The lime-green shoots of tulips are beginning to push their way through a patch of rich dirt in front of Germantown Elementary School. Principal Walter Reap parks beside this garden every morning, and sometimes he considers the tulips' slow and perseverant reach for the sun and sky as a symbol of the gradual rebirth he is seeing at his school.
Reap is in his first year as head of an Annapolis school that has grappled with drastic demographic shifts during the past decade.
A school that once had nearly 600 students evenly split between white and African-American, saw its enrollment drop in 2001 to barely 400, with Hispanic students making up a third of enrollment, as white students dropped to 15 percent. The school has 411 students.
Some of the new students were among the city's poorest, a third of whom did not speak English at home. As recently as five years ago, six out of 10 third-graders did not pass state tests in reading. Adding to those challenges were community perceptions that the school was unsafe and lacking in order and discipline.
Germantown's struggle to draw neighborhood children back into its fold is not unique -- particularly in Annapolis, where about 40 percent of elementary-school-age children either attend private schools or are home-schooled.
But as those challenges persist, Germantown's administrators and staff have started taking steps to repair the image of a school they believe could become a premier elementary school in the district, boasting its diversity as a badge of honor, rather than a hurdle to overcome.
"There just seemed to be this idea out there that this was an unruly place and I had parents concerned about the diversity at the school," Reap said of conversations he's had with parents at community meetings. "They want to know how does the diversity affect their child's education. I think for Caucasians, they're not used to being the minority, so they're not sure how it works and they were unsure how that would affect their children. That's changing a little bit now. They're visiting our school and they're surprised, pleasantly, by what they see."
Over the past four years, during which time Reap was promoted from assistant principal, the school began hosting gatherings -- movie nights, a winter carnival, a Hispanic heritage night -- that embrace different cultures and promote frank discussions about the diversity within the 41-year-old school's halls.
