Caught Between Both Worlds: Inner City Kids in Boarding Schools

[Taualumna]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/ny...l?pagewanted=2

[rainbowbrightCS]

Can you post the artical, I am not a memeber.

[Sistermadly]

I didn't go to a prep school, but I was bused from a poor inner-city neighborhood to a public school in a very wealthy area of my home town. While I definitely experienced a lot of culture shock in the beginning, I can honestly say that experience was the defining moment of my life, and helped to shape the person I became as an adult. However, in some ways my experience did throw up walls between me and the kids in my neighborhood. In fact, I got more grief from the kids in my neighborhood than I ever got from the rich white kids at my school.

[lovelyivy84]

It was an okay article. Didn't really go in depth on the issues these students face, but it was a nice surface glance of what happens.

This was me as a kid, and I work with the kids who are going from Newark to places like Andover or Choate now. Talking to our grads is interesting, most of them don't seem to be having an issue, but for those that are it can be hell. Some of them do have to make the choice between home and school life.

The difference seems to be all in the family. I think that our school does an EXCELLENT job of preparing the parents for what they are expecting (I am organizing an alumni/8th grade parent dinner this month so they can find out more about the experience) but at the end it all lies with Mom and Dad. If Mom and Dad are supportive and open with their kids (and a lot of the boarding parents find that they speak to their kids, and have a better relationship from afar than when the kid was at home) then the kid will have a much easier time relating those experiences at school to their life at home. Plus since they send them to a grade school where the majority of the kids end up at private or boarding schools they have a built-in supportive community of students who are going through exactly the same thing.

[Steeltrap]

Originally posted by Sistermadly
I didn't go to a prep school, but I was bused from a poor inner-city neighborhood to a public school in a very wealthy area of my home town. While I definitely experienced a lot of culture shock in the beginning, I can honestly say that experience was the defining moment of my life, and helped to shape the person I became as an adult. However, in some ways my experience did throw up walls between me and the kids in my neighborhood. In fact, I got more grief from the kids in my neighborhood than I ever got from the rich white kids at my school.

This was my experience from 7th to 12th grade here in LoCal. I was also bused and I also believe that it threw up walls, but there were also walls between me and some of the kids who rode the bus w/me (there were only three black kids in honors English in my HS, including myself, as an example).

[Munchkin03]

Good article! I'm glad they mentioned the company for which my friend works.

I didn't go to a New England prep school, but I went to college with a lot of students similar to those in the article, and they said that it wasn't the students at the schools with which they had problems; instead it was people from home who accused them of "acting white."

[Jill1228]

Can someone post the article on here please????

[Munchkin03]

A City Upbringing, Prep Schools, and Students Now in Between
By SETH KUGEL

Not long after 14-year-old Chris Oyathelemi of the Bronx arrived at the Brooks School in North Andover, Mass., in the early fall, a classmate turned him on to the Beatles. So a Beatles disc was spinning in his CD player when he went out to meet old friends — hip-hop fans — in Harlem during a break from the preparatory school.

When he told them what he was listening to, they started laughing. " `Oh, you're a white boy,' they said, `you listen to rock,' " said Chris, whose father is Nigerian and mother African-American.

Janelle Fouché, a 13-year-old freshman at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., tried goat cheese for the first time while making pizza at her English teacher's house this fall. Then she made the mistake of defending it at a Christmas gathering at her mother's Brooklyn apartment. Her older brother Daniel, a student at Bishop Loughlin High School, was disgusted. But Janelle stood her ground. "Goat cheese is mad good," she told him.

The tiny percentage of ninth graders from poor and working-class New York families who head off each fall to boarding schools face some predictable challenges: academic stress, insomnia induced by chirping crickets, total strangers waving hello with abandon. But the travails of coming home for their first Christmas vacation, which for most ends this weekend, can also be trying.

For many, it is the beginning of an identity-shaping process in which they decide, consciously or subconsciously, which aspects of their New York City upbringing to hold on to, and which to shed.

High on the list of endangered tastes: urban fashion. In December, Xenia Zayas, 14, came home from Choate to her Dominican family in Corona, Queens, with far too many school-approved outfits in her suitcase and not nearly enough casual wear. Xenia likes the dress code at school, but her pink collared shirt with khakis elicited heckling from her city friends.

So did her formal enunciation of English words, and her tendency to want to translate English and Spanish into French, which she studied for the first time this fall.

And though she got used to the crickets chirpping at night outside her dorm window, Xenia has been having problems falling asleep in her family's home. The culprit: late-night Dominican guitar music on the stereo. "I'm like, What are they doing in my house?" she said. "It's not time for bachata."

Of course, public school students from poor neighborhoods who win scholarships to some of the best schools in the country are somewhat different from their peers to begin with. Those who make it into schools like Phillips Academy or Choate have nearly all gone through programs to prepare them for the world outside the New York City Department of Education.

