There?s a trailer in a courtyard off Eager Street where vocabulary words adorn the classroom walls and college brochures pile up on a spare desk. Charles Dugger weaves history lessons into his literature classes here; students have talked about a William Faulkner short story beneath the poster of Malcolm X.
Four teenage boys looked up from their worksheets recently as Dugger led a classroom tour. They were tall and lanky and slightly distracted ? nothing overtly unusual but for their green inmate jumpsuits.
“This isn?t an ordinary setting,” Eager Street Academy Principal James Scofield said. Within the high stone walls of the Baltimore City Detention Center, beyond the metal detector and the body searches, are his 136 students: teenagers charged as adults with the most serious crimes, accused rapists and alleged murderers among them.
Until a judge sends them to prison or down to the juvenile system, or a jury sets them free, they live in their own wing of the city complex.
And they come to the courtyard to learn.
Dugger?s lessons included defining “inoculate” and “melancholy,” while across the hall about two dozen boys on a GED track sat through an early afternoon class. Later on they would have lunch and recreation time, tutoring and evening counseling sessions.
“You try to give them as much as you can,” Dugger said, “with the time that we have them.”
Students typically spend about six months at Eager Street, which puts it in the potentially awkward position of being a layover school. But motivation in class can be a practical matter for teens hoping to impress a judge in court. And Scofield said he pushes them to do the same work as other Baltimore students. That goal demands his teachers to be far more than academics.
“All of us here do counseling. Every single person here,” he said. Some students come in off the streets, facing structure for the first time in their lives, he said, and “some of them have serious abandonment issues. ?Are you going to be here?? I?m going to be here.”
“These kids are young enough, no matter how bad their crime is,” Lt. Robert Edwards said, they?re “going to get back to society.” Better for a teen to return home not wrecked by his jail experience, Edwards said, but a “whole person,” with at least a “chance at life.”
