ATHENS — It’s fitting that a college town known for its football team has a new private school that owes its existence to the sport. Not much else about Downtown Academy, however, is quite what you might expect.
The school is tucked into a nondescript building on the campus of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In the sanctuary, a person standing in the pulpit can look to the right, across Broad Street, to Parkview Homes, one of the many spreads of the squat, red-brick public housing that’s a familiar sight in Athens. From Parkview and other public housing around town come the students of Downtown Academy.
“The children we’re serving really are those that have no other options,” the head of school, Patrick Ennis, said when I toured the school recently, “because of finances, or their parents’ (lack of) access to transportation.”
As often as we’ve heard the plight of poor students, you might have expected families to flock to Downtown Academy. So did Ennis.
“The expectation had been people will be busting down the doors to get here,” he said. “But it’s new and somewhat uncomfortable for some families that never had private school as an option.”
Enter football. Predating the school is Downtown Ministries, an offshoot of Redeemer. One of its earliest programs was a football team for at-risk youth called the Falcons, which has since been joined by programs in basketball, gymnastics, tennis and swimming.
But coaches noticed a trend: Their efforts to turn sports into a motivation for middle-schoolers to stay in school until graduation bore little fruit as long as those students were woefully behind in their studies. Clarke Central High School is a reflection of the enormous economic gulf in the county. As Rivers put it, “It’s Yale or jail.”
Thus was born Downtown Academy. “We started with 17 children,” Ennis said. “And every one of those kids came to us because of our relationships from our football program. We had parents who said, we know you love our kids, so we’re going to trust you.”
The school started with just kindergarten and first grade. Now it’s a k-3 school, with ambitions of growing to cover middle school.
The school’s total cost is about $6,500 per pupil, but Rivers said the average family gets a 98 percent scholarship. So the cost to them is $130 a year, still a burden for many of them. Donors to Georgia’s tax-credit tuition scholarship program help cover some of the cost, and Education Savings Accounts would be a huge help to families if they were to become law.
Interestingly, Rivers said this expressly Christian school has a much broader appeal.
“There’s a lot of people competing for Christian donors,” he said. “So we have to go out to the more secular groups, which have embraced us because they want to see the improvement downtown.”
Improvement is what they’re getting. Downtown Academy students score right in the middle of the pack of all private-school students on national standardized tests, Ennis said. What’s impressive is those scores aren’t adjusted for income or other demographic factors.
“We’re able to raise expectations for the parent, which translates to the older kids, who we don’t have a place for, and they are doing better in school, too,” he said.
“This,” Rivers added, “is going to be the future of inner-city education.”
It’s hard to argue.
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