Civics lesson

Part 2

by Yvonne Abraham

Teacher Kate Johnson notices that the shades on the Lyndon's front windows have not been drawn properly. This annoys her. She likes them all brought down exactly halfway, but some have been pulled too far down, and some not far enough. Johnson knows she is obsessive about this, but she wants the school to look as good as the neighborhood around it, especially now.

Which isn't easy: the houses surrounding the Lyndon are elegant and perfectly maintained, with fresh-looking siding and carefully tended gardens. Even the smaller, more modest houses are like show homes. A faded Irish flag flaps from the top of a rambling white house behind the school, facing the site of the proposed extension. Gaily colored summer-themed flags hang from other porches. West Roxbury is middle-class, mostly white, and politically inclined: folks traditionally vote in big numbers here. Neighborhood residents seem to have the time and pride to get their hedges dead-level between trips to the ballot boxes.

In 1985, the old Lyndon School closed because of dwindling enrollment, and the once-handsome 1928 building, an area landmark, fell apart. Noisy teenagers started hanging around in the yard, which annoyed the neighbors, so in 1992, they enlisted then-councilor John Nucci's help to resurrect the building. "We brought it back from the brink of extinction," Nucci says.

In 1994, the Boston School Committee decided that the Lyndon should become one of the city's six pilot schools -- experimental public schools exempted, to some extent, from union and education-department rules. But the school still had to comply with the city's student-assignment process, which meant some kids had to be bused in from other neighborhoods.

From the start, one of the Lyndon's primary goals was to serve the area's large Latino population, which has few citywide opportunities for bilingual experimental education. The Lyndon began with kindergarten through second grade, offering two regular and one Spanish bilingual class for each grade. A grade would be added each year up to the fifth grade.

Johnson, a teacher with gray-flecked dark hair, brown eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, and red toenails, was on the Lyndon's planning team, as was Councilor Hennigan, herself a former teacher. Johnson is now on the board that runs the school. Four years later, she is still excited about the Lyndon, but the neighborhood's misgivings have her worried.

"There's some real passion about this school," she says leaning forward in her chair, hands on her knees, talking fast, in the Lyndon's administration office. The floors are pristine, newly painted and waxed for when the kids come back in early September. "West Roxbury has a history with this school. Everybody has a kid, or a nephew who attended here. The neighbors worked hard at trying to get it reopened."

And at first, the neighbors were pleased. Sure, having the school active again meant some inconvenience: the rehab was disruptive, and once the 250 kids arrived two years ago, the traffic could be bad. But the Lyndon had improved the neighborhood. Students and parents were certainly happy, too. Last year, the median third-grade math score on the Stanford 9 Achievement Test was 79 percent, compared to a citywide average of 48 percent; 30 percent of third-grade students were invited to join the city's advanced-learning program. The Lyndon is also a model of diversity, with roughly a third of its students black, a third Latino, and a third white.

And parent involvement, that elusive key to successful schooling, was strong from the start. When the Lyndon held a potluck dinner last year, 350 people showed up. The parents also run a well-attended after-school program. It was all good.

Until talk turned in earnest to building expansion.

This year, the nine-classroom school will extend to the fourth grade, which means that incoming kindergarten students will probably have classrooms down the road at the Annunciation Church, at least for this year. Next year, the problem will be worse, because room will have to be found for another three classes of children, as the school expands to the fifth grade. Even now, the cafeteria is so small that the school has three lunch seatings per day, and when the children put on a show there, parents and other students have to see it separately.

The Lyndon needs six more classrooms, a cafeteria-cum-auditorium, and some extra office space. This has sent neighbors with land abutting school property into a panic, since the extension would bring about 200 more kids -- and plenty more traffic -- into the dense neighborhood. Expansion would also overrun most of the playground at the back of the school building, bringing the Lyndon even closer to the abutters. Extension advocates insist that they would continue to be responsive to neighborhood needs, compromising as much as possible. No good, say opponents.

"If the school is doubled in size and the yard is reduced, where do the children play?" asks Jack Tobin, a leader of the opposition to the extension, who also ran against Hennigan in the last council election. "Now, if there are meetings at the school, you can't even get into your own street, and they want to increase it to 450 kids? That's ridiculous!"

Neighbors maintain that the school kept them in the dark about the expansion plan until it opened. The school just as vehemently holds that the expansion was common knowledge from the start. (And, indeed, there was talk of it in print in late 1994, but abutters say that was too late.)

"We knew we'd run out of space before the school reached to grade three," says Johnson. "That was in the original proposal. After the very first year, we'd have to look at building it out." Both Johnson and Hennigan say they gave the school committee and the Menino Administration plenty of warning. "We let [school-committee member] John Gould know right then that that was the plan, and as soon as [superintendent] Tom Payzant came in, I sat down with him and told him we needed to begin an addition program straight away, and I continued to remind the mayor, too," says Hennigan. Johnson and Hennigan say nobody did anything about it, though.

All of this does not leave the parents jubilant. "The parents made a commitment to this school," says Ernest Garneau, of West Roxbury, co-chair of the Lyndon school PTA, whose daughter goes into the fourth grade this September and is doing "exceptionally well." Garneau, an executive with Prudential, could have sent her to a private school, but he chose the Lyndon instead. "We were told the building would be expanded, even before we signed our kids up. Now we're wondering where we are going to put our kids. I live in the city, and I always thought public education was important for the vitality of a city. The level and standards and parental involvement in this school are beyond anything I've ever seen."

Indeed, if the school were not doing so well, the neighbors would have little cause for complaint. The Lyndon has become too successful for its own good.

Part 3

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.