A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation’s Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city’s newest public high school, you’ll see blue blazers, khakis, gold and purple school ties, confident handshakes, door holding, and eye contact, but the real salvation might come from the heart-to-hearts and hard lessons handled with care. It’s a school culture aimed at teaching teenaged boys how they can right their own paths, and girls—according to the equal-in-all-things reflex—ought not be left behind.
The freshman class at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School in D.C.’s Deanwood neighborhood was rebounding from back-to-back snow days when I visited its morning meeting earlier this year. The boys and the faculty took their seats around the edges of a rectangular meeting room that doubles as the dining hall. Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama looked on—their portraits posted on the wall, exemplars of greatness—while students who came in late quietly reported to their teachers.
Principal Ben Williams made the rounds, checking in with a few students here and there while they settled in for the school’s core ritual. They might all be a little out of sorts, he warned, after missing two days in mid-March—a first for Ron Brown, but then so is everything. After a few boilerplate announcements, the lights went down and everyone turned their attention to the day’s discussion starter: a clip from the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which Will Smith breaks down, from cocky and resentful to tearful and dejected, in the arms of his Uncle Phil when Will’s absentee father has disappointed him again.
Adults in the room kicked it off, and then a few brave souls among the school’s 105 students followed their lead, one noting Will’s flamboyance and compensatory good humor: his armor. But most of the boys sat quietly and listened with observable interest while their teachers talked about what’s underneath the armor men wear. A male teacher in his late twenties or early thirties talked of an “unsettled part of you to explore,” a sense of abandonment that stays with you until you can’t ignore it—but you, he addressed the students, the “young kings,” you can have these discussions now. Another opened up about his own sense of abandonment, thinking as a young man, “I’m pretty great; why shouldn’t they want me?” An English teacher scanned the student body for attentive eyes and invoked their literary readings and essays—you know these themes, she reminded her boys. (And from loftier sources than a sitcom, a certain encouraging edge in her voice suggested.)
At RBHS, students are “monarchs,” their mascot the head of a crowned lion facing head-on, and the teachers and staff who counsel and corral them—homeroom advisers in typical public school parlance—are the “council of elders.” “If we’re going to move these young men and grow these young men, we have to model what we expect them to do,” Williams told me. Their work is countercultural, he noted. “It doesn’t matter race or ethnicity, it’s uncommon for a 14-year-old young man to be able to express themselves and especially to be able to feel safe enough to do that in a school environment amongst their peers.” They’re talking about their feelings in front of their friends a mere seven months into the life of this brand-new school. “That’s a tremendous shift for many of our young men, especially considering the communities they come from,” Williams said. His office walls are covered in easel paper scrawled with data and ideas; students tend to come to RBHS trailing academically. “Our young people, because of where they are, are not generally going to be able to meet what other people might expect,” he said, “but if we can grow them two or three grade levels to help them get on par with the peers that are at that level, then we’ve done a good job.” The underlying goal, more fundamental than test scores, is cultural uplift, teaching boys to ask for help—having girls around necessarily undermines this mission—and to understand what it means to be men.
RBHS grew out of a commitment from Mayor Muriel Bowser and former chancellor of schools Kaya Henderson—and a $20 million pool of public and private funds—to address the high rate at which young black men fall behind and drop out of high school in D.C., where the four-year graduation rate is 91 percent for whites, 69 percent for Latinos, and 68 percent for African Americans; it’s 76 percent for girls and 63 percent for boys. In 2015, Bowser gave 100 boys Obama’s The Audacity of Hope for vacation reading and learned from their reaction that they most wanted mentorship. When officials get the question “What about the girls?” they point out the undeniable differences between boys’ and girls’ needs. Still, in response to that repeated question, the school system hosted listening sessions with 100 young women of color this spring, fourth graders to high school seniors. Rather than a school of their own, they wanted time together to build each other up and learn from older girls. The all-girl offerings include a citywide conference for young women of color on the first Saturday in June, a new grant program, and a series of workshops in the coming school year—no boys allowed. At the first conference, held earlier this month, chancellor of schools Antwan Wilson told me the eventual outcome of these efforts might still be a public girls’ school.
For now, Ron Brown’s closest complement in D.C. sits due south, also east of the Anacostia, though the Washington School for Girls is not a public school but an all-scholarship Catholic pre-secondary institution that has grown since starting in 1997 to include two campuses and 140 students in grades three through eight. Today its middle school fills half the upper level of an arts center boasting ballet studios and a theater the student body could fill twice with room to spare, while girls in grades three through five have gone to a second campus, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, not 10 minutes away.