Janelle and Xenia were admitted to a selective program run by the nonprofit group Prep for Prep, which offers a 14-month course for qualifying students starting the summer before eighth grade. Chris went through A Better Chance, another nonprofit preparatory program. And Bintou Ojomo, 14, who attends Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., went to KIPP Academy, a Bronx charter school whose students have won millions of dollars in private-school scholarships.

For some students returning home to New York during breaks, just a walk through familiar neighborhoods can spur introspection. Chris, the Brooks student, noticed the change while walking around Harlem.

"Not in the environment around me, the loud kids and fighting," Chris said, "but I noticed a difference in myself, the way I reacted. When I lived in Harlem, I used to watch fights, or girls yelling, and now when I see it, I just mind my business and keep walking. That's not important to me anymore."

The toughest, most ubiquitous issues are those of race and class. Some of the students come from communities where they had few or no white classmates. That is not as big a deal to the prep school attendees themselves, who said that for the most part, they had been well prepared for the change and felt welcomed at school. But to their friends back home, prep school students are still more abstraction than reality, they say, and the comments can be blunt.

Chris, who said he was getting used to being called a white boy, had one friend ask: "So, you're eating rich food? You're eating caviar now?"

He brushes it off. "I guess it's because they haven't seen a lot of white kids," he said. "I don't say it out loud, I just think to myself, I'm looking for something better in my life instead of staying around the same old people. I'm leaving my old lifestyle behind and I'm sort of changing and maturing into the person I'm going to be."

Janelle, the Choate student from Brooklyn, said that while still at school, she received a message on the computer from a city friend asking, in utter seriousness, "Did anybody buy you a car yet?" That kind of comment led her to avoid her friends from home when she got back. "I haven't seen a lot of them yet," she said after the first week of vacation, "because they're acting negative."

Leaving city life behind has its challenges, too. Bintou, who lives with her mother in the Bronx, said her adjustment to Phillips Academy — one of the nation's top schools — and to Andover was going well.

The mile-plus walk to the nearest fast food store (McDonald's) is an issue, as is the lack of public transportation and the pitch-black streets at night. (She keeps her computer screen saver on, a poor substitute for the lights of East 161st Street, but better than nothing, she said.) She has also faced the occasional questions from peers: "Have you ever been in a shootout?" or "Have you seen anybody get stabbed?" But the difficult times are the exceptions, she said, and she calls her dorm a family.

As they do with Chris and Janelle, some comments from friends back home surprise Bintou. One called and said: "I can't imagine what it would be like to go to school with white people. I'd be scared."

But for now, at least, these students' ties to their neighborhoods remain strong, even as they live most of the year in small New England towns. Being away from the Bronx, Bintou said, has made her appreciate it.

"In Wallingford, you can't go to the corner store to get chips," she said. "You can't hang outside with your friends until 10 p.m.; you can't go anywhere you want. You don't realize how good something is until you don't have it anymore."

[Peaches-n-Cream]

I think that it is pretty sad that NYC with all of its resources cannot educate some of the best and the brightest children. All children should have access to the best education possible. The public schools should be cathedrals to education. I guess this is off topic, but it just bothers me.

These students have a wonderful opportunity. These are some of the best schools in the country. If they succeed there, they will excel at almost any college in the country. They are smart young people with incredibly bright futures. I think that the pros outweigh any cons they experience.

[Taualumna]

Originally posted by Sistermadly
I . In fact, I got more grief from the kids in my neighborhood than I ever got from the rich white kids at my school.

It seems that way for many minorities. I've been told by some Asians that I act "too white" based on my social activities. What's interesting is that those who said this to me were born and raised in Canada and they really don't know too much about "being Chinese".

[Munchkin03]

I think the article was focusing on the fact that these students experience a terrifying culture shock when they return home, despite the wonderful academic and cultural opportunities they have. No one is suggesting that the disadvantages are so bad--instead, the issue of going from a place like a New England prep school from some of the nation's worst neighborhoods is rarely discussed.

I certainly experienced criticism from other students of color. I spent a week at a summer program for minority students before my senior year in high school, and 7 years later, I can honestly say it was the worst week of my life. Every single thing I did (coming from a small school in an upper-middle class neighborhood) was examined and criticized by the other girls as being "too white" or "too proper." I can only imagine what the kids go through who go through this.

[PandaOnProzac]

I get a lot of that culture shock from my cousins. One commented that if she was talking to me on the phone that she'd think I was a white guy.

It's like that one phrase you can interchange according to yourself: Too white to be brown and too brown to be white.

[Taualumna]

Originally posted by PandaOnProzac
I get a lot of that culture shock from my cousins. One commented that if she was talking to me on the phone that she'd think I was a white guy.

It's like that one phrase you can interchange according to yourself: Too white to be brown and too brown to be white.

Brown? I thought you said in an earlier post that you're Asian, and judging from your nick, I'd think you're Chinese.

[Rudey]

I say put all these inner-city kids to work in factories.

-Rudey
--Children deserve the right to work!