IT TAKES A SCHOOL

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/NORFOLK

The sign on the squat brick schoolhouse in the midst of crime-ridden public-housing projects in Norfolk, Virginia, reads BOWLING PARK ELEMENTARY: A CARING COMMUNITY. Principal Herman Clark is one of those who does the caring, which is why every year he takes the parents of his pupils on a field trip to local attractions. One year it was to Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. "We got the chance to see the electric chair," he says. There have been visits to a prison in Chesapeake and a women's penal institution in Goochland. Two months ago, it was a walk through Death Row at Mecklenburg Correctional Center.

"The parents are subjected to a shakedown body search" for weapons or drugs, Clark says. "They hear the door slam. They look at the inmates and see the way the inmates look back at them. We ask the prisoners, 'Was there something that led you to this life?' They say, 'Yes, my parents were not there when I was a kid. There was nothing to do, so I did this or that [crime].' It is frightening. It makes our parents realize: this is where their child is heading." Every three years, Clark puts his pupils through a similar ordeal. "We target students who have the potential to get in trouble," he says. When a group of 26 returned from Deerfield Correctional Center, Clark says, "I was glad to see the bullies crying."

The shock treatment of the field trips is just one of many innovative therapies that Clark, a Ph.D. in education, has brought to his school. Bowling Park is where the rhetoric of "standing for children" moves beyond talk. If children are to be rescued, the reasoning goes, who is better equipped to do so than the elementary school, a solid institution already in the business? Yet to rescue children, one must start early--even before birth. And to rescue children, whole families must be rescued along with them--hence the transformation of the neighborhood school into a "caring community." It may sound like a platitude, but it is in fact a revolution, one that is spreading through the country, from inner-city ghettos to prosperous suburbs and rural enclaves, as fast as you can say ABC.

One of the most far-reaching programs, which began in Missouri and has spread to 47 states, hires "parent educators" who offer parenting skills and developmental screening to families with young children, beginning in the third trimester of pregnancy. Bowling Park's Michael Bailey, a soft-spoken Mister Rogers type, hands out flyers in food-stamp lines to encourage new mothers to sign up. Each day he drives out to visit one of the 35 families who have joined the program. "Hello, teacher!" shrieks Tonesha Sims, 2 1/2, running out of her house to hug him on a recent morning. Bailey spends an hour reviewing colors and numbers with the pigtailed toddler. As Bailey leaves, Tonesha begs, "Teacher, can I play with you next week?" Lottie Holloman, 68, her great-grandmother--and her guardian since Tonesha's mother, a drug addict, abandoned the girl to foster care--credits Bailey with inspiring her to buy books and read to the child. Children in the program get priority for slots in Bowling Park's preschool.

By delving into the critical first three years of life, schools such as Bowling Park are expanding far beyond traditional academics. But to many educators it is a logical evolution. Moving away from a narrow focus on curriculum reform, some schools are assuming responsibility for the foundations of learning--the emotional and social well-being of the child from birth to age 12. Thus anything that affects a child is the school's business--from nutrition to drug-abuse prevention to health care and psychological counseling. "Schools are being called on to be those 'surrogate parents' that can increase the 'teachability' of children who arrive on their doorsteps in poor shape," according to Joy G. Dryfoos, author of the 1994 book Full-Service Schools.

Bowling Park was chosen in 1992 as the site of the first CoZi school, a model that combines the education programs of two Yale professors, James P. Comer and Edward Zigler. Over the past three decades, Comer, a psychiatrist, has helped convert 600 mostly inner-city schools to a cooperative management in which parents, teachers and mental-health counselors jointly decide policy and focus on building close-knit relationships with children. Zigler, one of the founders of Head Start, designed "The School of the 21st Century," a program operating on 400 campuses, offering year-round, all-day preschool beginning at three, as well as before- and after-school and vacation programs. Bowling Park combines both approaches in what may be the nation's most comprehensive effort, as Zigler puts it, "[to] make the success of the child in every aspect of development our constant focus." Other CoZi schools are operating in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and in Mehlville, Missouri.

At Bowling Park staff members "adopt" a child; many take on several at a time. Often the child is one whose parent has died or gone to prison, or whose siblings are dealing drugs, or whose single mother neglects him. "We take these kids home with us for the weekend or out to eat or to get a haircut," says principal Clark. "School has to be about more than reading, writing and arithmetic. These kids need so much--and sometimes what they really need is a good hug."

