Forsyth Street on New York's lower East Side--Harlem at 130th and Madison--Boston's Roxbury district--midtown Baltimore just above Mt. Vernon Square--Milwaukee's South Side: these old streets and neighborhoods must be etched into our collective memory; they have the familiarity of a dream just beginning to fade beyond the perimeter of conscious wakefulness.

They are also neighborhoods beleaguered with inner-city problems: violence, gangs, poverty, drugs, a declining industrial base, hard-pressed city budgets, and, perhaps worst of all, a creaking, dysfunctional public school system whose failures strike at the heart of our democracy's assurances of equality and opportunity for all.

But each of these neighborhoods is also home to a Jesuit middle school. The success of these schools, which share much in the educational traditions and values they bring into the lives of their sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade boys, challenge the inertia and despair that so often permeate inner-city life. The schools practically envelop the youngsters from morning until night, six or seven days a week, with classwork, sports, tutoring, music, and art--and, throughout the long days of summer, with leadership training, academic studies, and camping activities in the country. Academic excellence is pursued, but equal rigor is given to education in values: respect for self and others, a commitment to excellence and, above all, to community.

The Lower East Side

Imagine New York City's lower East Side, crowded, much as it was in the 1890s, with new immigrant families scrambling to survive and hoping to enter mainstream American life. It is a cool, gray day. A steady drizzle and dark, overcast skies accentuate the bright colors of traffic lights and of the advertisements and wares piled into the windows of the small neighborhood stores on Forsyth Street.

Four twelve-year-old boys in slacks, T-shirts, windbreakers, and baseball hats, students at the Jesuit Nativity Mission School, head for a butcher shop to pick up meat for the next day's staff lunch that will be prepared by one of the students' mothers. The language of the street is Spanish, and there are aggressive taunts from three men sitting on crates in front of a small tienda selling groceries, sandwiches, and beer. The streetwise boys hunch forward, their hands shoved into their pockets. None so much as glances toward the men.

Now, imagine this. These same four youngsters are among fifteen boys rehearsing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in their seventh-grade English class at school. Their teacher leans against the front of her desk in a corner of the small classroom overlooking a park with enormous old oaks just beginning to leaf out. Maranda Loengard, a graduate of Princeton with a master's from Oxford, speaks earnestly to her students. She is poised yet reserved, enunciating each thought with care. "You did a very good job in rehearsal this morning," she tells the class. "I got the sense that the crowd scene is going to be very, very powerful. Now, there are a couple of things we need to get right."

The classroom is small, and the walls are lined with lockers and bookcases that overflow with reading material. The students are attentive, and though they are giggle-prone and wiggly, there is none of the disciplinary tension that characterizes so many classrooms today--no standoff between teacher and pupils. As a group the students are racially and culturally mixed, though all claim Hispanic descent and all come from struggling families. The classrooms and routine also convey an intangible quality that might be described as part of the tradition of this twenty-four-year-old institution, though it is more vital and participatory than received knowledge or authority could ever be. The best word, perhaps, is community.

"Jeffrey," Loengard says, "I'd like to work on you--because you have the hardest part in a lot of ways." She surveys the class with dark, thoughtful eyes. "I'd like opinions on what we ought to ask Jeffrey to do. It's a tough one because we want it to be effective, but it can't be something where he and everybody else start to giggle."

"I think he ought to be very old," one student says.

"That's an excellent idea," Loengard responds. "He could carry a staff . . ."

"And he could be blind . . ." another suggests.

Jeffrey Quintana, a wiry youth with a mobile face and wry grin, is in front of the blackboard with two classmates. "Caesar!" Jeffrey calls out, leaning heavily on a yardstick and hobbling toward Brutus and Caesar with his eyes closed. Inevitably, the threesome dissolves into giggles. Finally, one manages to snort between gulps and wheezing gasps, "Hark, who calls?"

"Let's try it again," Loengard says with a practiced patience that speaks volumes about her teaching skill. "And Jeffrey, I think that if you stoop like an old and feeble man, that will be enough. You don't have to be blind, too."

Meanwhile, on the fourth floor of the narrow, five-story building, an eighth-grade science class is under way. The teacher, David LaDuca, is bearded and bespectacled, quick and good-humored. A liberal arts graduate of Colgate University, he, like Loengard, learned of the school through work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. "I came thinking that I was going to be an acting teacher, but I ended up with biology, chemistry, and computers," he says with a bemused shrug.

