Lifestyle:The Inner-City Prep School Experience

In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence.

Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT — “daedal,” “holus-bolus,” “calamari” — are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.

Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast’s Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny’s.

Every Sunday night, 325 students in grades 6 through 12, most of them African-American, most from single-parent, lower-income families in Southeast and Northeast, pass through the gates of SEED — the first inner-city public boarding school in the country, with admission by lottery. And for the next five days they do what other prep-school kids do: in uniforms of pressed khaki pants and polo shirts, they take classes in Spanish, precalculus, U.S. history and other subjects. They meet with staff members at the school’s College Café to talk about college applications. They spend their afternoons in chess clubs, on the basketball court or in poetry workshops.

Then, after school on Friday, they head back home, lugging duffel bags, suitcases and garbage bags serving as suitcases. For 48 hours, they leave SEED’s protected, grassy campus to return to their neighborhoods — the ones that created the need for charter schools like SEED in the first place. That ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school’s unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.

At 7:20 on a Friday morning in a bathroom in the girls’ dorm at SEED, Reneka Blackmone, who is 17, was standing in front of a mirror, surrounded by posters of Queen Latifah, Beyoncé and Naomi Campbell, brushing her teeth. Witty and self-deprecating, Reneka often performs her way through her day, dabbing beauty marks on her soft, dimpled cheeks with a mascara wand, imitating models on catwalks and freestyle rapping. But this morning she was preoccupied with the busy day ahead: Spanish class, an oral presentation on Charles Darwin for world history, classes in business management and music. Then there was the weekend to think about. At 3:30, the last bell of the week would ring and Reneka would be freed from the beige brick dorms, the study halls, the uniforms, the dining-hall food, the no-MySpace, no-Facebook, no-TV rules. She would also be freed from the reminders that teachers, administrators, counselors and resident assistants rain on her and other students 15-plus hours a day: tuck in your shirt, raise your hand, talk with respect, get to class on time, be nice to your classmates, study for your test, turn the lights out, get some sleep.

“Come on, baby, it’s late,” said a resident assistant, hands on her hips and old enough to be Reneka’s mother, as she stood in the doorway. Like all SEED students, Reneka belongs to a cluster of 12 to 15 students that is named after a college or university. The Howard House room Reneka and Quadidra Taylor shared was small and spare, with a desk, dresser and bed for each girl and a shared computer.

At 7:35, five minutes past the deadline to go to the dining hall for French toast, orange juice, apples and boxes of Golden Grahams, Reneka pulled on her uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue polo shirt. No plunging neckline, no huge hoop earrings, which are violations of the dress code. SEED’s 116-page Student-Parent Handbook, however, did say it “is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” So Reneka put on her faux Chanel rhinestone earrings, slipped on a chunky chain bracelet and spritzed her body with perfume, from her neck to her ankles. She was ready for the school day.

The night before, I asked the girls about their weekend plans. “Chillin’, talkin’, walkin’,” Quadidra said. For Reneka, Friday nights were often catch-up time on all she missed during the school week: four- to five-hour stretches of MTV, VH1 and cable-TV karaoke, her favorite steak-and-cheese sandwich and 11 or 12 hours of sleep a night. By Saturday morning, she would be at her aunt’s apartment in Northeast, in jeans, strappy sandals and tidy cornrows, before heading out again, past the drug dealer in the stairwell on his cellphone, down the street lined with two- and three-story brick apartment complexes, including the one where a man killed his girlfriend and her children, until she landed at her friend’s house. There, she would sit on the front porch as her friend, who graduated from high school last year, braided her 1-year-old son’s hair. Reneka and her friend would talk about, among other things, the kinds of girls they were not: “rollers — skates with no brakes,” hopping from one boy’s bed to another.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 8:40 am. It is filed under Featured and tagged with blacks, boarding school, cities, inner city, minorities, Prep School, urban. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.