New school symbol of renewal
Orchard Park makes diligent work pay off
In the mid-1970s, Edna Bynoe watched as yellow buses roared into Roxbury's Orchard Park housing development and whisked the neighborhood children away to schools miles from their homes.
Now, almost three decades after court-ordered desegregation forced the closing of Orchard Park's schools, Bynoe's dream of watching her grandson walk to a school in his neighborhood is finally becoming a reality.
When Orchard Gardens, a K-8 pilot school, opens next month, it will be one of the first new school buildings in Boston in 30 years -- and a symbol of renewal to those still haunted by the racial turbulence and urban decay that followed the start of busing.
"When buses started rolling in the '70s, they took our children and bused them to white communities," said Bynoe, who has lived in Orchard Park since 1942 and led the fight to convince the city to open a school. "We ended up with no schools in our community."
Resolved to bring a school back to her community, Bynoe, who chairs the Orchard Gardens Residents Association, rallied neighbors, families, and other residents.
During the past two years, every time the city held a meeting on new school development, Bynoe said, her group was there. They formed community focus groups, compiled research on the nation's best teaching practices, and presented the results of their work to school and city leaders.
In the end, their hard work paid off.
To Bynoe and other longtime residents, Orchard Gardens promises to repair what was lost when busing began by forging strong ties to the neighborhood.
Most significantly, the mammoth, brightly colored building that towers over the corner of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Albany Street will be the only school in the city allowed to draw three-fourths of its students from its neighborhood -- far more than any other Boston school. According to the district's student assignment policy, only half of the seats in other elementary and middle schools are reserved for children who live within the schools' walk zones, while the rest are bused in from other neighborhoods.
Bynoe's grandson, 8-year-old Jamille Freeman, who will be a third-grader at Orchard Gardens, said he watched this summer as contractors finished his new school, just a short walk from his home. "I'm happy because a lot my friends are coming here," he said, adding that he had grown tired of the long bus rides to and from the Boston Renaissance Charter School, where he attended last year. "Now I can get extra sleep in the morning."
Last Friday, Bynoe celebrated the opening of the school at a ribbon-cutting ceremony with neighborhood residents and city officials.
Two other schools will open in Boston when classes start Sept. 3 -- the Mildred Avenue Middle School in Mattapan, and the New Boston Pilot Middle School in Dorchester. The three schools together cost $121 million, and the district hopes to be reimbursed for 90 percent of the bill, though the state's reimbursement program has been frozen indefinitely.
For Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, the new construction is the partial fulfillment of his 1999 pledge to build five new schools in minority neighborhoods. The other two are on hold while the city copes with its worst budget crisis in more than two decades. But while budget woes have slowed progress, Menino said his mission to return Boston to a neighborhood school system remains.
Before desegregation, the area around Orchard Park was home to what was then two primary schools and one middle school. But all were shut down permanently, after tens of thousands of white families, unwilling to participate in desegregation efforts, fled the city and the dilapidated schools were left with hundreds of empty seats. More than 30 schools in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan -- neighborhoods densely populated by blacks and Hispanics -- eventually were shuttered.
In the following years, the neighborhood surrounding the Orchard Park housing development deteriorated further, becoming known as one of the most violent in the city.
"The kids were in the middle of it," Bynoe said. "The killings, stabbings, and drug dealings. It was terrible. There were buildings you couldn't even go into because drug dealers had taken them over. You were scared to walk through them because you never knew what you were gonna find."
Today, visitors walking through the front doors of Orchard Gardens -- built on what used to be part of Orchard Park -- are struck by the bold purples, reds, and greens, and the African-influenced designs.
But the connection to the community will be deeper than the paint color, says principal Nanzetta Merriman. Unlike at other schools, teachers at Orchard Gardens will be required to become active in the neighborhood, and residents are expected to remain involved in the school.
Not only have neighbors volunteered for tasks from answering phones to leading classroom discussions, they also developed the curriculum with school officials and are coming up with ideas to engage more local families.
"It's the most liberating experience I've had in my 27 years in Boston," said Cheryl Holmes, an English teacher at Orchard Gardens. "I mean, look, the people who once lived in the developments, developed the school. Now that says something."
On the first day of teacher orientation last week, more than 50 teachers piled into a yellow school bus for a tour of the neighborhood and a history lesson. This is where most of the school's students live, Merriman told his charges. And as the bus rolled, teachers learned the historical significance of various streets and churches, some of which were key to the nation's civil rights movement.
On the second day of orientation, Merriman read a poem called "The Rose That Grew From Concrete," penned by slain gangsta-rapper Tupac Shakur. He asked the teachers to reflect on this, his next lesson: "If a rose grows out of concrete, you wouldn't look at its tattered leaves," Merriman said, paraphrasing Shakur's poem. "Instead you would say, `That rose grew out of cement.' "
"All of these children should be treated like roses," Merriman added. "And my feeling is, when we show our success, then this type of school/community activism will be modeled in other communities."
