The Adventures of Jallon

Two weeks ago, we said goodbye to stand-up comic Greg Estrada, who returned to performing after spending a year producing amateur comedy shows. This week, we begin following Jallon Brown, a principal feverishly working to get her new public charter school off the ground.

Episode 1

Jallon brown sits at a table strewn with cans of iced tea, children's books and spreadsheets of student names. "Okay, everyone," she calls out, "let's get started." The five members of her fledgling staff take their seats and face the 31-year-old principal of KIPP Harbor Academy, a new public charter middle school in Annapolis.

For Jallon and KIPP Harbor, it's crunch time. After spending months canvassing public housing complexes and community center basketball games, Jallon has enrolled 90 rising fifth-graders. That's 10 more than her target enrollment, but Jallon suspects a few kids might quit before the school even opens.

In fact, parents of would-be students do have a few reasons to worry. For one, Jallon's school is somewhat homeless. She's trying to lease space at a vacant office building in Annapolis. "It's perfect," she says. "There are even bulletin boards in the hallway. It's screaming, 'I want to be a school.'" But even if she signed the lease today, there could be delays. The building, for example, needs to have sprinklers installed before meeting code, Jallon says.

And who's going to teach math?

Jallon doesn't know yet. She offered the job to a teacher living on the West Coast who now isn't sure that she wants to move east. In the meantime, Jallon is searching for other candidates. She even jokes with a visiting writer: "You look like a math teacher. Want a job?"

In just four days, her fifth-graders arrive for a three-week summer session. (Next year she plans to add sixth grade, then seventh and finally, three years from now, eighth grade.) For now, a local Christian school is letting her use its classrooms, which are empty for the summer. But before the kids arrive, it seems like there are a million things to do: Buy bagels, cream cheese and juice for the children's breakfasts; call and remind the kids where and when the school buses will pick them up; fingerprint the teachers.

These aren't the kind of tasks that Jallon envisioned for herself when she majored in elementary education at the College of William and Mary. After graduating in 1996, she taught in Williamsburg and Silver Spring, and quickly discovered the yawning academic gap between her low-income pupils and more affluent students. She often felt powerless to really address the problem. That's why, she says, she decided to open her own school.

Two years ago, Jallon accepted a fellowship from the Knowledge Is Power Program, a highly regarded nonprofit that trains educators to start public schools that serve mainly low-income students. In Washington and Baltimore, KIPP middle schools have made impressive gains in math and reading scores, in part by teaching students from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and having them attend school on many Saturdays and in the summer.

Still, when Jallon showed up in Annapolis last August with her proposal to create KIPP Harbor Academy, she was not received with open arms. For months, the Anne Arundel County school board appeared poised to reject Annapolis's first charter school, which would be publicly funded but independently operated. School board members worried that the charter school would drain students and resources from Annapolis's two existing middle schools. Jallon, who lives in Hanover near Arundel Mills Mall, found herself in constant -- and ultimately successful -- negotiation with school board members and leaders from the county teachers union.

Along the way, Jallon and her fiance, Phil Croskey, had a child, Malachi, now 6 months old. They are getting married soon -- after summer school ends but before the new school year begins.

Jallon concludes her faculty meeting by announcing that KIPP is sponsoring a national conference in Las Vegas in August. Sign these forms if you want to go, she tells her teachers. KIPP will cover all expenses.

Will you be going? someone asks Jallon.

"I really want to," she replies, "but I can't. I have my wedding to get ready for."

-- Tyler Currie