When a 10th-grade student at the New School For Enterprise and Development missed two weeks of classes last fall, it was Tom Blagburn’s job to investigate.
He called the boy’s house a half-dozen times. Finally, he knocked on his door in Atlantic Terrace, in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of Anacostia. The boy’s father cracked the door. Blagburn identified himself as the New School’s head of security.
“Where’s your son?” Blagburn asked. “We miss him at school.”
The father, a house painter, said he had fallen off a ladder a month ago and broken his back. He had no health insurance and no one at home to care for him: “My son is all I have. I needed him to be at home.”
Back at the school on Bladensburg Road, Blagburn called Neil Albert, then D.C.’s deputy mayor for youth and families. Within a day, social workers had set up a system to help the painter. The boy returned to school.
“I helped get the government to move,” Blagburn tells me. “Often, this is what it takes to keep students in class.”
Classes at the New School — and Blagburn’s commitment and expertise — might end in June because the D.C. Public Charter School Board has revoked the school’s charter. At the moment, the charter board is attacking the school by leaking negative reports, and the New School’s trustees are calling the board’s actions improper.
What about the students? I have not met or heard of any who want their school to close. To be sure, it is not an educational model — yet. But for many teenagers coming from crime-ridden communities and violent schools, it is an oasis.
Tom Blagburn is one reason the school is a safe haven. A native Washingtonian, he graduated from Eastern High, got a degree from Pepperdine University and returned home to be a cop in 1979. He became the first director of community policing; he was the point person for youth and gang violence from 1992-95.
After retiring, Blagburn committed himself to working with the city’s toughest teens. He founded nonprofit companies to provide vocational training. Then he became the New School’s security chief.
“I’m able to see everything that goes on at that school,” he says. “I know there is plenty of disruption. We take kids who have trouble at home, who are not academically prepared, who bring beefs on the street to school.”
Using the New School as a platform, Blagburn has brought together social workers, police, children, musicians, ministers and others to create a student conflict-intervention model.
“I think the New School is doing the nurturing, providing the support and intervening in ways that can reach these students and keep them in school,” he says. “We have people who genuinely care.”
Tonight, the charter school board has scheduled a meeting to help parents of students at the New School begin finding alternatives once the school closes. It might find plenty of parents and students who will fight to keep the school open.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
