Leaking pipes, broken windows and collapsing ceilings: these are some of the distinguishing features of many of the public middle schools and high schools that can be found within the District of Columbia. Georgetown works to provide a way out for these students, yet every year, only a small percentage find their way out of this system and into the freshman class of Georgetown University.
The D.C. public school system is considered among the worst in the nation. Many of the school buildings were built in the 1920s, and have had no major renovations since. “At School Without Walls,” a local high school, “a portion of the roof has collapsed. They put yellow tape around those classes and put the students in other classrooms,” Tom Bullock, assistant to the President for D.C. Educational Initiatives at Georgetown, said.
Charles Conway (COL ‘09) has lived in the D.C. area his whole life; he was born in Arlington and raised near Anacostia. He lived with his aunt, who he said motivated him to go to college. His options, however, seemed limited.
“You’re supposed to go to the school you’re near, but I was sent to Eastern High School because Anacostia High School was so bad,” Conway said.
Eastern was not much better—it was ranked one of the worst schools in D.C. his senior year, he said. He estimated the graduation rate to be around 40 percent. “We had around 250 at the end of eleventh grade, but 100 seniors were technically juniors because they had failed English. A lot of them had the attitude that high school was enough,” he said.
Efforts by Georgetown students and faculty, however, have worked to improve the circumstances of many of these students.
Dominique Couley (COL ‘09) attended Eastern with Conway. She says her ambitions were modest in middle school. “I was always a good student, but I wanted to go to hair school; my mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she said.
In her sixth grade, she visited the Georgetown campus with other classmates at Ronald H. Brown Middle School as the culmination of the Kids 2 College program, a six-week program where Georgetown students volunteer to bring awareness of college opportunities to middle-school students. She had thought this was a one-time event, but she was soon surprised. “They started coming back to my school every Saturday, and soon they started sending letters home to my parents. I didn’t realize I’d been enrolled in another program,” she said.
That program was the Institute of College Preparation, a Georgetown-run program that takes in a group of middle school students every four years, and works with them every Saturday in enrichment classes in the ICC until the end of high school.
“We are funded by a private grant that lets us follow a cohort of 40-50 students from seventh to twelfth grades and to college,” Charlene Brown-McKenzie said. She is the director of the Educational Community Involvement Program at the Center for Minority Educational Affairs, which oversees the ICP. The third cohort of the program is in their first year of college, and a fourth group is currently in the ninth grade. Many of the students in the program share characteristics with those most likely to drop out of high school; the vast majority of students who complete the program go on to big-name schools.
The program has a retention rate of about 85 percent, but Couley remembers many of her classmates dropping out of the program. At one point, she nearly quit herself. “In eighth grade I couldn’t see the point, and all my friends had dropped out.”
Brown-McKenzie acknowledges the strong pressures against students who want to stay in the program.
“Parents say, ‘I’ve never left the neighborhood, why do they have to do this? Why do they have to learn another language?’ Most of the current students are now 14; they’re going to fill out work permits and are going to choose to work and not come here,” she said.
In the freshman class, Couley said, there are only four students from D.C. public schools. Georgetown would not provide information on the number of current students from these schools, citing privacy reasons, except to say that admissions rates matched the national average. According to Scott Fleming, assistant to the President for Federal Relations at Georgetown, there are about 642 students from the D.C. area, but many of these students go to private schools or to schools outside of the city.
“I thought all my friends in the program were going to come here,” Couley said. “Instead, most went to historically black schools or schools in the South.”
She cited Georgetown’s lack of diversity as a major reason.
“Coming from all-black schools to a school where you’re only 6.7 percent of the population is a big shock,” she said. “Plus, D.C. schools don’t do a good job preparing us for big-name schools; they push us toward black colleges. It’s not that they tell you not to apply here, they just tell you how hard the transition is going to be.” Brown-McKenzie confirmed that most of the ICP graduates go to historically black colleges and universities; of the most recent ICP cohort to graduate college, three went to Wesley in Delaware and to the University of North Carolina, and two went to Howard. Only one came to Georgetown.
Couley said she believes local students enter Georgetown despite Georgetown’s admissions policies. “Georgetown does a really awful job recruiting from D.C. public schools,” she said. “Georgetown never went to our college fairs, never went to our high schools, they didn’t send us letters. I thought coming from a public school here would hurt my application.” The Office of Undergraduate Admissions declined to comment on Georgetown’s admissions activities in the D.C. area.
Devita Lanham (COL ‘07) also comes from Southeast D.C. and participated in the ICP program. She also went to a public school, but her tale is much different; she went to Banneker.
