Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Getting Started, Getting Bearings GETTING STARTED Bobby English decided to chair the education project in order to create the “study-action group for schools.” As community and university partners, she and I began to discuss the details in January 1995. We said little about the entity’s purpose or goals, beyond improving education. We talked about its first activities. It would interview parents and school staff to assess the schools and to develop an action plan. A coordinating committee would develop and oversee it. English suggested five members besides herself and me. Two—David Casey and Carolyn Boitnott—had led the Southeast planning process with her. Another—Ed Rutkowski—had become increasingly active in that process as it went on. A fourth—Irona Pope—had participated in planning, and English knew her from several years’ assistance to the school where Pope worked. The fifth—Peggy Roth—had not taken part in planning but knew the schools. Roth and Pope were the only ones whose children were or had been students in the city public schools. They also were the only members who might not be considered middle class. Roth lived in the heart of working-class Canton. She had high aspirations for her two daughters and cared a great deal about their schools. She had recently finished a Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) assignment staffing a low-key SECO education initiative. She had voluminous notes on school interviews and meetings, definite views of many principals and teachers, and ideas about what would improve the schools. She offered the best direct understanding of the perspective of working-class, white families, and she did not hesitate to offer judgments about schools. 59 Irona Pope, the only African American in the group, was a parent liaison at City Springs Elementary School. The purpose of her federally funded position was to involve low-income parents in school. She had grown up in one of Southeast Baltimore’s first public housing projects but had gone on to buy a house elsewhere in the city. From making her way, she had come to know community activists, politicians, public agency staff, and civic leaders. Her unflagging message to parents was to take responsibility for themselves and their children. She would advocate for almost anything “her parents” needed. She never hesitated to speak her mind, and she minced no words when talking about school problems. Persistently, she would explain how poor and black students did not get what they deserved. In December 2000, Baltimore Magazine would include her, along with Ed Rutkowski, among ten of “Baltimore’s Best.” Rutkowski was the only other group member who had grown up in Southeast Baltimore. He was unusual among those born there, in going to college and moving away to follow a career in computer programming. He had returned to improve the community. He concentrated on what he came to call the “Patterson Park Urban Transition Zone,” an area of racial, economic, and housing transition. With Marcus Pollock, a black activist, he wrote and circulated The Urban Transition Zone: A Place Worth a Fight (Pollock and Rutkowski 1998), proposing “a strategy for urban stabilization and revitalization.” Rutkowski had an inductive style, taking empirical evidence seriously. Paying keen attention to changes in individual dwelling units, for example, he slowly built up theories of the local housing market and ideas for influencing it. Carefully seeking bold remedies for community problems, he drew the attention of civic leaders, agency staff, and funders who wanted a broad approach for redeeming one of Baltimore’s slipping neighborhoods. He was deeply committed to improving schools because of what they meant to community life. Carolyn Boitnott was one of an early wave of middle-class people to move to Southeast Baltimore from the suburbs. After raising children in Baltimore County, where she had been active in the PTA, she and her husband resettled in Butcher’s Hill, a neighborhood of stately, nineteenth-century homes. She became a professional volunteer and devoted her full time to neighborhood and citywide activities. The Citizens Planning and Housing Association gave her its annual award for civic improvement. She believed that society should allocate wealth equitably, and she was committed to a reasoned, well-ordered process of involving community members in planning and acting. David Casey was a Methodist minister by training and passion, though at this time he had no permanent church and was working with a nonprofit housing developer. He had children but sent them to private school...