay.
"Roxbury Prep sees the contract as an integral part of making that
happen. A lot of places talk about parent involvement, but it's more than
lip service here."
To further promote parental responsibility, the school hosts Saturday
parent-teacher conferences, which allow more parents to attend the meetings.
"This not a common thing in urban environments," says Motley,
explaining that many of the school's parents work in hourly wage jobs.
"They can't just tell their secretary that they're leaving for an
hour to meet with their child's teacher."
For their part, students at Roxbury Prep say they are pleased to be
there. Some feel the charter school is a big improvement over their former
schools. Eleven-year-old Octavia White, from Mattapan, says her "teachers
explain stuff more and they challenge us more." Twelve-year-old Giovany
Morales, of East Boston, says that last year a teen was shot outside the
public middle school near his home.
The students say they especially enjoy their afternoon activities. In
his enrichment course, Akeeme Phillip, twelve, is helping design a Web
site on Kwanza, the African-American cultural festival. Finding out that
he loved computers was something of an accident, Akeeme says. He had been
taking basketball, but one day he forgot his gym uniform and sat in on
the Web design course. Octavia is taking an enrichment course called "Rhythm
Nation," which blends African-American history, song, and dance. Students
in the class are composing a musical about the Great Migration, the mass
movement of African-Americans from the rural South to the industrial North.
"They were trying to get better rights," she says. "The
whites weren't treating them fair. They wanted equality."
The dress code is the only aspect of the school these children complain
about. Akeeme and Giovany both say they don't like wearing ties and long-sleeve
dress shirts during warm weather because they get too hot. But Akeeme admits
there are benefits: "People don't look at your clothes and say they
are old and ripped up." Octavia likes wearing her regular clothes
better but notes that the Roxbury outfits "make us look more professional."
Roxbury Prep also has a strict code of behavioral conduct, with a zero-tolerance
policy toward classroom disturbances. Any child who disrupts class is sent
to the front office for a conversation with one of the directors. Repeat
offenders get detention. "You can't run a college prep school unless
you have a tremendous amount of focus and discipline," says Rudall.
"This is a strict environment, and we're going to hold kids accountable,
behaviorally and academically." Octavia, for one, says she understands
the need for discipline. "They're trying to prepare us for college,"
she says, "and at college they're very strict."
Despite its tough rules on dress and behavior, the school is not all
about discipline, says codirector King. Rather, the school's curriculum
emphasizes self-esteem and the importance of a person's choices in life.
"We try to achieve a balance," King says. "We want them
to be good students but also good people. We don't just have consequences
for bad choices. We teach kids how to make good choices."
To this end, the children regularly hear stories, often African or African-American
folk tales, about values such as responsibility, social justice, and dignity.
During one recent week, signs posted throughout the school read: "Choose
to be an Eagle. Use words and actions to build each other up." The
signs were a follow-up to that week's story, which told of a brood of young
eagles brought from Africa to America on a slave ship and deposited in
a Southern plantation's chicken yard. Without any knowledge of their proud
backgrounds, the eagles simply assumed they were chickens and never learned
to fly. The other chickens constantly ridiculed the eagles, calling them
"ugly and stupid" until the eagles believed it. One day, however,
an adult eagle arrived and told the young eagles of their true identities.
He encouraged them to fly away with him. Two of the eagles gathered confidence
and took to the air, but the third was too broken-spirited to even try.
Like the eagles, says King, children at Roxbury Prep are taught to be proud
of themselves and to encourage each other to "do the things they think
they can't."
For its teachers, Roxbury Prep presents special challenges. Students
arrive from public schools with a wide range of abilities. "Many of
our students come in two or three grade levels behind in reading and math,"
says Rudall. "It's easy to get frustrated in that situation and focus
on activities that don't really improve skills."
To overcome these problems, teachers must develop course work that makes
learning fun and relevant. In Jamie White's English class, for example,
students read autobiographies by prominent African-Americans, then write
their own autobiographical pieces. "The best way to hook them is to
have them write from personal experience," says White. Later the teacher
introduces her students to poems, myths, and short stories. "At the
end of the year, they will leave my class feeling like writers," she
says.
But writing is not just an exercise in self-expression, argues White.
It prepares students to get into college and to get jobs. "Access
to power in our society depends on writing," she says, adding that
many inner-city children are not adequately prepared to write well or for
other aspects of the modern world-a fact that Roxbury Prep is trying to
change. "We're redefining what it means to have a powerful urban education,"
she says.
During Lorna Mathieu's science class, students discover chemistry while
learning about nutrition. In one of the school's spacious classrooms, her
twenty students recently tested marshmallows for nutritional content using
eyedroppers and iodine. Changing colors revealed whether the marshmallows
contained fat, sugar, starch, or proteins. Mathieu, twenty-four, a full-time
science teacher at Roxbury Prep, earned her bachelor's degree from N.U.
in 1998 and is currently working on her master's degree in teaching at
Northeastern. As a first-year teacher, she has learned to deal with a range
of problems associated with inner-city students, she says. "The kids
came in with Boston attitude. They were used to no one caring about them
and not learning anything. Not that all Boston schools are like that, but
some are."
In the end, Mathieu says, Roxbury Prep's approach to education pays
off. "I've had students who did not care about science one bit when
they came here who are now coming to me and seeking my attention,"
she says. "They want extra help. They want to learn. Their whole attitude
has changed. These kids came in uncaring, and now they really do care about
their education and their lives."
Hudson Sangree, L'00, wrote about law school graduates pursuing groundbreaking
legal work in the September 1999 issue.
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