In Clark's office the other day, Rashid Holbrook, 11, fidgeted with his wraparound shades and sought to explain why he had gone after a boy with an ax and spray painted a family's front steps. "I got a bad temper," he says. "When I get home at night, I pile up feelings." Rashid lives with an aunt who, Clark says, takes little interest in him. "My daddy's in prison," the boy says, showing little emotion. "He hit my momma. He went for breaking and entering and a hundred other charges." Interjects Clark: "But you're going in a different direction."

Rashid volunteers that he might be an engineer or a policeman. Why a policeman? "I don't like people doing things to other people," he says. And then after a long pause, "But I do it."

Rashid has been "adopted" by Clayton Singleton, 25, an art teacher. "We've been to art museums and shopping at the mall," says Singleton, pausing during a drawing class that sprawls over the floor of a corridor. "He was getting curious about the man-woman thing, so we had The Talk. Whatever questions he asked, he got the real answer." The talk was timely: only a few weeks before, Rashid had asked the daughter of another teacher if she wanted "to make a baby."

The key to Bowling Park's success, which has shown up in higher test scores and a 97% attendance rate, is getting parents into the school. Many of them had never bothered even to walk their first-graders to class. CoZi offers "parent technicians"--two in Bowling Park's case--to visit parents at home, ask them what they need and spur them to form committees and organize projects. Responding to parent feedback, Bowling Park now offers adult-education courses, adult-exercise classes, a once-a-month Family Breakfast Club at which parents talk about children's books, a singing group and a "room moms" program that puts parents into the classroom to help teachers. Parents also pressed the principal for school uniforms--and now help launder them. Bowling Park's programs are funded through a combination of federal funds set aside for inner-city schools, parent fees, private grants and school-district money.

"This is a holistic approach," says CoZi coordinator Lorraine Flood. "If parents are not sitting at the table, we don't find out the underlying reasons for children's academic or behavioral problems." When a mother of children at the school lost her husband to cancer recently, leaving her with six sons, parent technicians set up a workshop on grief. A welfare mother, who had put her child in foster care, found her self-confidence so built up by parenting and adult-education classes and her service in the PTA that she recovered her daughter and got a secretarial job. Recently parent techs held a wedding reception at the school for a mother who finally got married. A grandfather, inspired by a writing workshop, reads his poems at school functions.

But the lessons of Bowling Park, where the student body is overwhelmingly black and low income, are not just for schools that serve the poor. In fact, Zigler's concept of expanding school into a full-day, year-round enterprise is equally crucial to middle-class parents at Sycamore Hills Elementary School in Independence, Missouri, where students are mostly white.

In Independence all 13 elementary schools work on the 21st Century model. Thirty-five percent of new parents take advantage of the state-funded home-visit program for children younger than age three. "We have fine buildings. Why let them sit vacant 14 hours a day and three months of the year?" says superintendent Robert Watkins. "Now we can see a child with a speech impediment at age three and get started on remediation."

Once start-up costs were absorbed for remodeling school basements or buying modular units, the preschool and afterschool day care became mostly self-supporting: 85% of the $2 million program comes from parents' fees. "Schools should be a community hub," says fourth-grade teacher Darlene Shaw. In three decades at Sycamore Hills, she has witnessed profound change. "Out of my 23 students today, only one has a stay-at-home mom," she said. "Without consistent, quality day care, kids flounder. And for kids dealing with divorce and single-parent families, school is their stability when things are going crazy at home."

Nicole Argo, one of Shaw's fourth-graders, has tried riding the bus home after school at 3:15 p.m. But she found she would rather stay in Sycamore's after-school program. "It's boring to watch TV at home," she says. "At 21st Century you do projects and go places." So Nicole's parents--an engineer and a human-resources officer--pick her up after work at 4:30--along with her five-year-old sister Amanda--and drop them both off each morning at 6:30, more than an hour before school begins. Nearly a third of Independence's students have a similar 10-hour day on campus. "It's Bobby's second home," says Laurie French, the divorced mother of a nine-year-old with muscular dystrophy. "The staff is like family, and since Bobby was three, we've done a pretty good job raising him together." Although he walks with difficulty, Bobby takes karate lessons in the program. And lately his favorite activity has been crochet, taught at the day-care center by a volunteer grandmother.

Independence and Norfolk have not experienced opposition to their reforms, but that does not mean every school district is ready for change. Overcrowded classrooms, pinched budgets and teachers set in their ways are only a few of the obstacles. Julia Denes, assistant director of Yale's Bush Center of Child Development and Social Policy, warns, however, that not adopting CoZi-like programs will ultimately cost more. "We must invest in children at an early age to prevent special needs and delinquency," she says. That's the message too of principal Clark's field trips.