On the front steps at Lexington Terrace Elementary-Middle School, Principal Patricia Dennis waits and watches for the children who aren’t going to come.
How many desks will be empty today? How many lunches should be cooked? Where are her “bright-eyed babies”? Day by day, amid mounting anxiety and increasing frustration, she and her teachers no longer know.
As the Housing Authority of Baltimore City uproots the close-knit extended families of the Lexington Terrace public housing complex so that it can be torn down in July, the brick school is becoming a ghost anchor of a ghost neighborhood.
The end is inevitable, Ms. Dennis said last week. Come the end of the school year in June, the deadline for families to move out, the West Baltimore school will close. There will be only 28 students left on the roll book when the Lexington Terrace neighborhood finally is deserted, “so there is no reason to have a school,” she said.
“Your head can comprehend all of that, but your heart takes a little time,” she said.
For the adults and the children, this academic year has been marred by unanswered questions, midyear transfers, disrupted learning and severed support systems.
Since September, the enrollment has fallen to 274 from 404, Ms. Dennis said. At first, a trickle of families left. By January, it had become a river.
Lexington Terrace includes pre-kindergarten through seventh grade. This week, 30 third-graders and 15 fifth-graders remained at the school.
A new crisis has arisen this week: The Housing Authority has to displace at least 52 families by Monday because of power failures at buildings in the complex around West Saratoga Street. An undetermined number of families with school-age students will leave the neighborhood, an agency spokesman said. Teachers at Lexington Terrace said many of their remaining students are affected.
“Really, we don’t have much time,” said Florise A. White, whose entire morning kindergarten class fit around one table last week in her brightly colored room. Nine of the 20 children who enrolled in September remain. “It seems like they could go on and allow them to stay to the end of the school year,” Ms. White said.
City officials have anticipated the closing of the Lexington Terrace school for some time, but the school board won’t vote to make it official until a public meeting Thursday.
Greater cooperation is needed among city agencies so that the timing of any future demolitions of housing projects won’t be so disruptive to schools, said Gary Thrift, the area assistant superintendent who oversees schools in that neighborhood.
“We certainly were taken by surprise by the speed with which this project is moving forward,” Dr. Thrift said. He was relieved that the original March date for the Lexington Terrace implosion was postponed to July, a decision Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III made to reduce disruption at the school.
“It would be better as we look at future projects if the city could secure the funding in advance, which would allow us to relocate everyone during the summer months, when it’s less disruptive to the educational process,” Dr. Thrift said.
“We had not planned to empty the buildings out as fast as they are emptying out now,” Mr. Henson said.
Many families want to leave before the June 20 deadline and choose new homes outside the school zone because of the discomfort of remaining, he said.
The effects ripple beyond the regular classrooms. The building also houses a regional alternative center for troubled students .. from six area schools and a Head Start center serving about 35 children. Both programs need new homes.
More pressing, parents and others say, is the effect on all of the children in the school throughout this school year’s disruptions.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” Sh’keena Richards, 12, president of the student body, said as she let longtime friend and neighbor Bianca Watkins, 13, twist her long braids playfully. The families of both girls must move from Saratoga Street buildings.
“We still have the telephone,” Bianca said, peeking at her friend then looking away. Where they will live and attend school remained unresolved last week.
The girls have been playmates since they were toddlers and classmates since kindergarten. Together, they were cheerleading champions, band members and baseball teammates.
They were supposed to be at Lexington Terrace another year. Before the demolition of the housing complex was decided on, the plan was to add an eighth grade.
Sh’keena was elected at midyear. Her predecessor, Latoya Linton, 13, was transferred from the school by her mother, who thought another school might meet her daughter’s academic needs better under the circumstances, .
‘A toll on the children’
And so the year has gone for all of the students and their families, one departure and disruption after another. Unlike adults, the children wear the stress on their sleeves, teachers say.
“When the [Housing Authority] put them out like that, we’re seeing that the pressure on the parents takes a toll on the children,” Ms. White said. “They can’t act out at home, so we see it here.”
Fights, crying jags, inattention and behavior troubles attributed to heavy hearts among the remaining students have become regular challenges, other teachers said last week. One boy has written a farewell letter in advance and says goodbyes weekly because he doesn’t know each Friday whether he will return to the school Monday, a teacher said.
Through a 2-year-old school partnership with the University of Maryland, social work interns have been meeting with individual students and class groups to help them cope with the disruption.
“The kids here have known each other since they were in diapers. We’re seeing kids from extended families split up among different schools, when they used to all go here together,” said social worker Mary Patricia DiPaula, the interns’ supervisor. The effect on the kids, “is horrendous,” she said.
The interns have asked students to paint fabric squares that will be sewn into hanging quilts so that “they could leave something behind,” Ms. DiPaula said. Many who grew up in steel-and-concrete high-rises drew peaked-roof houses, a child’s typical symbol of home.
“A first-grader told me that one of the good things about the move is she’ll get to have her own room,” said school counselor Elton Wiest. He has been telling students and staff members to dwell on the positive but also to find ways to express their grief and fear. “We can’t put our heads in the sand and pretend this isn’t happening,” he said.
The parents association that once sponsored tutoring and adult education programs has fallen apart.
Many school employees, such as cafeteria and maintenance workers, have not received from supervisors any official notice of the school closing or of their future assignments.
The teachers — and even Ms. Dennis — don’t know where they will be working next school year. Some, including the principal, joined the staff in September and were not told then what lay ahead.
Small triumphs
Staff members feel the pall over the school but can count the small triumphs, Ms. Dennis said. As enrollment shrinks, they rearrange class groups and try to take advantage of the luxury of extra books, extra space and smaller classes.
Volunteer coordinator Robert Manning sometimes walks children home to their isolated apartments in the eerie, almost empty high-rises. Teacher Erin McGraw uses her camera to make class portraits as gifts for departing students.
“It takes a while to make new friends after they move,” said teacher Carolyn D. Jones, who assembles a package for each of her departing second- and third-graders. Each contains flash cards, math workbooks and games.
“This will help them practice their skills and give them something fun to do when they are alone,” she said.
The school board did not schedule public hearings to give the families a voice, some parents said. The Housing Authority has held meetings at the school.
“Normally, when you close a school, you follow procedures that involve public hearings and community input, but this is kind of an emergency situation,” Phillip H. Farfel, the school board president, said last week.
Mr. Farfel said he was not aware of the day-to-day toll the Housing Authority’s actions have had on the school but added, “It’s clear we have to close the school. You can’t keep a school open for only 28 kids.”
Reopening planned
When new housing opens in the neighborhood, the school will reopen as its hub, Mr. Farfel said. Plans call for future residents to use a bigger, better Lexington Terrace Elementary. The school system is searching for money to expand and renovate the building and to install computers, he said.
Gina Loudon, a Lexington Terrace graduate whose mother attended the school, has a 5-year-old, Tevin Coates, in kindergarten there now.
“I don’t want to see it closed,” she said. Weeks ago, she was moved out of a building across the street from the school — 755 Lexington St. — to a South Baltimore house near the B&O; Railroad Museum. Every morning, she makes the 20-minute walk with Tevin so that he can finish the year in the school where he has been since he was a 2-year-old in Head Start.
“I don’t care how far I would have to go, because I think the best thing for him is to be here through the whole year,” Ms. Loudon said. “He’s already learning how to read.”
She hasn’t decided where to enroll him next year.
Pub Date: 4/20/96
