In a rare turnabout, Rodney and Leah Gunning Francis fled the suburbs for the city. And they did it for a school.

They left Webster Groves in 2011 so their two young boys could get into City Garden Montessori, a charter school in the Botanical Heights neighborhood — an area once known for drug sales and murders, not stellar education.

“We got a lot of, ‘Why would you want to do that? Why are you going? What about the boys?’” said Rodney Francis, who leads a social service agency near downtown.

Others are making the move with them. And their migration is seen by city leaders as promising evidence that good schools could reverse decades of population loss in St. Louis.

But whether the success of City Garden school is a momentous sign of things to come, or a mere anomaly, is unclear.

Over the past six years, parents have begun moving into the Shaw, Botanical Heights and Forest Park Southeast neighborhoods, as well as portions of Tiffany and Southwest Garden, to live within the attendance boundaries of City Garden.

They are drawn to a charter school whose reputation has grown since it opened in 2007. They like the school’s environmentally friendly building and the century-old Montessori model, focusing on small lessons, self-directed students and hands-on activities.

And now, the school can boast receiving a perfect score on a new rigorous state assessment — putting it on par with the elite school districts of Lindbergh, Ladue and Kirkwood.

“Getting the school in there was a major coup,” said Nancy Symeonoglou, president of the Botanical Heights Neighborhood Association.

Excitement over the school is so great that many say it has accomplished something rare even among other successful charter schools — it has boosted the revitalization of its surrounding neighborhoods.

Data to solidly document the school’s role in that revitalization aren’t available.

But it is seen by people such as Brent Crittenden, co-owner of UIC, a design and construction firm that has renovated or built about a dozen homes in the Botanical Heights neighborhood.

City Garden, he said, is a big draw.

“We normally lose those families to Webster Groves and Kirkwood,” Crittenden said. “We’re now able to retain those families.”

Ironically, attracting an influx of affluent families from outside threatens to disrupt the school’s mission of serving its economically and racially diverse neighborhoods.

And some say those tensions raise doubts about whether even the very best charter schools can be seen as part of a broader solution for the city’s ailing education landscape.

A DIFFERENT START

From its start, City Garden was a school driven by parents who wanted affordable Montessori education for their children. It began as a private, tuition-based preschool in Forest Park Southeast, primarily serving nearby families.

Because of parent demand, school organizers successfully petitioned the state to convert to a charter school. As such it became a publicly funded school that operates independently from St. Louis Public Schools.

It opened as an elementary charter school with just a few grades in the basement of Tyler Place Presbyterian Church on South Spring Avenue. The school added a grade each year, and now goes through eighth grade.

Its origins were in stark contrast to most of the city’s other charter schools, nearly all of which were larger and backed by for-profit management firms.

The school also stood out in another key way.

Its parent committee wanted City Garden to remain neighborhood-based, so leaders drew attendance boundaries.

Prior to City Garden, no charter school in St. Louis had limited enrollment to a specific area. Instead, the other schools draw from the entire city, many hoping to fill classrooms from the broadest possible population.

Critics of attendance boundaries say they can be used to turn charter schools into exclusive clubs, with lines drawn to favor higher socioeconomics. Those advantages, critics say, lead to gilded test scores.

But organizers of City Garden say their attendance boundary does not narrowly isolate wealth. Rather, the boundary circles neighborhoods that were 60 percent African-American, 40 percent white, with about 60 percent of households earning less than $40,000, when the school opened in 2007.

Under state law, anyone who lives in the school’s attendance boundary has an equal shot at being enrolled. Lotteries are held if the number of applicants exceeds class space.

Christie Huck, executive director of the school, said she’s frequently asked why the school doesn’t accept children from other parts of the city, as many other charter schools do.

“The reason we did it, we wanted to ensure we had a racially and economically diverse school,” she said. “We were also realistic about what we could do well.”

The diversity that the school draws from its neighborhood is what has attracted some families.

“We’re interested in our kids going to school and living around kids who are African-American,” said Leah Gunning Francis, a professor at Eden Seminary. “Kids who are Caucasian. Kids who are Hispanic. Kids who are Asian.”

BUILDING SUCCESS

One recent morning, 30 children went about their individual lessons in a blended-age classroom — a hallmark of a Montessori school. Second-grader Roger “Tre” Humphries focused on an exercise using colorful triangles to make other shapes, such as trapezoids and pentagons.

Across the room, Eliot Mohr, a first-grader, worked on addition. Beside him, third-grader Xenia Lopez labeled countries on a paper map of Africa.

“I’m doing all the ones I remember clearly,” Xenia said. “Ethiopia. Let’s see. Ethiopia is right here.”

Test scores at City Garden keep climbing. Last year, 73 percent of children at the school passed the reading section of the Missouri Assessment Program, compared with 30 percent of children in the city school system. The school’s performance in math was much weaker, but still on par with the state, at 54 percent. In city schools, 27 percent passed math last year.

This year, the school has begun getting calls from parents in affluent school districts — only to learn they have to live in the 63110 ZIP code.

“Literally, I get calls from the county who say it’s not fair,” said Pat Garrett, the school’s outreach coordinator.

