Flying solo

Part 2

Education by Yvonne Abraham

At the Downtown Evening Academy, kids who were beyond the reach of traditional schools are steadily moving toward something most of them gave up on years ago: high school diplomas.

"These are the kids nobody wants," director Ferdinand Fuentes says of his 150 charges. Forty percent are teen parents. Fifteen percent have been through the juvenile justice system. Here, the students get individual attention, and they advance through the school's three grades (Foundations, Pre-Senior, and Senior) only when they've mastered the necessary skills. "Other teachers just passed out books and waited for the work to be done," says Rondell Griffin, who never before attended school regularly; he has just earned his first A-minus ever. "Here, they ask questions and wait for answers."

Fuentes is proud that about 70 percent of his students attend classes at least 80 percent of the time: quite an achievement, since most of them are holding down day jobs as well.

But he can't fully enjoy his progress with kids like Griffin. He's too busy worrying about whether his school will have a decent home after next year.

And he's not the only one: every other pilot school in the city is plagued by concerns over inadequate and impermanent facilities. Some have spaces that aren't big enough for their needs right now, let alone when they expand as planned. Some must pay rent with money meant for books, furniture, and teacher salaries. Some have only temporary homes, and face uncertain futures as their leases expire in the next couple of years. Most face all of these problems at once. And two pilot schools -- the Boston Arts Academy and the Josiah Quincy Upper School -- have yet to open because they've had so much trouble finding homes.

Payzant says the pilots are "essential to educational reform." Menino has touted them as one of his administration's signal achievements. So you'd think the city and the school district would be falling over themselves to support schools like the Downtown Evening Academy. But so far, the support has stopped short of bricks and mortar. Look at the pilot schools, and you will find the limits of this city's commitment to educational reform.

When pilot schools were introduced, in the spring of 1994, the problem of where to put them should have been predictable. Elsewhere in Massachusetts, and all over the country, experimental schools have had trouble finding homes. The Boston public school system itself has been in a facilities crunch for years. Since 1972, 62 of Boston's public schools have been closed down and sold. Those that remained became increasingly crowded as the school-age population swelled again. In 1994, Menino appointed a blue ribbon commission to investigate the system's facilities problems: it found that the crunch would get only worse, and urged new construction. But other needs -- accreditation requirements and renovations -- took priority.

Yet the city and the school department didn't expect this to be an issue for the pilot schools, which emerged from contract negotiations between the city and the Boston Teachers' Union as a way to keep innovative educators in the system at a time when many were contemplating breaking away to found state charter schools. Pilots could be made from existing schools, or they could be schools within schools, or they could be entirely new schools. At first, everybody thought more existing schools would choose to become pilots, or that there would be more school-within-a-school proposals.

Both were unreasonable expectations. For a whole school to become a pilot school, two-thirds of its teachers must vote to take on more work and make more effort than most others in the system. If so many teachers were willing to do that, the public schools wouldn't be in the mess they're in today. And the school-within-a-school arrangement is not attractive to pilot founders, who inevitably compete with the larger school for space and resources. One director likens it to living with one's mother-in-law.

So most of the pilots were new schools, which meant they needed new facilities. But the city and the school department were eager to get the experiment under way. Rather than wait for the money to become available to build permanent homes, they encouraged the pilots to go ahead and start up, even though the sites they'd found were less than ideal.

Having set the process of innovation in motion, however, the city promptly dropped the ball. It placed responsibility for finding or paying for appropriate facilities squarely on the schools themselves. Some of the pilot schools are housed in leased buildings instead of city-owned ones, and many of those must use part of their operating budgets to pay rent, a capital expenditure that almost every other school escapes. The superintendent himself says that isn't fair.

Seeing the existing pilots' facilities problems worsen as leases run out and student populations climb, an overwhelmed school committee made sure the last three pilot schools to be approved knew that facilities were entirely their responsibility. (Right now, Payzant says, he's not sure whether the committee will solicit proposals for more pilots, but if it does, no schools without permanent facilities will be considered).

Wrong response, say pilot directors: "You can't have an educational need and not a facilities need," says Linda Nathan, codirector of the phenomenally successful Fenway Middle College High School, which has just learned it will probably have to leave its digs at Bunker Hill Community College.

"If you're committed to public education, you also have to be committed to public property," says the Downtown Evening Academy's Fuentes. He leases his classrooms from the Franklin Institute for $68,000 a year. That money comes out of his school's operating budget -- which means his students effectively have fewer resources than do kids in the mainstream schools, most of which are housed in city-owned buildings. The Downtown Evening Academy also has no access to the building outside school hours, which makes it very difficult to provide the students with extra help.

The Lyndon School, in West Roxbury, has perhaps the most celebrated of the pilot schools' facilities problems. The Lyndon offers small classes, interdisciplinary learning, and experimental education for 250 students, a third of whom are in Spanish bilingual classes. Right now, the school is decked out in all manner of ancient-looking sculpture and architecture, as the fourth grade learns about ancient Greece and its mythology in history, art, math, and science classes. Last year, the Lyndon's third-grade test scores were among the best in the city. Here, as at most other pilots, there is a long waiting list.

The city renovated an old school building to house the Lyndon two years ago, but it's too small. "We said, `We'll start up, but you know our problems,' " says Kate Johnson, the school's cofounder. "The city said, `Go ahead.' " Now the Lyndon needs an extension, and the neighbors refuse to allow it. Menino and the city council refused to go against the voters' wishes, and the whole controversy stalled the city's capital budget over the summer. Now there's no room for the school's three kindergarten classes, so they're in rented space a couple of miles away, at the Our Lady of the Annunciation church.

The Health Careers Academy, a high school that prepares students for careers in the health professions, offers extra tutoring and study groups for its students, training in public speaking, internships in health care, and regular family nights that are well attended. The HCA is a school within a school -- actually, within two schools, its 170 students split between Dorchester High and Boston High. Attendance at HCA is close to 95 percent, compared with averages of about 72 percent at its host schools.

But it's hard to keep the program together with students housed in two sites, 30 minutes apart. Already, says director Sharon Callender, there's no room for her offices at either building, so she uses space at Northeastern University. And the HCA wants to accept another 60 students next year. What it really needs is a building of its own.

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