June 14, 2002|By Liz Bowie | Liz Bowie,SUN STAFF
Jason Botel may be the most popular door-to-door salesman in Northeast Baltimore this spring. With a promotional video under his arm and an inspirational sales pitch, Botel works the neighborhoods around Pimlico racetrack, asking people to sign on the dotted line - and turn their fourth-graders over to him.
What is this 27-year-old with wire-rim glasses and close-cropped hair selling?
A new public middle school.
And he has been wildly successful. After visiting families at night and on weekends for a few weeks, Botel has signed up 70 children, nearly filling the first fifth-grade class of 80 pupils.
So desperate are Baltimore parents to find alternatives to the large, ineffective public middle schools their children face, they are jumping at the chance to send their children to Botel's school and two other experimental public schools to open in West and East Baltimore in the fall.
"Everyone says they are looking for a better education. They want their kids to go to a great high school and college," Botel said. "It is very empowering that they can make a decision about their child's education."
As part of a 5-year-old initiative to give parents choices for their children, the city school board is allowing the nonprofit groups that run these schools a significant amount of autonomy. They may choose the pupils, the curriculum, the teachers and the length of the school day, but are accountable for achievement.
Eleven so-called New School Initiative schools exist, mostly elementaries, and more are expected to open next year.
The three new middle schools are: Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which Botel directs; ConneXions Community Leadership Academy, being run by John Robertson, a city schoolteacher; and The Crossroads School at the Living Classrooms Foundation, headed by Mark Conrad.
ConneXions and Crossroads also are close to filling the first class in their schools, largely because they offer a parent's dream: smaller class size, more individual attention and higher standards for behavior and academic performance.
Wendy Griffin, the mother of Takeliah, 9, found the idea of KIPP appealing immediately. Her fourth-grade daughter is one of 30 pupils in her class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, and is taught by the teacher who taught Griffin many years before.
Griffin worries that Takeliah is being picked on at school and that she is falling behind academically.
"I wanted something that would help her," Griffin said, adding that as a single working parent of three children who wants to enroll in college, she doesn't have a lot of time to be on top of her daughter's schoolwork. She wants a school that will demand a lot of its pupils.
On a recent Monday night, she and Takeliah sat at the dining room table in her rowhouse, watched a 60 Minutes segment about KIPP on a laptop computer Botel had brought with him, then read and signed the pledge to attend KIPP.
Takeliah agreed to go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week and half a day on Saturdays. She agreed to respect people, to do her homework every night, to bring a sharp pencil to school each day and to come to summer school for a month. She nodded politely and said, "Yes, sir."
Her mother had lots of questions, from how her daughter would get to school to whether she would be able to take a foreign language.
KIPP gained national attention several years ago after 60 Minutes promoted the achievements of its two schools in Houston and the Bronx. Baltimore's KIPP school will open in unused space near Roland N. Patterson Sr. Academy on Greenspring Avenue.
ConneXions and Crossroads use a curriculum developed by Outward Bound, called Expeditionary Learning. ConneXions, which signed up 50 children in nine days, was the brainchild of a group of city schoolteachers. It will be housed in unused space on the William H. Lemmel Middle School campus in West Baltimore.
Crossroads will be run from the Living Classrooms Foundation, a nonprofit organization at the Inner Harbor that has begun working in city schools.
Each school can draw pupils from a specific zone, usually from three or four elementary schools. Botel, Conrad and Robertson said they are trying not to cherry-pick pupils and are holding lotteries or taking pupils on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Each school will add a grade each year until each has a middle school with 150 to 350 pupils.
Directors of the three schools say they have been moved by the experience of signing up children for the new schools.
Botel loves visiting homes, he said, because it gives him so much information about the children. And the ritual of signing the commitment papers gives pupils an idea of what the culture of the school will be like.
"I love this. It is my favorite thing to do," he said.
Robertson was most moved by the woman who began to cry at an information meeting after signing up her daughter. For her, the school offers hope for her child's future.
"It made me realize what a responsibility there is to the community and the parents," Robertson said.
And for Conrad, the eagerness of children and parents is a message for the whole system.
"I have had parents from all over the city who want to know if there is any way to get their kid in. ... The lessons of the New Schools Initiative schools are not lessons around instruction. I think they are lessons around size, autonomy and choice," Conrad said. "These are the things that seem to be the power of this movement."
