A mind club for girls

NEW BEDFORD - Tatshianna Pires loves school - especially math and spelling. She likes basketball and soccer and making fun foods at the Boys and Girls Club. Sometimes she finds her little brother annoying.

She is soft-spoken and proud. She doesn't care about cool or sexy. She thinks she can be anything in the whole wide world.

She is 9 and she is spectacular.

Now an unlikely coalition has come together to make sure she stays that way. Workers in New Bedford's poor and immigrant communities have teamed up with wealthy residents in surrounding Westport, Marion, and South Dartmouth to start Our Sisters' School.

It opens in a week.

The new academy, which leases space from a synagogue near Buttonwood Park, is a free, all-girls middle school with extra-long days and small classes meant to keep 60 of this city's fifth-through-eighth-graders brimming with possibilities even as they enter adolescence.

It's a concept that works incredibly well at Nativity Prep, the schools in Jamaica Plain and New Bedford on which this one is modeled: Catch kids at this crucial age, give them full days of rigorous classes away from the distractions of the opposite sex, keep the school small so that none of them are overlooked, demand family involvement, and put role models before them constantly so that they see their own potential.

Nativity takes only boys, though, and a lot of people in this city have been desperate for a girls' school like this. New Bedford's three middle schools have been struggling. The city is home to many low-wage workers whose daughters battle poverty and the pull of traditional roles. Girls' absenteeism, pregnancy, and dropout rates are distressingly high.

After 20 years of working with them at the Boys and Girls Club, Bernadette Souza was tired of seeing girls shut down as soon as they left elementary school.

"Come seventh grade, Tatshianna's not Tatshianna any more," Souza says. "She's got this attitude: 'That's not cool.' She's trying to fit in. What's happened to my girl?"

JoAnn Clarke and Doreen Lopes, friends who have spent their careers working with youth in New Bedford, had been talking about starting a girls' school on their walks together for five years. Clarke, who runs Trips for Kids, which gives educational bike tours, and Lopes, who ran a local YMCA, could see how well the boys at Nativity were doing (Lopes now runs the boys' school). Meanwhile, Lisa Schmid Alvord, a filmmaker, cofounder of conflict resolution group Urban Improv, and philanthropist, was also thinking about starting a girls' school in the city.

Schmid Alvord, who has a farm in nearby Westport, started asking around about the possibility, and friends put the three women - each of them a force of nature - in touch a couple of years ago.

Schmid Alvord recruited donors from surrounding communities, convincing wealthy neighbors that New Bedford's problems are their problems, too.

"You can't put New Bedford in a little box and say it doesn't affect us," she says.

They raised $1.5 million for the school, which is entirely privately funded, and will have an annual operating budget of $650,000.

Community leaders have already funneled enough girls into the school, which will start with just two grades and 30 students, that there is now a waiting list. Executive director Lisa Yates, whom the founders lured away from the city's very successful charter school, says every time she puts out a call she is overwhelmed with volunteers. She has legions of tutors and speakers lined up.

"Everybody says yes," she says, with pride and wonder.

A huge, enormously diverse group of people is invested in this little school. That's just the way education is supposed to be.

And Tatshianna Pires can't wait for summer to end.

She says, "I'm looking forward to everything, mostly."

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com