“Banneker High School is next to Howard University and is among the top schools in the city and the top 50 in the country,” she said. It is a public school, but it has competitive enrollment. There are 400 students and both the graduation and college attendance rates border 100 percent. Yet Banneker still sends few graduates to Georgetown. Lanham agrees with Couley that the lack of diversity at Georgetown plays a role.
“92 to 95 percent of my school was black, so this is a big difference. I find myself having to prove my abilities to other people even more here,” she said.
Students were also scared off by financial costs, Couley said. Georgetown promotes its financial assistance program as need-blind so that students coming in are guaranteed to receive as much assistance as is needed. The Office of Student Financial Services has worked on some outreach programs to local private schools, but has not worked with the public school system, Patricia McWade, dean of the Office of Student Financial Services, said.
According to McWade, the University offers the D.C. President’s Scholarship to students in local private and public high schools. There are about 12 current students with the need-based award, she said, and most are public school students.
“I hope it helps more public school students come to Georgetown, but the numbers are still pretty much small. I think there’s a lot of work that can be done to reach out to students and make sure they’re aware of financial opportunities,” she said.
In addition to diversity and financial concerns, Lanham mentioned what administrators believe is a more common—and to Georgetown students, perhaps more familiar—reason why many of these successful students don’t come to Georgetown.
“They don’t come here for the same reason many of you come here: they want to leave the area, and about 90 percent of them do,” Bullock said.
Still, numerous projects are under way at Georgetown to help improve the conditions of the public school system, according to Bullock. He has spent a lot of time thinking about how to “fix” Georgetown’s outreach efforts to public school efforts; he directed the ICP from 1992, three years after its inception, when it was known as the Brown Project, until 2005. He said he visits local schools every day and is currently spearheading an effort to catalogue the diverse slew of Georgetown’s educational outreach programs, which until now have never been comprehensively compiled into one list.
“We’ve found over 40 Georgetown programs in D.C. public schools across all three campuses, but we’re not using our resources effectively,” he said. “You have D.C. Reads for kids from first through third grade, but what happens to the kid you taught to read when he hits the fourth grade? You have Kids 2 College in the sixth grade, but what happens to them in the seventh grade? Nothing?”
At one point in 2003, he said, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation approached Georgetown to provide funds for an early-college high school program at the McKinley Tech High School.
“He offered us $500,000 in seed money, but the deal fell apart due to political infighting and other reasons; the D.C. school system had invested $10 million to renovate and reopen McKinley,” he said.
Meanwhile, a group of students is working on creating several advisory boards to the D.C. superintendent’s office to address subjects such as mathematics and English curricula.
“We’re working on reforming counseling centers in all the D.C. public schools,” Rashad Jones (SFS ‘06), a member of the group, said. “Not every school even has a counselor, and many of the counselors serve as jacks of all trades in their schools.”
Bullock’s goal is to focus Georgetown programs so that the targets of these efforts are not left behind. Some of the outreach programs have been around as long as 30 years; however, he said, this is the first big move to map and link all of the various programs. Part of the reason for this delay, Bullock said, is fear.
“If we are doing this, are we now accountable to the success or failure of students in the school system?” he said. “The Washington Post could say ‘after years of work by this leading university, test scores are still below the national average.’ That’s why we’re a little cautious.”
Many students in D.C. public schools are talented enough to merit entrance to Georgetown, but their resources are limited, Bullock said. “I go to a private school in D.C. with 1000 students, and I’ll find over 200 in AP classes. I go to a similar public school; there are only 5 in AP classes. For Georgetown to accept them, we need a way to say they have the same preparation as others we admit.”
Bullock himself does not know the admissions statistics, a fact that frustrates him. “Part of the reason they can’t release the information is because of the impact it could have on the D.C. schools. It would damage those we’re trying to help,” he said. Making public the low numbers of applicants and accepted students from the area could bring more negative attention to the school system and hinder future outreach programs, he said.
While administrators and students alike work to bring aid to the D.C. school system, high school students still find ways to make the best of their situation. Conway found the resources at Eastern that enabled him to move on to Georgetown. “I was one of about 15 to 20 students in a program called the Law and Legal Services Academy at my school,” he said. “Our teacher was a law student at American University.” This teacher, Conway said, saw potential in him and convinced him to apply to top-tier schools. ”’The money would come,’ he said. He brought me several times to Georgetown to tour the school,” he said.
Last Saturday, Conway joined a group of student volunteers to work with the students who come to the ICP program. “I’ve been given a big gift from Georgetown and the city in general, and I thought I’d give something back,” he said.
