Would the chief executive officer of the Baltimore City public school system consider breaking Roland Park Elementary/Middle into two or more schools?

That's what a former PTA president asked CEO Andres Alonso at the annual meeting of the Roland Park Civic League.

Claudia Diamond, former president of the elementary school PTA, told Alonso she is worried that enrollment is getting too high at the combined school, with 1,200 students.

And she said there are different "constitiencies" of parents with competing goals for their children, depending on whether they live in the community or outside the school zone.

"For example," she said, "you have elementary school parents who send their children from Roland Park, and out-of-zone families who attend the school's magnet programs. You have a very high-achieving population of students -- with typically very educated parents -- and students at the other end of the spectrum, who may not have a vocal group articulating their concerns, but are no less deserving of the school's resources and time."

Many Roland Parkers who consider Roland Park Elementary/Middle as a neighborhood school are now looking at area charter schools, Diamond said.

"Would you consider eventually breaking Roland Park into two schools?" she asked.

"I'm not a blueprint guy," Alonso told the audience of nearly 200 people.

And he said if anything, he is focusing more on increasing the size of schools such as Digital Harbor, a magnet school that has more applications than it can handle.

Neighborhood school?

The Messenger reported in 2005 that the school in the 5200 block of Roland Avenue was becoming more of a neighborhood school in the elementary grades and that fewer students were being allowed in from outside the school's residential zone.

Previously, the lack of neighborhood attendance had enabled outside students to go to Roland Park, but in 2005, 90 to 95 percent of the students in kindergarten through third grade were from the neighborhood, as were about 70 percent of the students in fourth and fifth grades, according to then-principal Mariale Hardiman.

More than half of the students were from outside the residential zone when Hardiman started at the school in 1993, she said at the time.

The changing perceptions of local parents regarding the school provided the impetus for the shift in enrollment, Hardiman said then.

"The community began to see the jewel that was this school in their neighborhood," Hardiman said.

Four years later, Diamond thinks Roland Park is still a neighborhood school. But "some (parents) are not choosing it for their children because there are good charter options available now," she said in an e-mail interview.

Diamond said charter schools are part of a movement to reduce enrollment in schools, a trend Roland Park Elementary/Middle doesn't appear to be following, she said.

"There has been class-size creep in the elementary school in the last few years with children in fourth and fifth grades in classes over 30," she said.

But she said that instead of addressing the issue of class size, a source of frustration for parents, the school has hired more teachers as math intervention specialists in the middle school.

She sees that as an example of "competing constituencies."

And she said that although Alonso is giving principals more autonomy than they used to have to articulate and strategize visions for their schools, "the rub" is that it's hard to manage a school with 1,200 students and an annual budget of about $7 million.

Having charter schools means more options for parents -- "a good thing," Diamond said.

But Roland Park "is going to have to figure out what it can do to make sure that it doesn't lose its standing in Baltimore City as one of the strongest schools in the city," she said.

Principal Carolyn Cole doesn't think the school should be split, or that enropllment is too high.

"It's how a school is organized, regardless of the size," Cole said. She said she has a lot of administrative support, including "house principals" for grade levels.

Cole said the issue of differing constituencies has been talked about for 20 years.

"That's a conversation for the school community to have," she said.

The current elementary school PTA president, Susan English could not be reached for comment.

Business consultant Frank Baitman, the parent of a Roland Park fourth-grader, believes that Alonso, Cole and Diamond all have a point.

But he said his son is caught in the middle, in a class of 33 students, too many for a teacher "to look a child in the eye and see whether they're getting it (the lesson)."

From a business standpoint, Baitman said, Roland Park with 1,200 students is like General Motors -- "it's a big thing to manage."

Baitman said if Roland Park is so successful with so many students, maybe the argument Alonso made expanding Digital Harbor applies to Roland Park and it should be expanded too.

Community involvement

With people like Baitman in the audience, the community's commitment to public education was not in doubt at the meeting. The setting for Alonso's talk, a general plea for community involvement in the public schools, was Roland Park's renovated multi-purpose room with its roomy stage, track lighting and posters on the walls of student productions of musicals such as "Annie," Disney's "Mulan" and "Into the Woods."

A middle-schooler who played Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" before Alonso started.

The school typically has high test scores and has become known for parents painting halls and cleaning bathrooms. The school has raised money to rebuild two playgrounds. Teachers are integrating arts into the curriculum, a rarity in city schools, and are using a "brain-targeted teaching model," which Hardiman instituted.

But it was also clear in Alonso's remarks that many schools in the city are not doing as well as Roland Park.

"In Baltimore City, it's very clear that the outcomes are unacceptable," he said.

That goes for the physical condition of schools as well, he said, noting that financial constraints have the school system "running on a treadmill" in its maintenance efforts.

The cracks are showing, even in Roland Park, he said.

"This is a beautiful school. Parents paint it and they keep it nice. But I notice there are cracked steps," he said.

Alonso said he wanted to "frame the converation" to send a message that change is possible, from getting schools to cut their lawns to raising test scores. He noted that systemwide, 86 percent of 12th-graders have already met Maryland requirements for graduation, enrollment is up and the dropout rate is down, even with the slashing of a combined $120 million from the past two school system budgets.

But he said the biggest accomplishments aren't increases in test scores or increases in graduation rates or increases in enrollment.

"The biggest accomplishment is that I increasingly feel that the (citywide) audience is starting to believe it," he said.

Even if people have no children in public school, "you should care tremendously about the schools," he said.

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user comments (3)

user cityparent says...

I'm concerned by the use of the term "different constituencies." What does that mean? Are you referring to racial diversity or academic achievement? As I recall, when Roland Park tried to form homogeneous classes based on test scores, at the request of its very affluent parent body, the lower-achieving classes were entirely african-american. Does the former PTA president want to split the school by achievement? Bad idea. Heterogeneous classes, both racially and academically, are better for all students.

Posted 1:58 PM, 05.28.09

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user stevetowson says...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Heterogeneous classes, both racially and academically, are better for all students. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not that I disagree, but saying it doesn't make it so. Can you offer something that supports this ascertion?

Posted 4:39 PM, 05.28.09

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user inthecity says...

Last year, I read an article by Paul Tough, "What it Takes to Make a Student" (New York Times 11/26/06) that supports cityparent's comment. In that article Tough references various studies that support optimal learning environments for kids-including studies that show all children benefit from heterogeneous classes.

Posted 1:45 PM, 05.30.09

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