When Jennifer DiFrancesco and her husband, J.T. Paulk, started looking for a home in the Baltimore area in 2006, acquaintances steered them away from the city, toward Lutherville or Timonium. But the suburbs just weren't their style. "We wanted more diversity," says DiFrancesco, a reverend and the associate pastor at the Second Presbyterian Church in Guilford. "White Republicans didn't always fit us. We intentionally picked living in the city."

They settled contentedly in a rowhouse in Charles Village just one block from the neighborhood public school, Margaret Brent ElementaryMiddle School.

But when it was time for their oldest daughter, Ellie, to start prekindergarten, they were again advised to look elsewhere.

The Margaret Brent school was a virtual island in Charles Village, a modern architectural interloper with a sweeping arch straddling North Calvert and St. Paul streets, surrounded by rowhouses of an earlier era. The school's architectural isolation hinted at deeper issues of social and racial segregation: The student body at Margaret Brent was predominantly poor and African American; the white middleclass parents of Charles Village sent their children to private schools, citywide public schools, or a growing number of city charter schools.

The neighbors' misgivings about the school may have been motivated by race and class, but their doubts were not unfounded. For decades, the academic standards at Margaret Brent had been dismal. "There wasn't as much dedication and commitment to children as there should have been," says Jacqueline WatersScofield, who took over as principal in 2006. Before she arrived, test scores were so low that the school received the lowest possible classification from the state—"reconstitution eligible"—putting it under strict state supervision.

Still, DiFrancesco wanted a closer look. She visited Margaret Brent, met with WatersScofield, and even joined the school's budget advisory committee. In the process, she discovered that there had been a dramatic transformation. "A lot of things we were told [before visiting the school] were blatantly wrong," she says. "And I'm glad we didn't listen."

All over Baltimore, city schools like Margaret Brent are suffering from a poor image that no longer holds true. An increasing number of city school children are meeting or exceeding standards on statewide test scores. According to Baltimore City Public Schools, the number of students from grades three to eight who scored "advanced" on statewide tests more than doubled from 2004 to 2009, from 2,561 to 6,355.

Enter the NeighborhoodSchool Partnership, a novel idea for an urban area: Instead of attempting the herculean task of transforming the worst schools (the city's school leaders are already trying to do that), the program, funded by the Goldseker Foundation, is pouring almost half a million dollars into spreading the good word about schools that are working well—and in the process, giving both the schools and the surrounding neighborhoods a boost.



The NeighborhoodSchool Partnership program is an outgrowth of Healthy Neighborhoods, a nonprofit organization started by the Goldseker Foundation in 2001 and funded by numerous banks and foundations. The approach taken by Healthy Neighborhoods was counter to what Baltimore, other cities, and the federal government had done in the past. Baltimore was a national leader, dating back to the 1960s, in spending millions of federal dollars to rejuvenate some of the city's worst slums. Some efforts, like the "dollar house" program, which offered homes for a buck to anyone willing to fix them up and live in them, transformed communities like Otterbein near the Inner Harbor and Sterling Street in East Baltimore. Others, like rehabbing and selling entire blocks of houses at reduced prices in Park Heights in Northwest, failed amid the city's heroin epidemic, high crime rate, and abject poverty.

The Healthy Neighborhoods approach, in comparison, is based on building a market for housing in more stable "middle neighborhoods," encouraging residents and newcomers to invest both time and money. It does this through what amounts to a selfhelp program for communities, encouraging residents to identify the things that make their neighborhoods unique and valuable. Homeowners, bolstered by targeted investments from developers and philanthropists, then prime the pump for more development. "We're all drawn to the worst problems in the toughest places," says Healthy Neighborhoods President Mark Sissman. "It makes sense to build a neighborhood from the strongest blocks outward, but housing programs all do the opposite."

This shift—away from the most bombedout neighborhoods and toward "the strongest blocks"—has yielded impressive results over the past decade in neighborhoods throughout the city, many of which have received support from Sissman's organization. (See "The Color Line," Feb. '10 Urbanite.) Today Healthy Neighborhoods works in forty-one communities, including Patterson Park, Highlandtown, Greektown, and Bayview in East Baltimore; Greater Lauraville and Belair-Edison in Northeast; Coppin Heights, Mondawmin, and Edmondson Village on the west side; and Greater Homewood in North Baltimore. Funds go toward home renovations, acquiring vacant houses for rehabilitation, decreasing the time houses are on the market, and increasing the city's tax base.

The idea to expand the Healthy Neighborhoods concept to local schools in some of these neighborhoods came from Goldseker Foundation President Tim Armbruster and the foundation's program officer, Laurie Latuda. After so many years of city public schools getting a bum rap in their own communities, Ambruster says he wanted to take another look at how schools were performing in the areas where Healthy Neighborhoods worked, especially since the reform efforts of city public schools CEO Andres Alonso.

In the fall of 2008, Latuda began to pore over the schools data. Her question: How well were local schools—both public and private—faring, compared to the best schools in the city and the state? "For decades these schools were seen as liabilities in neighborhoods. We were trying to test the evidence," she says.

Latuda started with test scores, and what she found was surprising: Many of the public schools within the fortyone targeted neighborhoods were not only beating citywide scores in reading and math, she says, but sometimes also statewide test scores.

