Globe Magazine 1998: Bringing back the Burke

This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on Sunday, March 8, 1998, under the headline: Bringing back the Burke: Can Boston's most troubled high school be turned around?

By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff

7:30 a.m.: Students trudge through a bleak winter morning along streets littered with fast-food wrappers and shards of broken glass, headed toward Boston's most beleaguered high school. Mostly, they come in groups, wearing cautious expressions the way athletes wear their game faces. Conversations are muted.

To get to school, some pass through the turf of the Intervale Posse, long one of Boston's most notorious gangs. Others must walk along streets dominated by the Columbia Road Boys, the Morse Street, the Brunswick gangs. Most avoid Castlegate Road, which runs toward Blue Hill Avenue from the front door of the school. The Castlegate gang is one of the city's most enduring and aggressive groups of thugs.

It is no coincidence that the turf of at least five gangs bumps up against the Jeremiah E. Burke High School, where Roxbury meets Dorchester, and that there are more gangs in the immediate vicinity. Inside the school, some of the teenagers who grow up deprived, emotionally even more than economically, on Intervale and Castlegate and Brunswick, launch themselves toward jobs or college. But outside, in the ruins of derelict buildings and vacant lots, others succumb to the camaraderie, protection, and fast money of the streets.

7:35 As the kids file through the metal detector, handing over their backpacks for a weapons check, the transformation is dramatic. Hoods and hooded looks come off. Smiles break across young faces. Laughter and chatter surge along corridors and up stairwells.

Michael Kennedy, who used to work in a program that takes black children out of the ghetto to suburban schools, is working security at the Burke, hoping for an opening as a history teacher. He pats down the packs quickly, greets the owners by name. He searches faces, too, for signs of trouble, but, these days, he's notworried the way he used to be. The kids who would bring a weapon to school ``are pretty much out of here now,'' Kennedy says.

Pouring into the classic Art Deco building, the students move quickly to class through well-lighted, high-ceilinged halls. Graffiti boards are mounted here and there; otherwise, the yellow tile walls are gleaming and spotless. There is no trash on the floors, no trash talk in the air. No hats. No gang colors. No headphones. No nonsense.

Posters solicit participants for plays, sports teams, chorus; others encourage good hygiene and promote ambition. It's not just violence for which the Burke has zero tolerance, the wall banners say. Mediocrity is not accepted, either.

The friendly, orderly, upbeat atmosphere would be a pleasant surprise in any school where fatherless children, teenage mothers, substance abuse, and clashes with the law abound. Here, it is amazing. Less than three years ago, the Burke became the first Massachusetts high school in memory to be stripped of its accreditation. Tiles were falling from the ceilings; much of the furniture was broken. Students came and went as they pleased, playing cards in class and boomboxes in the corridors. There was one guidance counselor for 1,000 students. No librarian. No drinking water.

Examiners for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges cited these and dozens of other shortcomings, ranging from lack of institutional purpose to inadequate supervision of students to poor sanitation, as reasons for withdrawing accreditation. The Burke became a symbol of all that was wrong with the city's school system, an embarrassment to City Hall, proof that the long-hoped-for renaissance of the Boston schools had not yet begun.

``Two years ago,'' Steven Leonard, the school's headmaster, tells a visitor to his office, ``if we had sat here this long, something would have crawled across your feet. Centipede, roach, mouse. There was cigarette smoke in the bathrooms, the smell of marijuana in the halls, and half the kids coming in late reeked of alcohol or marijuana. Each gang had its own territory in the building.''

Since then, the crumbling physical facility, the absence of guidance counselors and librarians, the scarcity of purposeful, effective teaching, and numerous other problems have been addressed.

Profound concerns remain. Suspension and dropout rates are high. Too many children have children of their own. And while everyone, from the superintendent of schools to the teachers at the Burke, believes that the students will show improvement in citywide tests this spring, no one thinks that enough time, energy, or money has been spent to turn around academic performance decisively. ``I've understood all along that getting the accreditation back would be a minor problem,'' Leonard says. ``The real problem is what to do so that the students who walk through these doors walk out with competitive skills.''