In fact, a quick inventory of his classroom suggests a creativity that might be the purview of a seasoned set designer. It appears the quintessential boy's science class, featuring much in the way of frogs and snails.

"We had some worms in a fish tank, and I couldn't feed them enough," LaDuca explains. "They multiplied and began crawling out of the tank and around the room, looking for food, and dying all over the floor." There are nods of affirmation.

"Then they got overgrown with fungus," LaDuca continues, "and then a succession of insects appeared."

"Yuk!" one boy exclaims, and all heads turn to look at LaDuca, whom they apparently regard as their very own--and very personable--mad scientist.

"Every time a new species showed up we looked at it under our microscope." LaDuca turns toward the boys. "And we do work with frogs," he says. "Tell our guest! Are the frogs missing or hiding?"

"Hiding!" a chorus of voices, some of them quite deep, chirp and croak in unison.

Rolando Vargas and Gregorio Mercado sit close to a Bunsen burner, heating sand and water in a beaker. Both have the self-possession and the relaxed yet reserved expressions of boys whose trust and concentration levels are high and whose intellectual abilities find many absorbing connections. Born in Colombia, Rolando has been in the United States for four years. His mother, he says, "works up to three jobs as a housekeeper in Manhattan and Queens." Gregorio's parents came to New York from the Dominican Republic, "like everybody else's parents," he explains, "to find a better life."

If one were to consult statistics for Hispanic youth, Rolando's and Gregorio's chances for success would be slim; nationwide, 37 percent of Hispanic youth fail to graduate from high school (as compared to 18 percent for African-American youth and 9 percent for white youth). Ninety-eight percent of Nativity's students live in families whose incomes fall below the poverty line; 60 percent live in single-parent homes.

Rolando and Gregorio, however, look confidently forward to scholarships in fine private high schools and, later, to college--as do other Nativity grads. And they will retain their strong ties to Nativity, returning for help with homework if the going gets rough, returning to offer their insights and to share their aspirations with the younger students as counselors, tutors, coaches, or friends.

"Once you've been a part of Nativity," Rolando explains, "you stay a part of it. Nativity leaves its arms open for any graduate or anyone who has studied here before."

Indeed, Nativity Mission is a model school. At first glance, its formula seems simple enough- -a small student body, a dedicated and flexible staff, and selection criteria that focus on the student's own receptiveness and interest in the school rather than on his past academic achievement. But scratch the surface and the requirements become increasingly complex: firm commitment from the students' families; volunteers for tutoring and cultural enrichment; and aggressive and persistent outreach in the community to build financial resources, including private donations, corporate gifts, and foundation grants, to ensure each student's completion of college. The energy and dedication necessary for the operation of such an all-day, year-round school is daunting--amounting to nothing less than the creation of a full community.

The rewards, however, are great--light years away from the modest increases in standardized test scores that most urban school systems now seek as proof of their efforts. This fall over 90 percent of Nativity's graduates of four years ago will enter college. "Our message to the Hispanic youth of the lower east side of Manhattan is this," principal Fr. John Podsiadlo, SJ, says: "If you want to break the cycle of poverty through education by making a commitment and an investment in your own future, then we will walk with you for up to twelve years, through college."

Manhattan's Nativity Mission School has been copied. In Harlem, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Boston, Nativity-modeled schools have been established for at-risk boys. They are all different, but they bear a strong resemblance in spirit and outlook to the original in Manhattan.

Harlem

At the far north end of Manhattan is an area of Harlem that for block after block affords the onlooker only the bleak, vacuous stare of once-elegant buildings, now abandoned. Windows are boarded up, and proud granite stoops are eerily devoid of any neighborly exchange.

At the corner of 130th Street and Madison Avenue, a burly woman, whose bright orange jacket identifies her as a school crossing-guard, chats with a thin, stooped man in front of a liquor store protected with iron gridwork. Except for buses, Manhattan traffic appears to take a detour around this part of Harlem--there are no taxis, few cars, even fewer pedestrians. The apartheid of the neighborhood is unsettling.