The neighborhood immediately surrounding the school is undergoing a transformation. A French pastry shop recently opened next door. A wine bar recently opened on the next block.

This is McRee Town, rebranded Botanical Heights in an effort to shed a reputation of drug dealing and violence.

After Interstate 44 came through the area in the 1960s, splitting it from Shaw to the south, McRee Town became a haven for gang violence, arson and despair. It was the focus of numerous failed redevelopment attempts. Then in 2003, developer McBride and Sons replaced six blocks of largely abandoned structures with suburban-style homes.

Changes came to a halt when the recession hit. Then in August, City Garden moved into a renovated warehouse.

Transformation is once again moving down McRee Avenue. Vacant lots are being filled with “green” homes. And about half have been sold to couples with children relocating from other parts of the city, said Crittenden, the developer who also renovated the City Garden building at 1618 Tower Grove Avenue.

Last fall, a new playground went up at Thurman and Blaine avenues. Though vacant homes remain in abundance, about a dozen are in the process of being torn down and replaced.

“The badness is done. It’s over with. There’s no way this area could get the way it was 15 years ago,” said Terry Garrison, who moved to the neighborhood in 1971.

“I know a lot of people’s kids that do go up there,” Garrison said of City Garden. “It’s probably the best thing they’ve done here in a long, long time.”

HARDER TO GET IN

Even for those living in the school’s attendance boundaries, there’s no longer guarantee of admission. In fact, the chances of enrolling a child at City Garden get slimmer each year.

In past years, school officials knocked on doors over the summer looking for students. Last year, demand barely exceeded the number of kindergarten spots, so the school held its first lottery for those in the primary enrollment zone.

This year, there are twice the number of applications than available slots for kindergarten, said Garrett, the outreach coordinator. The demand is similar for open spots in elementary grades.

“We got in at just the right time,” said Kira Banks, who moved with her family from Bloomington, Ill., to the Southwest Garden neighborhood in 2010. Her oldest son was admitted to the school last year by lottery. He now does third-grade math as a kindergartner.

That kind of intense competition to get into a charter school is new to St. Louis.

While charter schools have attracted more than 10,000 students in the city, they’ve generally done so through heavy recruitment. In some cases, that marketing has filled classrooms in even subpar schools. The Imagine network of charter schools, for example, was closed by the state for academic failure, despite enrolling more than 3,500 children.

Charter school boosters see City Garden as exactly the kind of school that could trigger genuine school reform in St. Louis. And they envision potentially dozens sprouting up where they are needed most.

“This is not an anomaly. This is our strategy,” said Robbyn Wahby, education liaison to Mayor Francis Slay.

She said she has urged City Garden repeatedly to open a second school. KIPP Inspire, Gateway Science Academy and St. Louis Language Immersion are others showing success that she’d like to see grow.

“Now we need to replicate,” Wahby said.

PRESERVING THE MISSION

Some residents and community activists say the school’s success could result in a spike in property values that could price out the elderly and other low-income renters.

“Gentrification is happening,” said John Pachak, director of Midtown Catholic Charities, which serves low-income families in the area. “The school is trying to be racially and economic integrated to the extent that they can.”

Changes are evident in the school’s demographics. Since 2007, the percentage of pupils at the school on free and reduced-price lunches, a marker of poverty, dropped to 41 percent in 2012 from almost 53 percent in 2009, according to state data.

Parents and nearby residents say the school will become victim of its own success if low-income families are lost from the neighborhood mix.

“People start moving in and people start getting pushed out,” said Banks, a parent who has been part of the conversation. “It’s a school that’s in a neighborhood that’s shifting.”

Community activists applaud City Garden for creating a successful school with strong ties to its neighborhood. But they also emphasize that in a city with thousands of school-age children, a school of 300 pupils is a small island in a big ocean.

“One school isn’t the answer,” Pachak said. “The public school two blocks away is a failing school. It’s the same old story. If you can’t replicate what works, you’re only reaching a limited audience.”

That observation exposes what some see as a flaw in the charter school movement. They argue that even when charter schools are successful, they are more likely to benefit children with motivated parents, including those who have the means to relocate to enroll there.

And many times, what works at one school doesn’t work at another.

Huck says she’s often approached by charter school organizers about how to start a successful school.

“It literally grew out of the parents who came together and talked,” Huck said. And, she said, “We recognize our role in the community. That’s why we’re growing gradually and slowly.”

Huck said school leaders are concerned about the social health of the neighborhood. In the last month, City Garden parents, school leaders and community activists began talking informally about ways to keep low-income housing in the school’s enrollment zone.

Crittenden said his firm has plans to build less-expensive homes later this year. The company wants an economically diverse neighborhood, he added.

Soon, Patrice Liddell said, she’ll be forced to leave her apartment so it can be renovated. She will move a block away.

Next spring, she said, she’ll apply for her daughter, Danielle, to enroll in City Garden’s kindergarten, and hope for the best. Her daughter attends preschool there, and her son is at Adams School, a few blocks to the south.

“I love City Garden. I really don’t want her to go to Adams,” Liddell said. The lottery, she said, “is the only thing I don’t like” about the school. “It’s not fair to the other kids and parents.”