Nevertheless, as city officials, school staff, and association officials gather today for the start of a four-day inspection that could lead to re-accreditation, the Burke looks like it has what it takes to turn a neglected, demoralized urban school around: A principal whose compassion and enforcement of discipline are equally absolute. Teachers who hold themselves responsible if their students do not learn. A budget nearly double what the standard School Department formula would dictate. Growing numbers of students who come to school because they want to.

But if the presence of all these elements foreshadows a bright future, the school's history sounds a cautionary note. Burke High School rose from the ruins once before, in the mid-1980s. Then, with stunning speed, the leadership at City Hall and in the Boston School Department let the Burke down. Things just fell apart.

7:40 Steve Leonard is standing just inside a broken-down fence, at the entrance to what passes for a schoolyard, welcoming students. He shakes hands with the boys, throws compliments to the girls, coaxes smiles to the surface even as he hurries them along.

``Brother William!'' ``Good to see you today -- on time!'' ``Lot of compliments from that interview yesterday, Tashiani!''

Tashiani Santos, big woman on campus, basketball star, aspiring student journalist, is startled. After a moment of shock, her street cool melts into a huge grin, and she gives Leonard an energetic thumbs up.

``These are good, good kids, as long as you create the environment where they can be,'' Leonard says as he swings into his morning routine. ``Unfortunately, we have created a world out there in which they have to be a certain way to make it through. We have to help them make the adjustment from what they have to be out there to what they can be in here. I want to cheer when they walk through the door,'' he says. ``I know what they had to go through and overcome to get here.''

This is not just talk. Leonard grew up fatherless on Waumbeck Street, in Roxbury, just a few blocks from the Burke. He had a daughter and was married before graduating from high school. A son was born the year after graduation. He worked at General Electric, the post office, TWA, but nothing seemed quite right for him. Less than two years out of school, he joined the Marines; while on duty in Vietnam, he received a Dear John letter from his wife, who disappeared with the children. He did not see them again until they were in high school. He is now remarried, with two more children.

Leonard was 32 when he received his bachelor's degree in education from Boston State College, 43 when he was awarded his doctorate at Boston University.

Even as he cheers Burke students' daily exertions, ``I tell them every pain they have, I've had already, and they're tougher than me,'' Leonard says. ``I tell them, `You can use your energy to whine about how tough it is, or you can use your energy to solve the problem.' ''

7:45 The kids are in trouble if they're not through the door by now. Late is anything after precisely 7:42. If you are tardy, your parent or guardian has to come sign you in.

Walkie-talkie in hand, Leonard swings his 300-plus pounds past the check-in desk for tardy students, looks up back stairwells to make sure no one's loitering, and lumbers down the halls. He gets a little out of breath; there is no time for the exercise he needs to keep his weight under control.

Many days, he is stopped and scolded by an angry parent frustrated over discipline, grades, or life. After one such encounter, which he endures stoically, Leonard explains: ``That young woman at the door, she has one son who's graduated, one daughter in school, one son who's been thrown out. She's got to get mad at someone. I let her get mad at me.''

Inside the school, young women offer him hugs and confidences that would make many fathers envious. Outside, he is treated with respect even by the scores of gang members he has expelled. Jacqueline Burnett, an aide to Leonard first at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and now at the Burke, gestures out her office window at the gray Toyota in the parking space marked ``Dr. Leonard, Headmaster.''

``Nobody has ever bothered that car,'' Burnett says. ``He touches them. He's one of them. He makes them feel `I am you; you could be me.' ''

Leonard first made a name for himself as assistant headmaster of English High School, then as principal of the King School, which, when he took over, was the most troubled middle school in the city. That is where he was in 1995, when city leaders, who had ignored years of warnings from the New England Association of School and Colleges about problems at the Burke, realized that loss of accreditation was imminent. Mayor Thomas M. Menino put forward a $31 million proposal to repair a handful of the most run-down schools, and the School Department asked Leonard to take on the Burke.

