Some Pr. George's Parents Question Safety of High-Scoring Flowers High
By Nelson Hernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 14, 2008
The No. 1 reason students get into trouble at Charles H. Flowers High School is not for fighting, not for weapons, not for stealing. It's for this: disrespect. Disruptive but hardly dangerous. It's the kind of school where, in a survey last year, 58 percent of the students agreed that they "feel safe" -- far more than at many other high schools in Prince George's County. The school boasts the second-highest state test scores in the county.
But all that is cold comfort to parents alongside the fact that a teenage girl was shot dead and another wounded walking home from the school. They were barely a quarter of a mile away when a car pulled up and bullets poured out.
A dread has settled on some parents left wondering if the modern tide of mindless violence is rising around them, wondering if one more school is at a tipping point.
"The school has so much potential," said Lisa Cooper, mother of a freshman. Which way will it go now?
"Don't get me wrong. It's not the worst school in the world. Some of the problems that school has, most schools have. . . . How Flowers builds itself from the ashes of this incident will say a lot about it. This is an opportunity to fall down or keep the image and build on it."
It is not only Flowers's image at stake. In some ways, it is the future of Prince George's public schools.
The school was opened in 2000, in part to hold on to a growing black middle class turning to private schools. Flowers has billed itself as "a mecca of excellence," and academically it is among the strongest in the county. Every year, hundreds of students take tests for admission to a highly competitive science and technology program, which attracts the top 5 percent of students in the county. On state tests of achievement last year, 72.6 percent of those tested showed proficiency in reading and 65.7 percent in math, well above the county average of 58.1 percent in reading and 51.9 percent in math. Only Eleanor Roosevelt, in Greenbelt, bested Flowers in both categories.
Before Flowers opened, some parents were concerned about mixing students from the affluent neighborhoods surrounding the school in Springdale, just outside the Capital Beltway, with students from poorer families not much farther away. And the working-class families did not want to be excluded from the attractive campus and its academic opportunities.
As a compromise, Flowers draws students from nearly everywhere. The area is an economic patchwork: Mitchellville, to the east, is home to the Country Club at Woodmore, a golf course and million-dollar mansions. Ardmore, just outside the Beltway, and Glenarden, just inside, have more modest single-family homes. The working-class communities along Brightseat Road and in Palmer Park, farther inside the Beltway, also send students to the school.
The distinctions between the communities are sharply defined by crime: Although Mitchellville, Springdale and Ardmore had one homicide and occasional break-ins and thefts last year, nearly all of the killing in the area fell inside the Beltway, according to Burgersub.org, a Web site that tracks homicides in the Washington region.
Disagreement over whether students carry their neighborhood differences to school is fierce.
Police have arrested three Lanham teens in the drive-by Jan. 8 near Flowers, which killed Cherrese Richardson, 18, a senior, and wounded Sonja Bangura, 17, a junior. A 36-year-old man in a passing vehicle was struck by a stray bullet but was not seriously injured. None of the suspects went to Flowers. Law enforcement sources have blamed a long-simmering feud between the Glenarden Goons and the Ardmore Goons, two neighborhood gangs. Each group claims ownership of neighborhoods less than a mile apart and has been linked to street robberies and low-level drug dealing, sources said.
"I don't know how it started, but it's almost gang-related," said a freshman whose mother asked that he not be identified because she was worried for his safety. The student said the school was too crowded -- more than 2,800 students attend, and there are about 20 portable classrooms on the campus -- making it hard to tell who belongs there and who doesn't. "It's more like a 'My neighborhood is better than yours' type of thing," he said. "It can turn into fights, because arguments go back and forth."
The student government association released an unsigned statement defending Flowers: "Our school environment is generally calm, productive, and without gangs intimidating students in our hallways, which has been erroneously reported in the press."
"The school is safe," said its principal, Helena Nobles-Jones. "No one has given me any factual data to say it is unsafe."
Zuleyma Herrera, a senior who attended a vigil for Richardson on Friday, said: "I don't associate with the whole crowd of gangs. . . . Everybody's trying to be a gangster, everybody wants to go hard, but my friends aren't like that. . . . Our principal takes pretty good care of us, makes sure we're safe."
Herrera's father, Herbert Jackson Jr., said the shooting was "horrific" but added that he still felt safe sending his daughter to Flowers. "I think the principal is doing an outstanding job," he said.
But some other parents, led by Walter J. Searcy, president of the parent-teacher association, are demanding strong measures. "They're doing the best they can with what little resources they have, but they're ineffective," Searcy said. "Parents have to bear a great deal of this. . . . If our children learned respect at home, we wouldn't have had what happened."
The school has one of the lowest rates of habitual truancy in Prince George's -- 3.8 percent, well below other high schools'. Yet county police reported filing 113 truant reports involving the school between Aug. 20 and Oct. 26, with 55 cases resulting in an arrest.
In the most obvious measure of security -- student suspensions -- Flowers is slightly below average for county high schools: The school reported 641 suspensions during the 2005-06 school year, the latest year for which suspension data are available from the Maryland State Department of Education. The majority -- 503 -- were for disrespect, insubordination and disruption and other minor offenses. The school reported 110 suspensions for threats and fighting, 10 for bringing weapons to school, three arson, fire and explosives-related suspensions, and one for a sex offense.
Nobles-Jones said the school had an investigative counselor, another person assigned from the central security office and three security assistants, as well as a sheriff's deputy, to keep order. Searcy has said he wants at least 10 security officers, but Nobles-Jones said that is unnecessary and would draw resources from other schools that need them.
Nobles-Jones acknowledged seeing "PPC" and "BSR" graffiti tags in the school, referring to the Palmer Park Crew and Brightseat Road -- two groups students say have had occasional clashes. They operate in neighborhoods west of the Beltway near FedEx Field, but Nobles-Jones said that if her students were involved in criminal activity in or out of the school, she had received no evidence of it.
"They are not students from rival communities," Nobles-Jones said. "We have occurrences in our school that happen in every school in America that is public.
"I believe what is going on is part of public hysteria."
Whether hysteria or gangs, a girl is dead and Crystal Gray is torn about what to do with her daughter at Flowers. "She's an honor student. She's in Chinese, which she loves. I would like to let her finish Chinese I, but with things escalating like they are, I don't know," she said. "I don't have any private high schools to go to. For parents like myself, what do we do?"
Staff writer Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.