Last year, Tashera Savage squeezed her father's hand and held onto his gaze as he lay dying of a gunshot wound outside her house. Such a profoundly troubling experience could easily have derailed the city high school junior.
"I thought it was something I would never get over," she said. But her small high school rallied around her. Her teachers cried with her, and her classmates stayed close to her. Savage will walk across the stage at the Academy of College and Career Exploration High School (ACCE) graduation next week , not only a survivor but ready to go off to a four-year university in Louisiana in the fall.
The school she credits with helping her get so far is one of five new innovation high schools begun about four years ago as an experiment to find a replacement for Baltimore's troubled comprehensive high schools. This month, two of those schools will graduate their first classes, and the results are demonstrably better than those at the comprehensive high schools their students could have chosen.
At ACCE, 88 percent of seniors were accepted by colleges, and nearly half of them by four-year colleges. Most students hope to attend if they can put together enough financial aid. Savage, for instance, is hoping to find enough money to go to her first choice, Grambling State University in Grambling, La., but if she can't raise the funds, she plans to go elsewhere.
The success of these high schools, the principals, teachers and students say, lies not in a quirky educational fad but in something as simple as a faculty that has bonded with the 400 or so students who attend each school.
"Our kids have someone who can help them on a personal level. They have a connection with someone in the building," said Jeffrey M. Robinson, principal of the Talent Development High School in West Baltimore.
In interviews, the administrators and students at ACCE described their Hampden school as a family. The small size of the high school allows students to get a lot of attention, and in a city where teenagers often need their teachers to provide more than academic guidance, students say this school has kept them connected.
"There are a lot of kids who were about to drop out, and they didn't because these teachers care about them," said Katie Zimmerman, the valedictorian. Back in eighth grade, Zimmerman thought she would go to City College, but when she visited she found it too large and impersonal. She chose ACCE, despite the fact that she would be one of the few white students there.
