The Inner-City Prep School Experience

In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT — “daedal,” “holus-bolus,” “calamari” — are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.

Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast’s Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny’s.

Every Sunday night, 325 students in grades 6 through 12, most of them African-American, most from single-parent, lower-income families in Southeast and Northeast, pass through the gates of SEED — the first inner-city public boarding school in the country, with admission by lottery. And for the next five days they do what other prep-school kids do: in uniforms of pressed khaki pants and polo shirts, they take classes in Spanish, precalculus, U.S. history and other subjects. They meet with staff members at the school’s College Café to talk about college applications. They spend their afternoons in chess clubs, on the basketball court or in poetry workshops.

Then, after school on Friday, they head back home, lugging duffel bags, suitcases and garbage bags serving as suitcases. For 48 hours, they leave SEED’s protected, grassy campus to return to their neighborhoods — the ones that created the need for charter schools like SEED in the first place. That ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school’s unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.

At 7:20 on a Friday morning in a bathroom in the girls’ dorm at SEED, Reneka Blackmone, who is 17, was standing in front of a mirror, surrounded by posters of Queen Latifah, Beyoncé and Naomi Campbell, brushing her teeth. Witty and self-deprecating, Reneka often performs her way through her day, dabbing beauty marks on her soft, dimpled cheeks with a mascara wand, imitating models on catwalks and freestyle rapping. But this morning she was preoccupied with the busy day ahead: Spanish class, an oral presentation on Charles Darwin for world history, classes in business management and music. Then there was the weekend to think about. At 3:30, the last bell of the week would ring and Reneka would be freed from the beige brick dorms, the study halls, the uniforms, the dining-hall food, the no-MySpace, no-Facebook, no-TV rules. She would also be freed from the reminders that teachers, administrators, counselors and resident assistants rain on her and other students 15-plus hours a day: tuck in your shirt, raise your hand, talk with respect, get to class on time, be nice to your classmates, study for your test, turn the lights out, get some sleep.

“Come on, baby, it’s late,” said a resident assistant, hands on her hips and old enough to be Reneka’s mother, as she stood in the doorway. Like all SEED students, Reneka belongs to a cluster of 12 to 15 students that is named after a college or university. The Howard House room Reneka and Quadidra Taylor shared was small and spare, with a desk, dresser and bed for each girl and a shared computer.

At 7:35, five minutes past the deadline to go to the dining hall for French toast, orange juice, apples and boxes of Golden Grahams, Reneka pulled on her uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue polo shirt. No plunging neckline, no huge hoop earrings, which are violations of the dress code. SEED’s 116-page Student-Parent Handbook, however, did say it “is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” So Reneka put on her faux Chanel rhinestone earrings, slipped on a chunky chain bracelet and spritzed her body with perfume, from her neck to her ankles. She was ready for the school day.

The night before, I asked the girls about their weekend plans. “Chillin’, talkin’, walkin’,” Quadidra said. For Reneka, Friday nights were often catch-up time on all she missed during the school week: four- to five-hour stretches of MTV, VH1 and cable-TV karaoke, her favorite steak-and-cheese sandwich and 11 or 12 hours of sleep a night. By Saturday morning, she would be at her aunt’s apartment in Northeast, in jeans, strappy sandals and tidy cornrows, before heading out again, past the drug dealer in the stairwell on his cellphone, down the street lined with two- and three-story brick apartment complexes, including the one where a man killed his girlfriend and her children, until she landed at her friend’s house. There, she would sit on the front porch as her friend, who graduated from high school last year, braided her 1-year-old son’s hair. Reneka and her friend would talk about, among other things, the kinds of girls they were not: “rollers — skates with no brakes,” hopping from one boy’s bed to another.

Other SEED students stuck closer to home on weekends. They drifted away from the old friends who didn’t want to hear about their SAT scores or the eight college campuses they visited with SEED staff members. Those friends probably faced a different future: Maybe they would graduate from high school or get a G.E.D. They might land a cashier job at CVS or Safeway or find something more lucrative in the drug business.

