DURHAM, N.C.- Healthy Start Academy Principal Dietrich A.M. Danner calls them “diamonds in the rough.”
Teacher Courtney Rollins likes digging through the rough of his chaotic sixth-grade classroom, where students joke, jive, sneeze, snicker, laugh out and laugh loud. Through the class chaos, Rollins raises his voice and requests the meaning of “renaissance” from his students, who are tugging at their blue and white uniforms. Rollins asks again. He surveys the classroom. Suddenly, a student in the front row hollers “Rebirth!”
A diamonds flashes, and so does an almost imperceptible smile on Rollins lips.
“Yeah, it gets crazy,” Rollins says of his sixth-graders. “But they’re gems. They’re all gems.”
The gems are the 230 kindergarten through sixth-grade students at Healthy Start Academy, the first charter school in North Carolina. Since opening in Durham’s West End in 1997, Healthy Start Academy has made national headlines for its successes and trials as a trailblazer in the charter school movement. One double-edged sword for the school, a success and a trial, is racial homogeneity.
According to Danner, 98 percent of the student body is black.
While a few charter schools specifically target one racial group, Healthy Start Academy does not. Like most charter schools, it has little control over the make-up of its student body because enrollment is voluntary. Healthy Start Academy has six buses to collect students across Durham and herd them into the renovated Baptist church that serves as the schoolhouse, but its original student body almost entirely derived from the surrounding area, which is largely a black community.
This outcome is ironic according to Kathryn Meyers, a member of the Charter Schools Advisory Committee for the North Carolina State Board of Education. At the inception of the charter school movement in North Carolina, many people worried that charter schools would become white-flight academies, like those that arose in the South during desegregation. They envisioned a mass exodus of white students that would homogenize and ghettoize traditional public schools.
“But the people who tend to charter schools are those that feel they’ve been disenfranchised by the rest of the public school system,” Meyers says. “Those people tend to be African-American parents.”
Liz Morey, Healthy Start Academy’s executive director, thinks black parents opt for schools like Healthy Start Academy because they see their children going to traditional public schools and coming home uneducated. They are willing to take a risk with charter schools because “at that point they have nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Morey says.
Healthy Start Academy didn’t intend to have a black student body, but the black focus at the school is apparent with a simple glance around Rollins’ classroom. The visages of Malcolm X and The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. observe students from posters on the front wall. Wedged between grammar and composition books is a collection of Langston Hughes’ poetry and J.A. Rogers’ “World’s Great Men of Color.” Students interrupt Rollins’ lecture to query, “Mr. Rollins, when are we going to finish watching ‘Roots’?”
The homogenous student make-up is an attractive feature to some teachers. It means teaching to a specific group. In the case of Healthy Start Academy, it means teaching to a group that is often academically discounted before setting foot inside a classroom, a group considered “at risk”—a slippery term that makes people cringe when asked to define it. For the students at Healthy Start Academy, most of whom qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, it is their overall poverty that secures them the label.
“Many teachers want to help at-risk kids. You’ve got a cadre of people who are willing to help just because of that,” says Roger Gerber, executive director of the League of Charter Schools.
Such was the case for Rollins. Before coming to Healthy Start Academy, he was a teaching assistant at Lakeview School in Durham, a sixth- through 12th-grade alternative school for students who have a history of chronic misbehavior or who have received long-term suspension.
Rollins describes the school as a holding pen.
“I thought maybe if I could get to these kids a little earlier, before they reached that, maybe I could make a difference,” he says, with one eye on two students dallying in his classroom before heading to lunch, and the other eye on an attendance register teetering precariously on a tower of books on his desk.
Danner echoes his sentiments. The principal was drawn to Healthy Start Academy six months ago from administrative positions in higher education because he wanted to make a difference in the life of a child who came from a violent neighborhood. “I felt I needed to be in the trenches,” he says. “To see what’s really out there.”
Otho Tucker, the director at the Office of Charter Schools for the Department of Public Instruction, thinks that schools with fewer racial subgroups can be advantageous for teacher accountability. He has found that teachers who must address a wide variety of subgroups have to spread themselves thin.
“Of course, I don’t think anyone in public schools seeks to have a homogenous student body,” notes Meyers. “One of the tenets of public schools is to teach students to be successful citizens in a society that isn’t homogenous.”
The homogeneity of Healthy Start Academy received national coverage five years ago when the State Board of Education nearly terminated the school for failing to reflect the racial composition of Durham Public Schools. The State Board of Education originally required racial diversity in charter schools specifically because of white-flight fear. There was an outcry at the attempted closing of the school, especially when people discovered its academic success up to that point.
After one year at Healthy Start Academy, kindergarteners who took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills rocketed from the 42nd percentile to the 99th percentile. Second-graders leapt from the 34th percentile to the 75th percentile.
The controversy produced strange bedfellows. Healthy Start Academy joined forces with the North Carolina Foundation for Individual Rights, a conservative organization bent on challenging Affirmative Action laws, and filed a suit against state officials to keep the school open. Healthy Start Academy won the case and was able to continue teaching Durham’s disadvantaged youth regardless of race or ethnicity.
Healthy Start Academy garnered further national attention when teacher Claudia Daye-Kirkley addressed the 2000 Republican National Convention. The George W. Bush election campaign invited her as a representative of Healthy Start Academy’s accomplishments, the same kind of accomplishments Bush was aiming for with his proposed No Child Left Behind Act, which has now become national law.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, known as NCLB and pronounced “nicklebee” in the education community, is a new trial for Healthy Start Academy. The Act is a sweeping reform of the federal role in kindergarten through 12th-grade education. It has increased flexibility and local control of all schools, something Healthy Start Academy is well accustomed. However, it also increased school accountability through testing, which does not bode well for Healthy Start Academy.
Although the students have performed phenomenally on the Iowa test, the students have not scored well on the ABCs of Public Education, which is the testing program North Carolina uses to determine school performance. Consistently, Healthy Start Academy students have tested within the 40 to 60 percentile range.
Why the discrepancy between the Iowa and the ABCs tests?
“N.C. end of year tests are bad for public schools and even worse for charter schools,” Gerber explains, in form for an education reform lobbyist. He points out that the tests don’t account for the backgrounds of the students taking them, nor do they follow specific students to chart individual improvement.
Danner diplomatically clarifies that Healthy Start Academy has a focus on teaching a sound foundation of lifelong skills rather than a focus on teaching to pass a test. However, he has no fears that Healthy Start Academy cannot overcome the problem with ABCs scores.
“This school looks at children as a piece of coal,” he says with a smile and his hands in front of him, as though he were holding a lump between his palms. “We take that coal and put it in a refinery. Before they leave us, we want diamonds. We have diamonds in the rough.”
Back in Rollins’ sixth-grade classroom, the uproar of the class intuitively hushes when a diamond discovery is imminent.
Rollins is barreling through a lecture about the ideal of beauty in Greek and Roman art when Anthony Harrison raises his hand. The rough classroom hubbub dissipates and, one by one, eyes turn to his desk as he speaks.
“But Mr. Rollins, what about if, like, you might have a gorilla on pictures? You might think that’s beautiful. Beauty doesn’t have to be one thing.”
“That’s a good point, that’s a good point,” Rollins responds, capping his black marker to address Anthony and the class. “You gotta remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“If you can influence how a person sees things, you control a lot. It’s the power of an idea.”
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last updated: 4.12.03