Baltimore City Public Schools is in the middle of a $1.1 billion makeover, approved last year by the General Assembly, that will allow dilapidated schools to be refurbished and a few new ones to be built.
The new building for Waverly Elementary and Middle School may be the first completed project after the money was approved.
The original design plan for Waverly (the school’s Facebook page).
So, with a groundbreaking in 2012, long before the General Assembly approved the money, plans were under way, with the help of community investment in public neighborhood schools, to give Waverly a new building. The school had already occupied three different buildings since 1911.
And the fourth is simply wonderful, Erica Green in the Baltimore Sun reports, under the leadership of Amanda Rice, who took over as principal of the school this year.
“We now know, 10 years later, that you can’t fight this one school at a time,” the Sun quoted Karen DeCamp, director of neighborhood programs at the Greater Homewood Community Corp, as saying. “The building is incredibly beautiful, and I think it is, for us, going to be the shiny example of what you can accomplish when you organize people to work together.”
The nonprofit pushed for a new building, and Ms DeCamp helped mobilize the community in what she called a “sustained public outcry,” the Sun noted.
Residents of the neighborhood have also expressed great optimism in the new facility, which opened in the fall.
“We have such a long history of a diverse, quality public education in this neighborhood, and so many of us got to enjoy that,” said Joan Stanne, a 40-year resident of the neighborhood who has volunteered at the school for the past 13 years. “This area is special because of its diversity, and we need a school that fits with that—where everybody feels comfortable. … Somewhere a little bit of that was lost. We have parents now who say, ‘We’re going to do this neighborhood public school thing,’ and that’s really great to see.”
The building features new technology, new learning spaces, a cafeteria that doubles as an auditorium, and so on, but also a daycare center, a food pantry, and other features intended to connect with the local community and give residents a sense of ownership. An excerpt from The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson explains this ownership a little more eloquently than I can in this short space.
Of course, there’s more to a school than the building.
“The building is one part of it, and is a necessary and important element, but a 21st-century building also needs a very progressive, very forward-thinking school leader and a robust community behind it,” the Sun quoted the district’s interim superintendent as saying. “And I think Waverly has that.”
