SE Community, Classes Are a Study in Fresh Starts

Not that there aren't still signs of the old neighborhood: On a recent evening, blue and red police lights flickered on a bank of metal apartment mailboxes up the hill. A group of teenagers shuffled past the new community center, heads down.

But two boys carrying trumpet cases almost skipped out of the building, beaming. The shouts of more than 100 kids playing at the Boys & Girls Club echoed inside. Still-wet paintings hung along a window, drying, and newsprint was spread over a long table for the next art class.

And in the Trinity classroom, a dozen grown-ups had their notebooks out, textbooks open, learning how to be students again.

Goals Within Reach

Karen Wright stopped by the open house for Trinity in January on a whim, and before she knew it, she was getting whisked into a seat, tested and signed up. Classes are much cheaper than at the main campus, low enough that federal grants could cover the cost.

She had thought about going back to school, bored with her job as an executive secretary for a federal office.

As a teenager at McKinley High School, she got through school memorizing the answers, she said, but never learning to think. "I wasn't used to stretching out my brain so I could think about the consequences. . . . I wasn't taught I had chances and choices above what I saw every day."

Wright didn't give much thought to college back then. She knew she could work at the carry-out soul-food corner store her parents owned. And so it went, a series of non-choices and bad judgments, she said, drifting along through life.

A few days before classes started, she drove to Trinity's main campus and walked into the big 100-year-old stone Main Hall, all burnished wood and pillars, just to see if she was really a student. Someone in the admissions office showed her her name, right there on the computer screen.

"That's something I thought was really unattainable, a private school," she said. " . . . I was excited, just crazy excited."

And a little scared. "I was hoping maybe they'll take it easy," she said, "and feel sorry for us because we're east of the river."

The classes are small -- 22 students all told. The school hopes to offer a full bachelor's degree for a couple hundred students within the next year or two; school leaders think the demand is there.

Claudia Queen, a neighborhood health outreach worker, thinks that with more education, she could be a social worker. Earlean Davis, an aide at an after-school program, thinks she could be a teacher if she had a college degree. Bernard Smallwood gave up hustling years ago, he said; he volunteers helping kids. He wants to learn to manage a nonprofit community center.