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On this first day of school, Charmaine French’s students learn how to sit.
It may seem a trifle, but sitting well apparently is essential to a high-performing first-grade classroom. Straddling the chair or sitting sidesaddle is impermissible. It sends the wrong message to a 6-year-old; it means the rules are flexible, or maybe that there are no rules at all.
Without discipline there can be no order, and, said French, “without that, there’s no learning.”
Hundreds of thousands of students are returning to school in metro Atlanta this month. Summer break ended first in Cobb County and Decatur, where children met their new teachers and classmates on Monday.
That too was the first day of school for both French, a newly minted teacher, and for the brand new charter school that hired her: Kindezi Old Fourth Ward.
The number of charter schools in Georgia is growing, with three more set to open this school year in Bibb, Peach and Spalding counties. This second Kindezi campus is piggybacking on the charter of the first, in west Atlanta, and doesn’t even contribute to the total count now of 118 schools in Georgia, though it is in effect a fourth new school. These schools will be under a brighter spotlight as Georgians look for models to reform an educational system that routinely ranks low among the states.
The first days, and indeed the first weeks, at this new Kindezi campus will be devoted mostly to establishing a studious environment for children. It is in an edgy but fast-changing part of Atlanta, and many of the students come from failing schools and tough neighborhoods. Without manners, a classroom can descend into chaos, and perhaps that is what happened to the school that was here before — the school that failed.
When Dean Leeper, the Kindezi co-founder, toured the building before that school vacated the premises, he noticed a dent in the drywall: “I joked and said it seems like a student got thrown through the wall, and they said, yeah, that’s what happened.”
He brought new staff to the campus but is enrolling many of the children who attended Intown Charter Academy before it was shuttered by Atlanta Public Schools this summer. All the Intown students were poor enough to qualify for free lunches. The school routinely performed near the bottom academically.
Intown’s students came from the surrounding neighborhood, a place where one mother said she fears her young children will get caught up in gangs if she lets them play outside. Kindezi students, on the other hand, come both from the neighborhood and from across Atlanta.
Orkan Utkan and his wife Pia live in Ormewood Park, a gentrifying locale to the south. Their neighborhood school is struggling, so they looked for other options. They considered private schools but were put off by the cost. The charter schools around them had a long wait list or seemed too regimented for their 5-year-old daughter. They were drawn to Kindezi by the diversity (he’s from Turkey; she’s from Peru), the small class sizes (about seven students per teacher), the enthusiasm they witnessed at Kindezi’s first campus on the west side and the education level of the staff.
Many teachers and administrators the couple met had a master’s degree, said Utkan, who has an M.B.A. “It tells you that these people care about education,” he said. “It’s not just feeding their families and making a buck.”
Before the teachers can put those advanced degrees to work, though, they’ll have to establish the ground rules. Leeper was concerned about one classroom, and sent in reinforcements — two administrators — after confronting a couple of girls who were getting a little too lively.
Other teachers seemed to be off to a smooth start. In one fourth-grade classroom, 15 students were seated cross-legged on the carpet, exchanging anecdotes about their summer vacations. Lunchtime was near, so they were discussing cafeteria decorum. One girl suggested a need for an “inside voice,” and the teachers agreed. A boy volunteered “no horseplay in line,” and teacher Steven Posey added, “no horseplay anywhere.”
Gryffen Taylor Andrews, another of the three teachers in the classroom, elaborated further: no fake or real hitting or pulling chairs out from under people, she said. “Keep your hands to yourself at all times, and,” she quickly added after considering the possibilities, “don’t kick people.”
No census has been taken yet, but Leeper guesses middle-class students will comprise at least a fifth of the student body. Too much poverty can drag a school under for an endless number of reasons. A critical mass of well-educated parents can make all the difference.
In this era of an ever-growing gap between the haves and the have -nots, Kindezi is, for the moment, intertwining the fates of parents who might not otherwise have met.
The school is Ayanna Anderson’s best hope. She lives nearby, works at Burger King and didn’t make it to college. She wants her two boys to get an education, but the neighborhood school is, to her mind, a dangerous place. Her two sons, 9 and 6, come home talking about the Bloods and the Crips, two notorious street gangs.
The boys had attended Intown, and rather than send them to the neighborhood school after that charter school closed, Anderson was prepared to ship them to her grandmother’s house in another school district. Her kids were not going there, “period,” Anderson said. Her reaction upon hearing that Kindezi was taking Intown’s place: “Thank God.”
Only time will tell whether Kindezi succeeds and her prayer is fully answered.
