Black ministers start schools to fill in gaps
When Cheryl Daughrity's two daughters were young, they did just fine in their St. Louis public elementary schools, getting mostly A's and B's. But as they reached middle school, the troubles began.
Class sizes swelled, students fought in the hallways, and basic materials such as pencils and paper were in short supply. The girls' grades, attitude, and self-esteem suffered.
At Mrs. Daughrity's inner-city church, conversations gravitated toward the poor condition of St. Louis public schools, which are technically unaccredited and only a legality or two away from state takeover. The problem was glaringly apparent in a Sunday school filled with children only marginally literate.
Bishop Lawrence Wooten, her pastor at the Church of God in Christ, was equally fed up. The former educator teamed up with other local ministers to found the St. Louis Academies, two nonreligious K-10 schools that opened this fall on a shoestring budget.
During their first semester at the new school, Daughrity's daughters thrived. One, who had dropped back a grade, was promoted within 90 days of enrolling, and both girls are earning A's and B's.
"I gave my daughters a choice either to stay or go back to public school," says Daughrity. "They said, 'Mom, [the academies] don't have a lot of different things like dances, but what we do have here are teachers who care about us.' The academies are a labor of love, and it shows."
At wits' end over the slow pace of school reform and the widening gap in educational achievement between cities and suburbs, African-American parents in major urban areas are turning to what has long been the institutional cornerstone of inner-city communities - the churches - as their last, best hope for change.
And the churches are responding. Sponsoring schools is seen as a natural extension of their long tradition of community outreach.
Here in St. Louis, the group led by Bishop Wooten spent two years studying the possibility of opening as many as six schools in the spirit of community service, though not in the name of religion. "The situation had become desperate," he says. "It is not our intent to be critical of the public schools, but they simply weren't meeting the needs of our kids. We felt we could and should take a leadership role in addressing the problem."
The St. Louis Academies, housed in two former parochial school buildings, are considered private at the moment, but are tuition-free, thanks to church donations, a loan from a Phoenix-based educational institution, and some federal funding for lunch and after-school programs.
The curriculum at the academies is best described as meat and potatoes. Fads are out, the basics in.
"Our philosophy is very simple," says Tim Daniels, executive director of the academies. "If our kids can't read or understand math at their grade level, that's what they do, even if it's for six or seven hours a day, so they can get up to grade level. Anything else you try - special programs, computers labs - aren't going to work if the kids can't read to begin with."
When enrollment began last summer, the first sign-ups came from Wooten's church and other congregations. But soon, parents from across the city caught wind of the opportunity. In addition to the 450 pupils currently enrolled at the two schools, there is a considerable waiting list.
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