School’s pride alive in a name
Before the first brick was even laid, the new school had a name: the New Brunswick Gardens Middle School. The name came from the overgrown land off Columbia Road where it was to be built, a place where prostitutes once turned tricks, drugs were sold, and rival gangs from Roxbury and Dorchester sometimes collided.
Residents worried that the school's name might provoke turf wars among students from different neighborhoods, so Boston school officials started calling it something less descriptive, but seemingly benign: The Columbia Road Middle School.
That didn't work either. Columbia Road is the name of a well-known street gang, neighborhood leaders said.
So when the school opened in the fall of 2003, school leaders opted for a name that couldn't possibly spark controversy: They called it The New Boston Pilot Middle School.
It had no gang affiliation. It didn't offend anyone. But it was boring.
Now, after six years of debate and more than two years of operation, the school has come up with a permanent name: the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School. In choosing to honor Frederick, a respected neighborhood resident who was known for rallying residents behind reviving troubled streets in Roxbury, the school has acquired more than a name. It has gained a unifying identity.
''She lived right around the corner," said Michael Kozu, a community coordinator for Project Right, a coalition of neighborhood groups in Grove Hall of which Frederick was the president. ''This was her school."
The 67-year-old activist died unexpectedly last January after a brief illness, and the Boston School Committee agreed last month to residents' requests to name the school for her.
Frederick, a resident of Grove Hall for 30 years, was in the forefront of efforts to reduce crime and violence in her neighborhood during the gang wars of the 1980s and 1990s. She was the driving community voice behind designing the school on a vacant lot so dangerous that Menino called in the Army National Guard in 1996 to clean it up.
''We found guns in there, a car in there," Menino recalled yesterday. ''Now we have a spectacular school. When a lot of people gave up on Grove Hall, Lilla Frederick was out there fighting for it. She made it better."
Frederick pushed a dream that seemed far-fetched to some neighborhood residents who were gripped by fear of gangs and discouraged by the chronic crime. She and other community leaders wanted to turn the site into a community school where students could come together without fear.
''She was the key person pulling together residents to address a variety of different issues when the school was being built," Kozu said. ''If she saw a teenager hanging on the street, she would go to them, get them involved. She was very direct, and she was not afraid. She would respect them, and she would talk to them."
Naming the school after Frederick, a Jamaican immigrant, also sends a message to a student population surrounded by negative influences, he said.
''It tells them that you don't have to be famous, you don't have to have money or authority to be powerful," Kozu said. ''You can be a neighborhood person and make a powerful difference."
Despite the forces that surround the school of 700 students in Grades 6 through 8, it's hardly a school of hard knocks. Here, the hallways are pristine, and the classrooms are adorned with student artwork.
The $34 million, 141,000-square-foot school also features a computer lab, a library, and a full-size dance studio, a rarity for a Boston middle school. The students, uniformed in blue shirts and khaki pants, have lofty ambitions. And they are eager to represent the Frederick Middle School in front of their peers.
''She actually cared a lot about us," said Atarah Williams, 14, who volunteered alongside Frederick during community cleanups.
''It was really nice that a woman her age would still get out and do things to help the community. I wanted to be a part of that. A lot of people, they think our neighborhood is bad and that a lot of kids here are really bad. But the school helps us be who we are supposed to be."
Christian Haskins -- an eighth-grader who recently applied to Concord Academy, a private high school -- said he looks forward to wearing Frederick's name on his uniform even when he's gone. ''She deserves the honor," he said.
Haskins' mother, Lisa, credits Frederick's influence on the school for her son's positive outlook.
''For my son, he did have a little problem with the boys who live on Columbia Road with some gang," she said. ''It got so bad he had to get picked up and dropped off at home every day. But . . . this school pushed him to look further ahead. The school gave him a lot of support, and I know Lilla was behind a lot of that."
Frederick, a native of Jamaica, earned a bachelor's degree in business administration at Northeastern University and a master's degree in management at Lesley University.
While she worked as a state insurance examiner, she was also a quiet leader in her community who rarely claimed credit for her works, friends and colleagues said. After the school opened in 2003, she was a fixture in the hallways. She organized a fund-raiser to make sure parents could afford uniforms.
She had championed the dress code as a way of showing pride and seriousness at school.
''She was so important to this school and to this community," said Deb Socia, the school's principal, whose eyes welled up with tears as she spoke of Frederick.
Socia was a dean at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School before coming to Dorchester.
''I understood that it would probably take a while for people to warm up to me," she said. ''. . . I'm not so sure it would have been so easy for me without her. I still can't believe she's gone."