Whatever Happened to The Class of 2005?

The school has just two copy machines, one of which is broken, he said.

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"That printer doesn't work," he said, pointing to an aging, bulky machine in his classroom. It has been out of commission for five weeks, he said, and "I don't know when it's going to be fixed."

The Class of 2005 had a nickname for the school: "Cardirty."

The classmates shared some difficult times. Sophomore year, a boy snuck a gun through an unlocked door and fired shots outside the cafeteria, wounding a student. Senior year, a mercury spill closed down the building, and for three weeks students were shuttled to empty classrooms at UDC.

Ballard, now a regional superintendent for the D.C. public schools, said the biggest problem at Cardozo was the troublemakers -- he called them the "one percenters" -- who monopolized school staff: One percent of the student body took up 99 percent of the staff's time and resources.

He said he had to cope with gangs -- particularly African American girl gangs and Hispanic boy gangs -- which he tried to manage with police officers and security guards and with regular sessions between students and counselors.

"Whatever's happening in the community happens in the school," Ballard said.

Just 63 of the original 243 students -- slightly more than a quarter -- would walk across the stage and graduate from Cardozo in the spring of 2005. Over the four years, they were joined by an almost equal number of students who transferred in, for a total graduating class of about 140.

Not Ready for College

Danielle Chappell was among the proud graduates in 2005. The youngest of three children, she said she was the first to go to college on time and to go away to school. She said her parents had wanted her to attend a local college. But eventually her father, a truck driver, supported her desire to go to the University of Maryland Eastern Shore even though it meant he'd have to pay more.

Math wasn't her only obstacle. At Cardozo, "English was one of my best subjects," said Chappell, 20, but she soon realized that she was weak in grammar. "We were learning about [sentence] fragments, compounds and pronouns at Eastern Shore. We didn't learn that at Cardozo."

Chappell also was mystified when her professor assigned a paper with footnotes and a bibliography.

"I didn't write a research paper at Cardozo," she said. "I heard about it, but I never done it until I got to Eastern Shore."