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The Observer New year, clean slate By
Sam Allis Until this month, the last middle school built in Boston opened in 1967, the year Yastrzemski went 7 for 8 at Fenway in the last two games of the Impossible Dream season. Now we’ve got two new ones - the New Boston Pilot Middle School in Dorchester and the Mildred Avenue Middle School in Mattapan. (A third, the Orchard Gardens School in Roxbury, runs K-8.) Speaking for all Bostonians, welcome aboard. It’s great to have all of you with us. There’s something profound about a new school. Beyond the fresh paint and doors without handles, a new school is the face of a dream, a rare freeze-frame in time when hope trumps the field. For that brief moment, we take leave of our senses and believe that anything is possible. How often does that happen? New schools are rare creatures, given the budget garotte that strangles most of them in their cribs. So we should honor the survivors that appear before us, and thank Mayor Tom Menino, school superintendent Tom Payzant, and the neighborhood groups who pushed so hard to make them happen. Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched New Boston rise where abandoned buildings once defaced the landscape along a raw stretch of Columbia Road. The area is still sketchy, and the school carries a certain Fort Apache karma. “These are the toughest streets of Boston,” says Boston Police Officer Jay Greene, who with partner Richard Jeanetti handles security at New Boston. Greene, who lives nearby, was referring to notorious paths of gang violence like Intervale, Geneva, and Columbia Road itself. I drove past the site to and from work every day as it grew from girders to a $39 million house of learning. Along the way, I wondered, will it make a bit of difference to an area described by neighborhood activist John Barbour as “a war zone”? We’ll know better a year from now, but why not? The community is all over this one. About a dozen people, including dynamos like Barbour, Michael Kozu, a community activist with the Grove Hall Safe Neighborhoods Initiative, and Claudia Owumi out of Quincy-Geneva Housing Development Corp., began meeting over four years ago, once a month, to chart the area’s future. Their numbers grew when Menino announced in 1999 that a school would be built at that location. Community representatives sat in on interviews as staff members were hired. They were in on the design and siting of the building. They chose the color schemes. They were there. They still are. Volunteer parents join faculty to meet the buses in the morning and get the kids back on them in the afternoon with a minimum of mayhem. Everyone watches out for vandalism. Barbour, whose house abuts the school, recalls chasing youths off the property at 1 a.m. “We were the ones who said, ‘Bring one of those schools to our community,’” says Barbour. “We have to take control of this community. This is the beginning of the turnaround.” New Boston looked like a million bucks when it opened after Labor Day to 750 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, almost all kids of color. The architects, Drummey Rosane Anderson Inc. out of Newton, confected a handsome exterior and a delightful interior full of surprises. You’ve got to see the place to appeciate it, but the physical plant is a dream. The punch list of things yet to be done or corrected by contractors, on the other hand, is massive. Peabody Construction was to have finished the building last spring, says Principal Debra Socia, a veteran teacher and a former program director of Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools. The staff got inside for the first time only the week before school opened. Never mind. She and her crew threw a cookout the last weekend in August, and 1,000 parents, kids, and neighbors showed up. Socia is overwhelmed by nothing. She’s in at 6 and usually leaves 13 hours later. Her staff isn’t far behind her. She brings the messianic passion common to alpha principals that eventually leads to burnout. She also knows this is an opportunity of a lifetime. The plumb newness is staggering. There’s the Rubik’s Cube of bus schedules, the fact that the new staff members don’t know one another yet, and that all the kids are new. Greene says there already have been altercations among students, but nothing serious. As a pilot school, New Boston runs its own show. Its classes are longer, and its staffing, schedule, and budget options more flexible. For example, Socia has divided the school into four academies. (All the data support this move to smaller entities.) Escorts take all kids from class to class. More important, escorts walk many of them to and from home, through gang turf, in Operation Safe Passage. You leave the place praying that New Boston (its temporary name) will be a reservoir of excellence and not another swamp of disillusionment. You pray that teachers will feed from the challenge and not fall to cynicism, and that the spanking-new building does not simply mask the problems that have wounded so many urban schools in Boston. For now, in the crisp new days of a New England autumn, success looks inevitable. That’s the cool thing about new schools. Sam Allis’s e-mail address is allis@globe.com. .This
story ran on page A2 of the Boston Sunday Globe on 9/21/2003. |
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