Reneka’s boyfriend last year was that kind of neighborhood boy — a low-life, in Reneka’s estimation, who skipped school too much, smoked too much weed and would never amount to anything. I asked if he had ever visited her at SEED. Never, she said. SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”

By the time she was 12 and her number was picked from the annual SEED admissions lottery, Reneka had moved several times, including into foster care for a year, while her mother struggled with a drug addiction. Once, she was playing double Dutch when a guy began shooting up the street. Another time, she was washing her mother’s hair when they heard the pop-pop of gunfire and dropped to the floor. Three of her half-brothers have been killed in gun violence.

When Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota, both former management consultants, opened the SEED School of Washington, D.C., in 1998, they had students like Reneka in mind: students who contended not only with failing schools but also with the risks of their neighborhood during the nonschool hours. Last year, the SEED School’s foundation opened a Baltimore school, and plans to expand into other cities. Some critics, though, have balked at the expenditure — $35,000 per student, most from the city’s public funds — which, in theory, could be used to help more public schools and serve a greater number of students in nonboarding settings. And, of course, the ultimate goal should be to improve homes and neighborhoods enough so kids don’t need to leave.

While SEED enrolls plenty of at-risk students, critics argue that SEED and other charter schools skim the cream of inner-city youth, attracting the families who are motivated to fill out the paperwork to apply to the school. Meanwhile, some of the most high-risk kids, whose parents are barely functional and place more value on their child’s being home every day to baby-sit or do housework than they do on education, are left behind.

But SEED’s statistics have impressed fans of the school, including President Barack Obama, who called the school “a true success story”: at least 97 percent of SEED graduates are accepted to colleges, including Princeton, Alabama A&M and Connecticut College. And 90 percent of SEED graduates immediately enroll in college, compared with 56 percent of African-American high-school graduates nationally. (About 70 percent of SEED graduates are currently in or graduated from college, although the program is new enough that the sample size is small.) Though SEED also outpaces D.C. public schools in reading and math, reading is still a weakness for many SEED students and, not coincidentally, the school’s SAT scores have been unimpressive. Part of the blame, according to Charles Barrett Adams, the head of the school, lies with the public elementary schools: students arrive at SEED typically two to three grade levels behind and spend much of the next years playing catch-up.

Reneka was 12 the first night she stayed in SEED’s four-story, 77-bedroom girls’ dorm. She kept her door wide open and barely slept. She wasn’t worried about the neighborhood. She had lived in worse. She didn’t even miss home much — as the oldest child of a single working mother, she was relieved not to be caring for her four siblings. Instead, she feared being behind the gates with kids who were bigger than those at her elementary school, where she held her own in fights. In neighborhoods like hers, being sent away was for delinquents, not kids with college ambitions.

It wasn’t so different across the campus in the boys’ dorm. During his first months, Triston Elliott, now a senior, wondered who would take care of him if he got hurt; he also longed to get bags of chips from his mother’s kitchen. The boys’ dorm was unadorned and felt forlorn, like an airport terminal: “It’s like you’re supposed to sit and wait for something to happen,” he said. His brother Parry, older by 16 months and handsome, with angular features and an intense approach to everything from his basketball game to his A.P. classes, struggled to find his place at SEED, too. Older kids bullied him, and Parry pushed back. Both boys phoned their mother regularly those first months, often asking to come home.

“So you’re giving up?” their mother asked them. Tolya Elliott-Chandler was in the minority of SEED parents who had graduated from college, and she pushed her sons academically, but she was not convinced that she could outweigh the forces at a traditional public high school and the neighborhood. She knew there were worse fates for her sons than feeling homesick.

Some kids don’t last beyond the first year or two at SEED. Until recently, the school lost about 20 percent of the student body each year — mostly in middle school and mostly boys. The incoming class of 70 students slowly dissipated each year so that by senior year, the remaining students barely filled a gym bleacher. The high attrition made the school’s much-lauded college acceptance rate less impressive: If a class of 70 seventh graders fell to 20 students by the time of graduation, those remaining 20 students were arguably among the best — at least in terms of self-discipline and a willingness to stick it out — of the original class. Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses. During this past school year, the attrition rate dropped by more than 50 percent.

