Tuesday editorial: Hope rings out
In a ritual playing out at schools across the region, the buses started pulling up to Clyde C. Miller Career Academy at 6:45 a.m. Monday. The angular steel and glass building at Bell Avenue and North Grand Boulevard, just north of Powell Symphony Hall, started coming alive. The scene at Miller Academy, while typical, deserves special attention.
School bells here ring with hope for the beleaguered St. Louis Public Schools. The Miller Career Academy kids were smartly turned out in the school uniform: khaki pants, shorts or skirts paired with sharp white or blue sports shirts adorned with the school insignia.
The more than 750 high school students, including 180 freshman, started filing in for their first day of classes. The upper-class students picked up their schedules in stages. The wide-eyed freshmen, who’d already been through the school with their families for orientation, buzzed through the hallways searching for their lockers. Everybody had to be seated by 7:30 a.m.
What a morning it was: bright, clear skies and cool, dry, sweet-smelling air.
The first day of the school year is reminiscent of nothing so much as baseball’s opening day. The slate is clean. The pendulum is at the top of the arc. Everybody is in contention. There’s nothing not to like.
And so it is at Miller Career Academy the first day of this school year.
The school’s demographic profile is typical of the entire St. Louis district: 93 percent of the students are African-American; 65 percent to 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.
This school had 152 graduates this spring; 141 of them were accepted to college, and 132 of them enrolled, said Principal Stephen D. Warmack. This profile is not typical of the St. Louis district.
Prospective students must apply to be admitted to Miller Career Academy. They must sit for an interview. They must write an essay. The applications are reviewed by a committee of teachers.
Mr. Warmack pulled out an essay from a stack of this year’s applicants. This one was by an incoming freshman who wants “to be different from every young man” who “walks around lost thinking we don’t have a future.” He hopes “to play sports, and enjoy just being a kid.” But he strives to “become a great man of standards,” something he believes “will come by taking it one day at a time,” but will require him to “do (his) best, here and now.”
Mr. Warmack’s office has a window onto the school’s central corridor. Midmorning he sees a young teacher, Cates Mallaney, walk down the hall. He calls her in.
Ms. Mallaney is from Centerville, Ohio. She is one year out of college. Bright and poised, she’s starting her second year at Miller Career Academy, teaching biology and anatomy.
Ms. Mallaney will complete her two-year commitment with the celebrated Teach for America program at the end of this year. She hopes to stay in the region and continue with St. Louis Public Schools. She is hopeful about its future.
Ms. Mallaney sees the district’s scaled-down size (fewer than 27,000 students were expected to enroll this year) as a reason for optimism. “With a smaller district, it’s easier to make change,” she said.
That’s a thought worth holding on to.
(Pictured: Teacher Andrew Gallagher leads a 12th-grade English literature class on the first day of the school year at St. Louis Public Schools’ Clyde C. Miller Career Academy. Photo by Eddie Roth)
Hmmmm. I don’t know St. Louis very well, but I congratulate the school. I suspect that the parents of the students are high middle income. That is good,
(Without testing, you can rate students achievments by the incomes of the parents with 95 percent accuracy)
The clowns who rage against school choice claim that private schools would cherry pick the best students, leaving only the hard cases for the public schools to deal with. This is pretty much the same thing.
And it was interesting to note that you focused on a Teach for America teacher. The same clowns who protested against the state takeover were also very vocal in their opposition to Teach for America. Perhaps they were afraid people would discover that Teach for America teachers would outperform experienced certified union members. Gee, what a surprise!
Get your facts straight Nick. The “clowns” did not protest Teach for America. We voted to prefer educated, professional teachers if the choice came down to letting go an experienced teacher in favor of a temporary Teach for America employee. We at no point said or felt that Teach for America employees were not good people or could not be good teachers. The fact remains they are temporary, and building a quality district requires some stability in teaching staff. Good teaching staff, of course, not bad ones.
Then again, considering the stunningly misplaced cost-cutting priorities of the current leadership which led to my daughter’s school having 96 5th graders show up to a school with ONE fifth grade teacher there to teach them, at this point it seems any teachers would be helpful, certified or not.
So clown or not, I still protest the state takeover. That sort of thing didn’t happen with Dr. Bourisaw in charge.