She continued checking school attendance records, as well as parent satisfaction surveys and safety records, and found that many of the schools were above average, even by statewide standards.

After looking at all the data, Latuda and Armbruster concluded that in terms of community development, the schools should be viewed as assets, not liabilities. If they could change the perception of the schools, they could draw people into these neighborhoods—and at the same time, provide a real benefit for the schools, too. There was a hidden synergy that just needed to be excavated.

Last July, Goldseker put out a request for proposals for partnerships between neighborhood organizations and local schools, making it clear that poorly performing schools were not eligible. The money would go toward connecting each neighborhood with its schools—"to bring the school into the neighborhood," says Latuda, "and the neighborhood into the school."

School reform is not the end goal, says Ambruster: "We were very intentional to describe this as an extension of community development work."

Paul Brophy, a nationally known consultant in housing and neighborhood improvement and an advisor to the Goldseker Foundation, says the idea of using schools as magnets for urban development "is fairly unique." The most comparable effort, he says, is a partnership between the University of Chicago and that city's South Side, where the university helped found four public charter schools ten years ago.

Today, these neighborhood charter schools have long waiting lists, high test scores, and high graduation rates, says Hank Webber, former vice president for community and government affairs at the University of Chicago, who now works at Washington University in St. Louis. "The schools were laboratory schools to test new ideas, but also the key ingredients in revitalizing communities.

"There are three things you need to revitalize a community," says Webber: Safety, quality housing, and quality education.



At the Margaret Brent school in Charles Village, Principal WatersScofield felt that she had already come a long way toward providing quality education. In the three years she'd been at the school, she had brought in new teachers, raised academic standards to pull students up to grade level, and made sure teachers were using techniques that would improve student test scores. Today, the school's scores, while still low in its middle school grades, have significantly improved in the elementary grades, with some grades exceeding the state average. (Last year 100 percent of the fourth graders were either proficient or advanced in math, compared with 89 percent statewide.) The school is an inviting place. "I don't want [my office]
to be an old fashioned principal's office. I don't want the children to feel like they're going into a dungeon," says WatersScofield, who goes by the nickname "Dr. J." "I want to appeal to their better values. I want them to know that we expect them to be responsible for what they do."

Still, the school couldn't seem to shake its image problem, so when the Greater Homewood Community Corp. approached her about the NeighborhoodSchool Partnership, Waters-Scofield jumped at the chance to apply. Organizers began their application process for a partnership grant by holding focus groups with young families, most of whom had never set foot in either Margaret Brent or the nearby Barclay Elementary/Middle School. "Almost everything we heard about the schools and about Baltimore schools in general was fairly negative," says Karen DeCamp, Greater Homewood's director of neighborhood programs. "Almost every bit of it was second- or third-hand."

Few of the parents had even heard about Alonso's reform efforts. Parents said they heard the local schools were "very lowachieving: ‘They're not academically rich places. We don't perceive them as nurturing places we would want to send our children,'" DeCamp says. Some said they'd even heard there were girl gangs at Barclay. "It's almost laughable. It's just not true," DeCamp says.

Jennifer DiFrancesco, whose daughter Ellie was by that time enrolled in prekindergarten at Margaret Brent, recalls her husband standing up at one of the meetings. "It's not like that at all," he said, reassuring the group about the family's positive experiences. One person in the room confessed, "This is the first time I've heard from anyone who's been inside of the school."

At the meetings, those inside the schools get a few lessons from outside as well. "I had to broaden my perspective and look at it from the point of view of a young parent," says WatersScofield, who has worked in Baltimore City public schools as a teacher and principal for thirty-seven years. "That was eye-opening. Here I am, a veteran. I thought I knew what parents wanted, but no, I didn't know what they wanted."

Parents said they were looking for a school that would focus on the whole child, says Greater Homewood's DeCamp, one that was more like some of the new public charter schools that were so hard to get into. The group concluded that they wanted the grant to finance a themebased project curriculum, one that teaches students writing, math, history, architecture, transportation, and other subjects through research and tours of their own neighborhood. The grant money would pay for teacher training and curriculum development. In addition, Loyola University would give the school in-kind professional development.

Last December, organizers learned that the community corporation, Margaret Brent, and the Barclay school would each receive $35,000 to develop their new "thematic, projectbased" curriculum. DiFrancesco, who plans to send her younger daughter, Maggie, now 3, to Margaret Brent next year, hopes the new curriculum will begin to lure other parents to follow in her footsteps.

It might. Laura Scott, a neighborhood resident who has a 13month-old daughter, Avery, is already observing classes at Margaret Brent. She was so impressed on a recent visit by the engaging relationship between the teachers and children, she says, "If I had a child going to kindergarten next year I would send her without hesitation."

Both Scott and DiFrancesco, however, understand that the local school is a tougher sell for other parents who continue to consider the public schools too risky. "They don't feel like it's a safe bet yet," DiFrancesco says. She is working with a group called the Village Parents to help entice local parents. "If you don't step in and do it, nothing's going to ever change," she says.
WatersScofield knows it's a challenge to lure in the school's closest neighbors, but she is determined to charge ahead. "Even if they don't send their children here, we are going to do it anyway," she says of the new curriculum.

"Maybe they'll come next year."

—Joan Jacobson covered neighborhoods and housing for the Evening Sun and the Sun for twenty years. Her two children attend city public schools.