Minority Fellowships, Child Care Are Hot Issues : Exclusive Prep School Ponders Obligations to the Community

The girls are dressed in green skirts and jumpers, the uniforms of prep-school privilege, and they study on a 26-acre, tree-shaded campus that virtually wraps them in a century of academic tradition.

Gathered around a table one recent morning, they are immersed in subjects that seem a world apart from their surroundings: poverty, teen-age pregnancy, the chasm that separates them from the housing projects of inner-city Baltimore.

The girls at Bryn Mawr School, one of the city’s more prestigious and rigorous private schools, have done their share of packing food boxes for the poor and volunteering in nursing homes.

But now their school is considering a new and much more risky proposal, one that would fundamentally alter the notion of community service--enrolling inner-city, teen-age mothers as regular students at Bryn Mawr and placing their babies in a day-care center that the school runs on its campus.

The students toss around the idea.

“If they picked girls they thought could handle it, it could be neat,” said Laura Shapiro, a 17-year-old junior who has just completed a term paper on poverty. “They could get individual attention.”

Pressure Adds to Skepticism

But there is also skepticism. “The pressure in this environment, if you don’t have the right hair or the right shoes--if it’s disturbing to someone like me, it’s going to disturb someone more who is more removed,” said Kelly Rogers, an 18-year-old junior.

As a black student in a predominantly white school, Rogers knows the potential for isolation and culture clash. She issues a simple warning: “We cannot impose our desires for their success.”

Such collective soul-searching is common at Bryn Mawr, a school anxious to find its proper place in a troubled city. The recurring question here is both philosophical and practical: Do the city’s problems of poverty, adolescent pregnancy and academic failure have anything to do with them?

In the minds of most of those who work at Bryn Mawr, the answer is clear. “We should serve some public purpose,” said Barbara Chase, the school’s headmistress. “We search . . . for what can be our impact on the community.”

Community service is well established in some sectors of private education. Catholic schools in the nation’s big cities have begun serving large communities of poor, minority and non-Catholic students. Quaker-affiliated institutions have retained a tradition of commitment to community. At Bryn Mawr, 14% of the students receive financial aid.

But many public educators would argue that, at best, private education is irrelevant to the challenges facing urban public systems. At worst, they would say, private schools exacerbate the problems, sapping from public schools more and more middle-class families and recruiting away the brightest minority students.

The conscious effort of Bryn Mawr to explore its public responsibilities occurs against a changing social backdrop. Public-school systems, like Baltimore’s, are increasingly challenged as the result of a demographic change that is bringing to their doors children who live in poverty, non-English-speaking students and youngsters in unstable homes. Staggering numbers of them become pregnant or drop out of school.

And in some cities--among them Baltimore, Washington, Boston, New York--a frightening scenario seems to be playing out in the form of an educational caste system, with public-school enrollment largely poor and minority and private-school enrollment predominantly white and middle- to upper-class.

Baltimore’s public-school enrollment is about 80% black, and nearly half of all students meet the low-income criteria required to receive free or reduced-price lunches.

Bryn Mawr School, founded in 1885 in downtown Baltimore as a preparatory school for Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, is about 80% white; 8% of the students are black, the remainder Asian. Many private schools enroll even fewer minorities.

But schools such as Bryn Mawr find themselves in what amounts to a no-win situation.

Widening Gaps

Well aware of the widening gaps between public and private systems, many private schools have been compelled by traditional liberal thinking and their own sense of responsibility to reach out to disadvantaged, minority students.

But these instincts are tempered by the realization that in doing so they can be accused of stealing away the most talented students from public schools. And after two decades of bringing students onto their campuses, they have learned that well-intentioned efforts can go wrong, that plucking students from the ghetto and asking them to assimilate is not always successful.

On Bryn Mawr’s campus the issue seemed ever present last spring, discussed over faculty lunches, at trustee meetings and student seminars.

Some educators outside the school would brand this pursuit as nothing more than an exercise. But this year, the school took it further, using $22,000 in funds from Baltimore’s Abell Foundation to study how it might make an impact on the problems of the inner city.

A few proposals have emerged from that process--a summer reading camp for disadvantaged public-school students who are having trouble in the elementary grades and a program to help teen-age mothers, either by bringing them and their children to the campus or providing day care in downtown settings so they can return to their neighborhood schools.

Decision Not Made

If the proposals are implemented--and the school hasn’t yet made that decision--they are unlikely to draw much attention outside the community. But the fact that an upper-crust, private institution is compelled to wade into the problems of poverty and academic failure reflects the broad impact that the growing number of so-called children at risk is having on American education.

As it wrestles with these proposals, Bryn Mawr must examine the very nature and mission of private education.

Is Bryn Mawr’s primary responsibility to the students whose families pay nearly $7,000 annually in tuition, or is it to open its doors in some fashion to disadvantaged children whose families survive each year on less than that sum?

The school’s self-examination was prompted in large part by visible signs of trouble in the public schools, underscored by “Baltimore 2000,” a report issued by the Morris Goldseker Foundation two years ago. “The (public-school) system is now widely condemned as ineffective, undisciplined and dangerous,” the report said.

Enrollment in the Baltimore schools had fallen more than twice as rapidly as independent-school enrollment from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. Now, nearly 17% of the city’s students are in private schools, compared to a national average of about 12%.