The moves were ``supposed to impress [association leaders] enough so they would not take the accreditation away,'' Leonard says. ``As often happens in this system, the bureaucracy moved a little too slow. [The association] said to them, `This is not about giving you another chance. It's about cheating children by not giving them the basic services they are supposed to have.' ''

After the association acted, Menino visited the school, and a fortuitous accident occurred. As the mayor and the principal walked through the auditorium, a hunk of plaster fell from the ceiling, striking Menino on the shoulder. The mayor brushed himself off and asked for a drink of water. Leonard laughed. There were no working water fountains at the Burke.

``He said, `That's it,' and the place became a beehive of activity,'' Leonard says. ``Between June and September of 1995, it came to look like a school.''

But looking like a school and actually being a school are not the same.

Soon after accreditation was lost, in 1995, a group of Burke parents drew up a federal civil rights complaint; they asserted that conditions would never have been allowed to deteriorate so profoundly if 97 percent of the enrollment had not been children of color. Now, not just the city's reputation was at stake. The impending suit meant the federal government could withhold tens of millions of dollars a year in aid -- on which which the school system depends heavily -- while the complaint was being investigated.

Suddenly, the city wanted action. Fast.

From his City Hall perch, Menino could make sure that the plaster and plumbing were repaired. To fix the long list of academic deficiencies cited by the examiners, a different kind of housecleaning was required. School Department administrators agreed to allow teachers to transfer out freely. Then Leonard told the staff what he expected.

``The hardest thing of all -- but it's something people have to understand if they want to be urban educators -- is we have to take responsibility,'' Leonard told them. ``The day when a teacher's responsibility was just to come in and teach at grade level is over.'' The Burke's teachers had to see to it that their students made progress, whatever that took. To help them do that, they were offered a 36-hour professional development course on an unpaid, volunteer basis.

``If all this is too much for you,'' Leonard told the teachers in the summer of 1995, ``if it is too late in your career, don't be here in September.''

Half of them weren't.

The 65 teachers now on staff are there because they want to be. All are volunteering for professional development training. They represent a wide range of ethnicities and experiences -- from Abner Logan, 47, who has spent his adult life in the Boston schools, to Chad Leith, 27, who came here from Harvard College via the Peace Corps less than two years ago.

One winter day, Logan is working with a group of 10th-graders on George Orwell's classic Animal Farm. His main problem is that the book is an allegory for the Russian Revolution, and the students don't know anything about the Russian Revolution.

``When someone starts an organization -- a gang, a team -- how do they go about selecting a leader?'' he asks, sparking a discussion that gradually gets away from the book, until a girl asks the teacher if he thinks the president is stupid. ``If he is,'' says Logan, smoothly guiding the class back toward Animal Farm, ``then he's leading a population of stupid people. . . . Now, is Orwell saying the working population isn't smart enough to move forward?''

Down the corridor and around the corner, Leith helps a class of students from Cape Verde practice how to call authorities in an emergency. Then he adopts a different persona.

``Now we are going to leave the Jeremiah Burke once again,'' Leith says, making his voice deeper and more dramatic. ``Where are we going? California. Where in California? The university, where Professor Leith will deliver a lecture on Death Valley.'' He encourages class members to think of themselves as college students, and takes them through a half-hour in which they work on converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, change kilometers to miles, and figure out that almost all of Cape Verde would fit inside Death Valley.

Both teachers are enthusiastic about the Burke, though neither is under any illusions that things are ideal there or ever will be.

Logan, the veteran, remembers years when kids rode bikes and pulled knives in the halls, when strangers roamed the school. He taught without textbooks for so long that he says he eventually ``learned to Xerox articles and do without books.'' Just looking at the rows of new books makes him grin.