Though SEED students get in trouble for the usual teenage reasons, in some cases breaking rules reflects their ambivalence about prep-school culture. Black inner-city boys particularly have to wrestle with the question of whether it is O.K. to be smart. And if it is, then they have to figure out how to wear that — or not wear it — when they return to their neighborhoods each weekend.

To survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams. But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”

Some parents argued that students’ lives would be easier if they were at SEED seven days a week. The five-day plan was primarily a financial decision — it was too expensive to staff the program on weekends. But Elliott-Chandler was one mother who chose SEED, in part, because she could still see her boys regularly. As it is, weekends fly by with family visits, errands, church and pilgrimages to Sam’s Club, where Triston and Parry stock up for the school week — bags of chips, SunnyD drinks, packs of Winterfresh gum and Gatorade.

And on Sunday, when other families have the entire evening in front of them, Parry and Triston are finishing laundry at home and packing their uniforms. Around 8 p.m., they and their mother pile in her car and soon they are driving through the SEED gates for another school week.

Last year, when Reneka was considering having sex with her boyfriend, she confided in Carmen Brown, her life-skills counselor. Like many of the counselors, who are on duty from 3 p.m. to midnight, Brown is African-American, in her 20s and a college graduate. She is also the adult on campus to whom Reneka feels the closest.

Brown suggested that Reneka slow things down. Then, she brought her Howard House girls together to talk about relationships and sex. Later, she created a panel of men, including a student-life coordinator, Matthew Carothers, who lives in the boys’ dorm, as well as a senior male student, and asked them to answer questions the girls submitted in advance: “What’s on the mind of the 16- to 18-year-old boy?” “Why is it hard for boys to be faithful?” It was a key part of SEED’s after-school curriculum called Halls, Habits for Achieving Life Long Success, with more than 200 lesson plans run by life-skills counselors, including “What Do Those Food Labels Mean?”; “Hip Hop: Is It Bad?”; “Dining Etiquette”; and “Mean Girls.”

In the boys’ dorm, the teenagers were just as much in need of life skills and relationship advice. A few years ago, Triston liked a girl but wasn’t sure how to get her attention. He wasn’t going to ask his friends, and he doesn’t know his father. So he talked to his life-skills counselor, Nathaniel Goodwin, who had worked with Parry and Triston since they started at SEED five years ago. Triston told Goodwin that many of his ideas about romantic relationships came from the 1997 film “Def Jam’s How to Be a Player,” about a playboy. “Mr. Goodwin was like: ‘No, no, no. That’s not it,’ ” Triston told me, as we sat on a bench outside the girls’ dorm one afternoon. Goodwin told Triston to be himself. “And he told me,” Triston said with a small smile, “to shower more than twice a week.”

Like the Halls lessons, other efforts at SEED are intended not only to broaden students’ experiences but also to ease the transition to colleges, where there would be plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class students who had summered in Paris and interned at law firms. To that end, SEED, with the aid of scholarships, sends students off in the summer to study creative writing at the Putney School in Vermont, to wilderness trips in Wyoming and to other programs in places like Zambia, Guatemala and Scotland. For Parry, the school’s annual two-week trip to Greece for a select group of upper-schoolers was a turning point. Imagining a broader world outside Washington was one thing. Being abroad, with food, music, history and a language far different from his own, made him hungry to see and to learn more.

Around 11:30 on a Saturday morning, during their 48-hour break from SEED, I met Parry and Triston at their family’s tidy two-story row house in Northeast before we headed out into the neighborhood. A couple of blocks away was the basketball court where Parry has clocked countless hours. He still plays there most weekends, though he has grown weary of the neighborhood boys’ talk about SEED as “D Block.” He no longer tries to set them straight and avoids telling them about his plans for college. Instead, at the end of each game, Parry heads in one direction, the boys in another. “You feel bad when you are different from people in your own neighborhood,” Triston said.

Those neighborhood streets may become more alienating when Parry and Triston leave for college next year. Parry hopes to go to Morehouse for business law. Triston wants to study film at Oberlin. In both cases, they will be hundreds of miles from home. But among the lessons SEED instilled in Triston and Parry was that to move ahead, they had to keep moving beyond home.