The report pointed to low test scores, poor attendance and a declining proportion of students going on to college. And it recommended that if other reforms fail, the city should take the drastic step of issuing tuition vouchers to allow enrollment in either public or private schools.

Bryn Mawr officials are humble about their ability to make a dent in such entrenched, structural problems. But they reason that they know how to provide a good education to young girls. They look at teen-age mothers or black girls from South Africa--the school will enroll two next year--or elementary students who are having trouble reading, and they say: Here are some girls who could benefit from what we have to offer.

School officials first raised the possibility of helping teen-age mothers because the school, which enrolls 630 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, also runs a day-care center on campus for nearly 200 children.

Penney Hubbard, who is directing the school’s Abell Foundation study, saw the center as a way to provide day care while the mothers completed high school or a year of college-preparatory work.

When the idea was proposed to a group of Bryn Mawr students, they were both cautious and idealistic about the barriers that separate them from their inner-city counterparts.

‘Different Worlds’

“So many people look at our worlds as two different worlds,” said Eva Vishio, 16. “There has to be something that ties us together. We can help them as much as they can help us. We have to be educated about their world. They have to be educated about our world.”

But the students were also troubled by the potential for social isolation.

“At Bryn Mawr, material things do matter,” said Laura Shapiro. “We sit around and talk about mom and dad and dating.” She wondered if the inner-city girls would feel comfortable or would hesitate to ask for extra help from a teacher out of fear of being perceived as “stupid.”

Kelly Rogers, who said she lives in a low-income neighborhood where “almost every girl” has a child, has attended Bryn Mawr since first grade. “It’s like night and day in terms of the environment,” she said. “To my friends, private school is a foreign concept, a somewhat obnoxious concept. They don’t want this.”

Rogers said she appreciates the demanding education she has received here--her favorite course is on ancient Greece--but still wonders whether she might not have been better off in public school. It is hard for black students, she said, “if everyone thinks that the only way you do anything . . . depends on an amendment to the Constitution, affirmative action or a scholarship.”

Shannon Harris, another black student and president of the junior class, echoed Rogers’ ambivalence. “If a child is placed too early in an environment like this, where they are in the minority . . . by the time they graduate, they have no sense of themselves.” But she added: “Private education does offer a lot of opportunity.”

Bryn Mawr officials are not naive about the risks of implementing their proposals. Any naivete there may have been was lost in a painful experience with a scholarship student who had a successful start at the school but soon began missing classes and homework assignments.

At one point the faculty confronted her about violating school rules but assured her that she would not be expelled. Nevertheless, she left the school that day and never returned.

There is another incident spoken of frequently at Bryn Mawr--the widely publicized death three years ago of Edmund Perry, an honors student from Phillips Exeter Academy.

Shot by Police

Perry, a black 17-year-old from Harlem, was sent to the New Hampshire prep school on a scholarship. Shortly after graduation, he was shot by a New York City policeman during what was described as a robbery attempt.

After Perry’s death, it became clear that he had been seriously troubled at the school, in large part because of the enormous racial and economic gaps he had to confront.

Perry’s death seems to have crystallized a common fear at Bryn Mawr--that somehow, even the noblest efforts can backfire. Teachers and students pass around a book on the incident, “Best Intentions,” written by former Time magazine reporter Robert Sam Anson.

“You can’t help but do a lot of soul-searching,” Chase said. “The last thing we want to do is put a kid in a situation where failure is the outcome. We also don’t want to close the door.”

For these reasons, a small contingent of faculty members is opposed to bringing teen-age mothers on campus. They support the alternative proposal, helping the children enroll in a downtown day-care center so their mothers can attend neighborhood public schools.

But others argue that setting up a separate program sends a bad signal: that young mothers from a lower socioeconomic class should be isolated from Bryn Mawr students.

Off campus, there is a measure of skepticism about private-school efforts to bridge the barriers of race and class.

Efforts by private schools to bring in minority students, for example, “tend not to be well thought out,” said Meldon S. Hollis Jr., president of the Baltimore Board of School Commissioners. “They’re well intentioned, but you end up with young black kids isolated in the suburbs coming back with a very bad taste.”

Maryland School Supt. David W. Hornbeck said private education could be an ally to the public schools in dealing with disadvantaged students. But it is also possible that private schools will take an increasing proportion of middle-class students, sapping the public schools of the parental support and stability associated with middle-class homes.

Widening Gap

“That would contribute to a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots,” he said. “If that happens in the society as a whole . . . we will have something rotten at our core.”

Private-school efforts to diversify enrollments are interpreted cynically in some quarters, as motivated by a selfish desire to give upper-class white children the “experience” of exposure to minority students.

And Bryn Mawr officials are aware that their community-service efforts--each student must complete 40 hours of community service in order to graduate--may be seen as noblesse oblige, or the work of “Lady Bountiful,” prompted by upper-class guilt.

“I guess we can deal with that,” Chase said. “We’re not into this kind of work only to help people, but because it’s good education.”

“We mean to worry the kids with it,” said teacher Debby Parker. “These kids shouldn’t sleep at night” knowing the poverty and illiteracy that plagues certain segments of their world. “If our girls grow up thinking the most difficult thing is finding shoes for the dance, we haven’t fulfilled our mission.”