There followed a furious few weeks of hiring, training and facility leasing and upgrading at the old parochial schools. And on Sept. 18, instruction began at two of the four sites -- Perpetual Help in north city and St. Boniface in the city's southeastern corner. There were about 450 students, not 3,000. But the St. Louis Academies were open -- private schools using public money and requiring no tuition to provide solid, basic skills education to inner-city kids presumed to be bound for college.
Although the organizers are religious leaders, the schools themselves are not religious. They're open to any city children in grades K-10 (the plan is to add 11th grade next year, 12th in two years), and there is no religion in the curriculum. There is a mantra, though. You hear it over and over from teachers, staff, students and parents. The mantra is "no excuses," and it comes from Diana Bourisaw.
Bourisaw is the former superintendent of the Fox School District, outside St. Louis, and most recently was the state supervisor for 37 districts in the St. Louis area. She joined the Academies to develop the academic program, leaving a better paying job "because it's in my blood," she says. "It's a passion to work with impoverished learners and to help those who need additional opportunities."
(This sentiment is expressed repeatedly by staff and teachers, many of whom took pay cuts to work at the Academies. Daniels, who works for no salary, says that the pay scale at the schools ranges from $23,000 to $40,000 a year. The plan, he says, is to bring teachers and administrators up to St. Louis city school pay levels once a charter, and the funding that comes with it, is obtained.)
"We believe that our goal as educators is a no-excuses approach to education," Bourisaw says. "I based [the curriculum] really on high standards for all students and the belief that all students can and will learn, and our approach is that every student that attends our academy is college-bound."
The curriculum is based on basics, and revolves around individual instruction, smaller class size and extra time spent on studies. "What we've done is we've looked at where they [the students] are, and we've designed a program to try to target the areas that they're short in," Daniels says.
That means coming to school early and staying late for some kids, and it also means heavy parental involvement.
"We're going to have to train the parents how to sit down and do homework," Daniels says. "Because parents, if they don't know something, how can they help a child? Probably a good 50 to 65 percent of any child's learning process takes place when they actually do homework."
Ladonna Brewer, an eight-year veteran of the classroom who's now the principal of the Academy school at St. Boniface Church, says that parental involvement has been one of the best parts about her new job.
"It has been really good, and that makes a difference," she says. "It makes it easier on the teacher as well as myself, because we are a no-excuses school, and from the beginning we're telling parents, 'It's a privilege to have your child here.'"
The key to all this parental participation is "ownership of the school," says Daniels. "When parents feel that they have a say-so in what happens, they're more apt to want to participate. The biggest key here is we got the parents involved before the schools opened. Most of the parents who are in the schools are the ones who were showing up at the town hall meetings, asking questions, giving the input."
Another key to the Academies' special brand of education, says Bourisaw, is that its curriculum, while not religious in any way, is "values-based."
"We teach kids about respect and integrity, citizenship, being kind neighbors, and all of those things that are so important to becoming good citizens and productive adults," she says. "We believe there is a right and wrong and there's a very clear line to what that is. We have very high expectations. We believe you have to work extra hard in order to achieve, and particularly students who come from poverty-stricken backgrounds have to work twice as hard to achieve."
Ambitious as it may be, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about the Academies' approach to curriculum and learning, says Daniels.
"Johns Hopkins has done research for 20 years that clearly states that if you add additional time -- in other words, it's like putting in overtime on your job -- that tends to help our kids come back up to grade level," he says. "When parental involvement goes over 60 or 70 percent for the school, the kids do better. When you add two math classes, two reading classes a day -- this data is already out there to show us that these things work. So we didn't reinvent the wheel by trying to put all this stuff together."
Next page: "We're operating on a shoestring, there's no doubt," Daniels says