Jeremy Lent Photo
As summer camp got underway, Marcella Monk Flake began with a story for the kids, a story from Africa.
As the kids gathered around her, Flake told them about Sundiata, a 13th-century king of the Mali Empire. At the end of the story, she told her students that they’d soon be hearing the story of Booker T. Washington, another man with African roots.
Flake (in photo above) was teaching her first language arts lesson at the Booker T. Washington Academy. Right now it’s a pilot summer enrichment program, an add-on to a camp at a venerable Dixwell Avenue church, Varick A.M.E. Zion. It’s also a dry run for what church organizers hope will become an academic-year full-day school.
“When we talk about Booker T. Washington, we’ll talk about him being a slave,” Flake told her students as the program got underway Tuesday morning. “But I want you to remember that before Africans were slaves, they were free: They were farmers, teachers, and even kings and queens — like Sundiata.”
Flake’s plan to teach about Washington was no coincidence: The five-week summer program is a test-run for the Washington-inspired curriculum that the Academy’s board members plan to implement on a larger scale starting in the fall of 2012.
That’s when the Academy board members — seven local educators and community leaders — hope to open the Booker T. Washington Academy as a K‑6 charter or parochial school. The board was convened in 2009 by Rev. Eldren D. Morrison, who had recently become the pastor of Varick.
Soon after arriving in New Haven, Morrison learned that Booker T. Washington had given his final public speech, in 1915, from the pulpit of Varick. While learning more about Washington’s educational philosophy and about the state of education in New Haven, Morrison (who was not available for comment) got the idea of opening a charter school dedicated to some of Washington’s ideas.
“New Haven’s school situation and Booker T. Washington’s ideas about education really gelled together in [Morrison’s] mind,” said Chaka Felder-McEntire, director of counseling and admissions at Eli Whitney Technical High School in Hamden and chair of the Academy’s board.
Washington, an emancipated Virginia slave, worked his way through college and seminary before becoming the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, at that time a teachers’ college for African-Americans in Alabama.
“We plan to teach using the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who talked about using education to ‘lift the veil of ignorance’,” explained Belinda Carberry, another board member and an assistant principal at Hillhouse High School, who was on hand for the summer program’s kick-off.
According to Carberry, Washington believed that education’s goal should be to “make the child a whole person and a viable citizen — to encourage the child to support others and not simply to make money.”
Despite their curriculum’s tried-and-tested roots, the Academy’s board members will need to show that they’ve done an academic test-run in order to be competitive for grant money, Carberry said. With that motivation, Carberry and the others proposed adding an academic component to the five-week summer camp that Varick has hosted for the past three summers.
Last December, summer camp planning officially fell to the board members, who set about recruiting four local certified teachers to conduct morning classes in math, science, social studies and language arts.
The preparations didn’t stop until after midnight Monday, when Academy staffers were still erecting room dividers and hanging posters to forge classrooms in the basement of Varick, recalled Makeda Flake, who oversees the summer program’s administration.
When Tuesday morning arrived, there was a problem: The basement lights wouldn’t turn on. After a quick investigation, staffers discovered loose wires hanging from a utility pole just outside the church. Workers from the United Illuminating Company weren’t able to fix the wires until the afternoon.
Undeterred, the program’s four teachers set up shop in the church’s upstairs rooms (which still had power) and prepared for the day’s lessons.
Several of the arriving students weren’t fully aware of the special curriculum awaiting them. Lyandre Boyd and Rashon Fuller recalled being at Varick last summer, when the program was exclusively a summer camp. Trips to the park, swimming pool and movie theater were the main entrees each day, they said.
When informed that they would be taking classes in the morning, both boys agreed that they can tolerate the summertime work. (They were also glad to be told that the afternoons still would be reserved for fun.)
Despite the academic “surprise” and the makeshift classrooms, the Booker T. Washington Academy’s inaugural students settled uncomplainingly into their lessons on meteorology, arithmetic tricks, New Haven history and accomplished Africans and African-Americans.
“Is this a fairy tale?” asked one of Flake’s students, once Flake began telling the life of Booker T. Washington.
“No, he was a real person,” Flake replied. Her young audience member smiled and kept listening.
The Booker T. Washington summer enrichment program is accepting enrollments until Friday for students entering 1st through 7th grades. The program staff can be reached at 203 – 624-6245.
The Academy’s board members hope to open the Academy on a more permanent basis as a full-day parochial school at 31 Sperry St., which until recently housed the Shaw/St. Paul A.M.E. Zion Church. The Varick . congregation acquired the building last month, after the Shaw/St. Paul congregation dwindled and disbanded.
And the developer couldn't contact this group to see if they would like to furniture before it was dumped from East Rock School.
I wish Varick AME Zion the best of success with their plans for a school.