Like the new Ron Brown, the Washington School for Girls was built from the ground up and works to reroute young lives. Neither especially bears the influence of any hot-trending education reform movement; both serve almost exclusively African-American students, by virtue of need rather than racial proscription. (WSG, which does not cite race in its mission, has had perhaps one Latina graduate in its 20 years, per one administrator’s recollection.) And both aim for spiritual intervention. RBHS, while as secular as can be (a needless disclaimer, but let’s not trouble the ACLU any further), scoops up souls statistically predisposed to stray—or students demographically likeliest to drop out. Both begin with a fairly simple formula for sanctuary: Ron Brown has discussion circles and daily meetings, Washington School for Girls morning prayer.
WSG began as an after-school program in the mid-nineties. Head of school Mary Bourdon, a sister since her college years, belongs to the order Religious of Jesus and Mary, who dedicate their lives to educating the poor. Serving her calling through social work and in-school counseling, Sister Mary saw the need for a girls’ school. She and her sisters brought together a founding circle of women from the National Council of Negro Women and the Society of the Holy Child Jesus; they decided the preteen years were the most important time to step in.
“We thought that’s the place at which young girls are deciding their future consciously and unconsciously,” Sister Mary told me. “We wanted to have the freedom to have faith exploration and to have faith expression in the school. We start every day with a prayer. It grounds the students.” The girl who read that day’s gospel, the story of Jesus healing at the pool of Bethesda, was so expressive her friends seemed torn between genuine admiration and wanting to tease her for overacting—admiration won. “It’s another example of girls being free,” Sister Mary said.
Kimberly Hopwood, the director of student life and graduate support, sends eighth-grade graduates to high school and often sees them off to college four years later. Keeping up with alumnae from the summer before their freshman year at high school until they’re college bound—holding them close while handing them off—makes for a delicate balance. “Making sure kids go where they need to go and do what they need to do—that’s pretty much it. We cannot be their parents, we can only encourage,” and they encourage academic exploration and self-knowledge, and are quick to check in if word gets back a graduate is falling behind in high school. “We’re the backup.”
Sister Mary told me about an eighth-grade student who’d returned triumphant from a shadow day at a top-shelf Catholic high school. They showered her with praise and offered a spot almost immediately, but she couldn’t be swayed from surveying all her options. As it should be. “If nothing else, our girls get that sense of freedom which a lot of women really don’t have,” she said, and she had in mind bigger decisions than the choice of high school. There are decisions a young woman must make with a hypothetical future family in mind. “It’s a little weakness to try to please someone else in what you do, even if it’s for the rest of your life,” Sister Mary said. “That should be the one decision based on what do I want.”
Black women defer to the demonstrable urgency for intervention in young black men’s lives, Hopwood offered as a partial explanation for the increased attention paid to boys-only schools. Publicity—including a forthcoming documentary to chronicle the first year, I’m told—has swirled around RBHS since they opened last summer. Jaztina Somerville, WSG class of 2006 and now an assistant in the school’s graduate support office, concurred. “I think it’s because there’s more of a need for that kind of environment for boys,” said Somerville, who went to Cesar Chavez, a charter high school, and Frostburg State University. She talked about her brother, who felt compelled to fit in, no matter what it took. “As black men living in the city,” she went on, “they face peer pressure in a way that we can’t really fathom.” So the need for a boys’ school seems greater, “at least in the parents’ minds” (and the school district’s, too). “We kind of already have our stuff in order,” Somerville said, explaining why girls wouldn’t ask for their own school while “boys need to start getting it together.”
The school-to-prison pipeline and generational poverty are familiar concepts even to those most protected from their sting; they’re mainstays of political discourse and must-read think pieces. Dependency on woman’s powerful character sustains a less-discussed cycle of matriarchy. “Often in black households, the mothers, the women are normally the backbone,” Somerville said, and Hopwood agreed. “If nothing else, our girls get that sense of freedom which a lot of women really don’t have,” Sister Mary told me. Middle school is the time to inspire it, she believes: That’s when a girl learns what interests her and wonders who she’ll be. Before she knows who she is, she might find the rest of her life spoken for.
Alice B. Lloyd is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
