Mary Kinney, standing by the front door of her classroom at Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary School the other morning, looks at her students and asks a simple question:
"Who made a New Year's resolution?"
Hands shoot eagerly into the air. Consider the possibilities, reader. The children are 9 years old. Imagine their innocence.
"I resolve not to throw chairs around the room," says a boy in a hooded sweat shirt.
Mary Kinney smiles approvingly.
"No more fighting in class," says a fellow missing a piece of front tooth.
Principal Mariale Hardiman, standing behind Kinney, nods her head happily.
"And if we do fight," says a third kid, "we have to keep the chairs on the floor."
At Sharp-Leadenhall, this is known as progress.
About 90 children attend this South Baltimore school, but not until they've been thrown out of other schools, released from hospitals, diagnosed as intellectually capable but deeply troubled emotionally.
They range from 6 to 12 years old, and they come here with psychological folders several inches deep, and histories that make you cringe.
"We have children," says principal Hardiman, speaking in calm, measured, sympathetic tones, "who are psychotic, who are hallucinatory, who have chemical imbalances and have to be medicated regularly. We have one boy who tied his cousins to the light-rail tracks. Some have a history of setting fires. We have a 9-year-old who put his teacher in the hospital for a week. . . ."
"Like my grandson," says a man sitting in Hardiman's office. "He was 5 and putting people in the hospital regularly. He got bounced around. He was acting out to keep somebody from hurting him. Now he comes here, and he's doing work on a computer. He's finding himself. That's why they can't close this school."
At the moment, it seems a cry in the wilderness. On North Avenue, where education bureaucrats shuffle their various papers, there are tentative plans to close Sharp-Leadenhall at the end of this school year.
"The reason," says Hardiman, "is totally and purely economic. The planning department looked at numbers, and they didn't take programs into concern at all. It's pure cost factor. They want to put these kids into the mainstream population."
The mind boggles at the possibilities of these children being moved into public school classrooms. At Sharp-Leadenhall, there are a teacher and an assistant for every nine children. In the public elementary schools, the ratio is 30 to 1, and that's just the tip of the problem.