Leith, the newcomer, knows little of the old days, though some gang members were still active in the school when he arrived, two years ago. To him, the Burke is simply the ``most supportive place I have ever worked, including the Peace Corps and [Cambridge] Rindge & Latin. A lot of us spend time together out of school. It's very warm and comfortable.''

News that the Burke was being stripped of its accreditation set off a domestic dispute in John and Ann Young's house, in Dorchester. Their son Shawn was happy in the school; he had friends there: It was where his older brothers and sister had studied.

Ann wanted to pull him out. John wanted him to stay.

``John said if we were going to keep running from problems, they'd never get worked out, that this was our community's school, and we should do everything we could,'' Ann says, over a quick dinner in a Dorchester Avenue restaurant, before a recent parents' group meeting. They doubted that either Dorchester or South Boston High School would be better; they feared that if they had to pay for Shawn to attend Boston College High School, they'd never be able to cope with college costs.

John, a carpentry contractor who has been disabled since the mid-1980s, promised his wife, a social-service center employee, that he would take an active role at the school. They agreed to try to stick it out.

They and a handful of other parents began meeting and talking. ``Why was this happening to the Burke,'' John Young wondered, ``when Latin Academy [an elite exam school, formerly Girls' Latin], in the same neighborhood, had a nice library and gardeners outside? We had no library. We didn't even have drinking water.''

The parents sought legal advice from the Center on Law and Education, a national private, nonprofit organization that offers assistance to parents seeking school reform. They wound up creating the strongest single force for bringing the Burke back -- the civil rights complaint that alleged that the rats, the lack of guidance counselors and drinking water, the general neglect, would not have been permitted in schools with more white students. To avert litigation of the complaint, city officials agreed to fix 34 specific physical and academic problems, nearly doubling the Burke's budget in the process.

Michele Brooks, one of the parents who worked with John Young on the complaint, says she has experienced the effects of racism since she was a Burke student herself. A lifelong resident of the neighborhood, she entered the school during the last of its glory days; she took Latin through 12th grade, three years of French, a year of Spanish, and graduated in 1970.

The Burke was still a girls' school then, as it had been since it opened in 1934. The student body was diverse. Half of the whites were Irish Catholic, half were Jewish; the numbers of blacks and Asians were increasing. Students could choose a college-track curriculum or a course of study deisgned to prepare them for office jobs after high school.

``The Burke's status was almost the same as Girls' Latin,'' Brooks says, ``but all the guidance counselors were white, and there was a lot of subtle racism. A lot of girls who wanted to go to college were being discouraged. Black girls who wanted to be doctors were told, `Go into nursing. It's easier.' ''

Brooks became so involved in the school after it lost accreditation that she gave up her job with a computer company to take a part-time position as the Burke's parent coordinator. Now she is studying for her teaching certificate. She is happy about the progress at the school over the last several years but, like other parents, is worried about the future. Whenever accreditation is regained, the obligations of the city and School Department under the civil rights complaint end, too, and ``we could be right back where we were in 1991,'' Brooks says. ``This could be a very short-lived victory.''

Most people concerned with the Burke now see the loss of accreditation, so traumatic when it occurred, as a blessing. It forced city officials to focus; it put power in the hands of the parents; it put resources in the hands of the staff. And, despite fears to the contrary, it did not have an adverse effect on students' futures. ``We sent kids to college from the unaccredited Burke High School last year,'' Leonard says, stressing that ``if you've got A's and B's here, you're going to college, and you're probably going free.''

Leilah Rose is one of those A and B students. She is senior class secretary, works afternoons and weekends when she can find jobs, participates in an academic enrichment program for urban students through UMass-Boston, and still finds time to volunteer at an early-learning center for children on Columbia Road and at homes for the elderly in Dorchester and Roxbury.

She likely would be homeless now, or bouncing from one friend's apartment to another, if not for the staff at the Burke. She probably would not be on track for college, still wrestling with whether she's more interested in engineering or psychology.

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