Word: brandon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Brandon was well on his way to joining the two-thirds of black males in Baltimore who don't graduate from high school - and perhaps the nearly 50% who end up in jail or on probation - when almost miraculously he was lifted out of that hellish environment and settled into a boarding school in rural Kenya. There, he and other Baltimore boys who had been forced to grow up too hard and fast got a second chance to experience childhood - to climb trees, collect insects, do their homework together, read mystery novels. After attending seventh and eighth grades in Kenya...
...author of Brandon's transformation was Robert Embry, head of the Abell Foundation, which invests $5 million a year in education in Baltimore. Six years ago, Embry canvassed principals of local middle schools to see what they needed most. More computers? New after-school programs? Every principal said the same thing: Help us remove the 5% of students who are disruptive and make it almost impossible for the other 95% to learn. It's a problem familiar to schools all over the U.S., especially urban ones like those in Baltimore - underfunded, often with unwieldy classes of 30 or more students...
...middle school enrollment - not nearly enough to achieve the classroom tranquillity in Baltimore that was the initial goal. But in its four years, Baraka has delivered an unexpected bonus. It has turned around the lives of most of the students who have gone there. Many of them, like Brandon, were bright and able to learn once they were removed from the negative influences of their neighborhoods and from their often troubled families. "The pattern for a lot of our kids is so devastating," says Kristy Ward, a teacher at Northeast Middle School in Baltimore. "They don't just need smaller...
...hell," says Brandon of his first year at Baraka. He kept talking back to his teachers, again and again, and landed in the "boma," a crude, isolated group of tents surrounded by thornbushes that Baraka used for punishment. For smaller matters like swearing or sleeping in class, discipline worked on a point system. Staying out of trouble earned students safaris, video nights and trips to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, three hours south of the school...
...Brandon had never really studied before; he hadn't brought a single book home from school. At Baraka he had to adjust to the rigorous classes designed to raise the students up to grade level. That typically meant cramming five years of learning into two years...