100% of school’s first class is college-bound

June 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

CHICAGO

For each boy, the new school offered an escape and a chance at a life that seemed beyond reach.

Marlon Marshall was nonchalant about everything, school included. His mother pressed him to go to college, but it seemed like a pipe dream.

Sometimes she’d yell at him and his brothers for their bad grades. Once she just cried when she picked up their report cards.

Marlon had heard, too, about the new high school on Chicago’s South Side. Students would be accepted by lottery so his mediocre grades wouldn’t disqualify him. He thought it was worth a shot.

Marcus Bass figured there just had to be something better for him. Barely a teen, he’d been shot at, robbed a couple of times and had seen terrible things in his housing project. His parents argued constantly; life was chaotic.

He was sold by the recruiter’s description of a “different” high school.

Urban Prep would be a charter high school. It would bring together some 150 boys from some of the poorest, gang-ravaged neighborhoods and try to set them on a new track. They’d have strict rules: A longer school day — by two hours. Two classes of English daily. A uniform with jackets and ties.

And Urban Prep had a goal — one that seemed audacious, given that just 4 percent of the Class of 2010 was reading at or above grade level when they arrived at the school in 2006.

In four years, they were told, they’d be heading to college.

From the very start, Tim King had a grand plan.

“I wanted to create a school that was going to put black boys in a different place,” said the founder of Urban Prep, “and in my mind, that different place needed to be college.”

It had taken four years for King to win permission to open the Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, which receives about 75 percent of its funding from the Chicago public schools; the rest is private.

King’s plan was both idealistic and grounded in the harsh realities of inner-city life: He’d take boys from tough situations, many way behind in school, and if they followed his road map, they’d get into college.

If the premise seemed simple, implementing it was anything but.

At Urban Prep, every student has at least one mentor — maybe a coach or a teacher. About 60 percent of teachers at the Englewood campus (Urban Prep has another school and plans to open a third this fall) are black men. They serve as confidantes and role models to students, many of whom have no fathers in their lives.

All staff members have school-assigned cell phones so students (and parents) can phone day or night. And they do.

Of the 150 teens who started in 2006, 95 lasted four years. (Another dozen were transfers.) They’ve become a tight-knit group.

So when Cameron Barnes’ mother died last year, he returned to school the next day. “It was like being with family,” he said.

The acceptance letters began arriving this spring.

Trinity College. The University of Illinois. Howard University. The University of Virginia. Morehouse College. Indiana State University. Tuskegee University. And on and on.

When all 107 seniors had received letters, there was a celebration.

The Urban Prep graduation is an unfolding story and King knows it.

“It’s just a milestone,” King said. “It’s not an endgame. This is not the fulfillment of our mission. [That] comes when we are able to see our students succeed in college and that may not be apparent for four or five years.”