In her office at City Springs School at Lombard and Caroline streets in Southeast Baltimore, we find principal Rhonda L. Richetta in the midst of a normal day. A third-grader showed up who was never here before. The child was accompanied by his grandmother, who carried legal papers showing she had properly and systematically taken custody of the child.
“Took the kid from his own mother?” Richetta was asked.
“Yes.”
“Drugs?”
Richetta nodded briefly, then held up a chart on reading scores at the school. The vast percentage of kids are below grade level, some of them several grades below. Now Richetta was asked another question.
“How many of these children live in homes with two parents?”
“Maybe 1 percent,” she said.
There are 569 children at City Springs. You do the math. The kids are behind academically, and they go home to mothers — or grandmothers, or aunts — who are overworked and exhausted and, in some cases, do not much value the world of classrooms and academics. The children, therefore, are not precisely groomed for lives of marvelous success.
So here sits Richetta at her desk, and in a chair across from her we find Maria Broom. The name should be familiar. Years ago, she was a reporter for WJZ-TV but left to teach, and then to act in such Baltimore-based television dramas as “Homicide” and “The Wire.” Now she teaches in the theater department at the Baltimore School for the Arts. But she is here today as part of a new project, and she has another question for Richetta.
“Who read to these children when they were little?”
“No one,” says Richetta.
The words puncture the air and add to the children’s troubles. When there is no reading, the vocabulary is arrested. Attach this to the broken English of the street, and moodiness, and a child’s tendency to mutter and mumble, and the combination becomes a formula for failure.
This is why Broom has arrived, with a program she developed for elementary and middle school students. It’s called the Bards of Baltimore. Twice a week, for six weeks, she coaches students on voice and presentation, tone and enunciation, and clear expression of thoughts and feelings.
“In other words,” says Broom, “how to present your best self.”
She’s now doing this at four schools — third- through eighth-graders — including City Springs.
“I love it, I love it,” says principal Richetta. She was the first principal to respond when Broom formulated her program and took it to city school officials and to the Abell Foundation, which is helping to fund it.
Beyond approval from school officials — and money — Broom had two other advantages: Barack Obama, and Broom’s own record. Obama, because young people are listening to him and finding it cool to speak properly. And Broom herself, because some of these kids know her from “Homicide” and “The Wire.”
“When I first started,” Broom says the other day, “I had students tell me, ‘I want to act in ‘The Wire.’ I can talk just like those boys.’ I told them, ‘Yes, but those boys can turn around and do Shakespeare tomorrow.’ ”
This begins to open their eyes.
“But there’s plenty of initial resistance,” says Broom. “I’ll ask them, ‘Don’t you want to speak well?’ They’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ Or, ‘Everybody I know in my neighborhood speaks like this. I don’t want to sound different.’ Or, ‘Somebody might think I’m trying to be stuck up.’ They’re very aware of the difference between proper English and street talk.
“And we get into that. We’ll talk about how it’s OK to talk one way with friends — which we all do — and how you speak in different situations. Or I’ll tell them how, in Africa, there’s the language of the village, and the language of the country. That resonates with them.
“Or I’ll tell them, ‘Speak the way you want to speak according to what you want to do, and where you want to go. If you only speak street, people will think that’s all you know. And that would be a lie. You have to let them know you have this huge brain, and creative energy.’
“And that resonates, too. They’re smart, they’re creative. You should see them on computers. But take them off [computers], and listen to them talk, and look what happens. Lazy mouth. Talking and barely moving their mouths.”
Broom explains all of this as she heads toward a classroom, where a dozen children will spend the next hour with her. They’ll recite 26 paragraphs, mostly by memory, and make it sound as though Henry Higgins has just triumphed with Eliza Doolittle.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two part series.
» Friday: Inside the class
