Friendship Academy inspires hope among parents of city schoolchildren. The science-themed middle-high school is slated to replace the troubled Canton Middle this fall, and the new school?s operators boast a 90 percent graduation rate at others they run.Now if only they could win over the school?s neighbors.
Canton residents, frustrated by students vandalizing, assaulting people and loitering, expressed outrage at a meeting Thursday night. Critics say school officials excluded them from planning the privately operated school inside the Canton Middle building.
After receiving complaints from his constituents, City Councilman Jim Kraft, D-District 1, threatened to hold up the school budget until school officials heed residents? concerns.
“Why did the school board do this behind our backs?” Kraft asked. “People are afraid to come out of their houses between 2:30 and 4 p.m.”
Brian Morris, president of the city school board, said he?s troubled by Kraft?s comments about the school, which buses in black students from all over the city into Canton, a predominantly white neighborhood.
“It smacks of code words that we don?t want those black kids in Canton,” Morris said. “It?s ridiculous to be having this conversation when that facility has been used for many, many years as a school, and we want to continue to use it to educate the children of Baltimore.”
“I just want everyone to give this new school a chance,” said Lisa Aull, a mother of a seventh-grader and vice president of Canton Middle?s Parent-Teacher Organization.
Ariana Morgan, mother of a seventh-grader and president of the PTO, said she?s excited about her daughter?s going to the new middle-high school.
“Our children deserve a better education,” she said. “People need to embrace it.”
Friendship and five other combined city middle-high schools, to be run by outside operators, are part of schools chief Andres Alonso?s effort to reform troubled schools.
Five Friendship Academies in the Washington area have a 90 percent graduation rate, and see 80 percent of students accepted to college.