And yet, in the midst of this taut urban silence are many children, and on this very corner three schools operate contiguously: a public school, a parochial school, and the newest arrival, the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Program, founded in 1991 by Fr. Edward Durkin, SJ, longtime teacher and former principal of Nativity Mission. Housed in the All Saints parochial school, which occupies the first two floors of the building, a visit to the program means a climb to the third and fourth floors of the musty graystone building next to All Saints Church.

Though the classroom walls are painted a pale yellow and the floors are warm, smoothly sanded wood, the rooms are large and sparsely furnished. The whole atmosphere of the school is spartan: austere and disciplined--an atmosphere that in its sheer determination and intensity both counters and reflects the tension of the surrounding streets. It is remarkably quiet.

Clyde Cole, a 1991 graduate of Northwestern University, has been with the school since it first opened its doors. He is earnest and enthusiastic, energetic, a young man determined to help buck the statistics of the poor, largely African-American student population of this economically disenfranchised neighborhood.

"Most of our students come from Harlem--some from Brooklyn and the Bronx. Our applicants come to us by word of mouth. We don't recruit for students academically, much less for sports. We're looking for something we call teachableness. And we look at their parents, too--their willingness to work with us, to have faith in us."

"It's a hard program," he says, "but it's beautiful to see it working. I observe the students in all their many guises--in the classroom, on the field, or just sitting quietly in study hall."

As a student at Regis High School in New York, Cole came into contact with the Jesuits there and at Nativity Mission Center. These contacts were renewed when he was a senior at Northwestern and Fr. Durkin was looking for teaching staff. Deeply committed to the Jesuits and the goals of the school, Cole proudly points to his students' accomplishments.

Between classes the halls suddenly fill with the exuberance of young men, among them two who stop to chat with Cole. As Tyrone Alvarez and Jason King turn and politely introduce themselves to a visitor, one sees in their eyes the inimitable expression of calm assurance and self-fulfillment that are the sure accompaniment of high achievement, well-defined purpose, and trust. Both, Cole later mentions, are headed for Fordham Prep.

Baltimore

Two hundred miles from New York City, behind the fine old brick and granite building that climbs a full city block on Calvert Street and that once housed Baltimore's Loyola College, a similar educational effort now enters its third year and will graduate its first eighth-grade class next June.

"Let's just say it's enjoyable," says twelve-year-old Dana Stanley of St. Ignatius Loyola Academy in Baltimore. "You never get bored here. The teachers here are very concerned. They listen to you. They don't yell."

Dana is a slender child with a bemused and studious appearance accentuated by wire-rimmed spectacles. During the free period following lunch, while other, more sports-minded classmates toss a basketball in the enclosed brick courtyard, Dana chooses to remain in the parish hall that serves as both lunch room and auditorium for the fledgling academy. A keen observer of others, Dana characteristically remains somewhat aloof, assuming the posture of an elder--an earnest grandfather, a preacher, or an eccentric scientist. But when he smiles, his face lights up and one sees the playfulness of his years.

He meticulously clears his place at the table and crosses to the far side of the large room to browse through a shelf of books. Eventually he totes a large encyclopedia back to his table, opens it, and is soon lost in study. At the same table, another sixth grader, eleven-year-old Dwayne Eades, also remains behind, dawdling over lunch.

Dwayne is a sociable boy, short but athletic, with a frank curiosity about others and a pragmatism that forms an interesting counterpoint to Dana's imaginativeness. In his sixth-grade Latin class, Dwayne has chosen the name Mercury. "Mercury," he matter-of-factly informs a visitor, "is the god of shortness."

"What are you reading?" Dwayne asks as he gets up from the table and pushes in his chair. "I'm studying electricity," Dana replies, peering at Dwayne over the rim of his glasses. "Well, what's there to know?" Dwayne asks impatiently. "You plug something into a power source and the lights go on."

Dana gets up, adjusts his tie and closes the book. He puts his hands into the pockets of his dark trousers and faces Dwayne with the tired but patient amusement of a kindly teacher. "Believe me, Dwayne, there is a lot more to know about electricity than that. A lot."

"We find," says Fr. William Watters, SJ, the school's president, "that our high schools come into the educational picture too late to benefit many of our city's most promising youth. We've lost them before we even have a chance to begin."

Arriving at 7:45 a.m., the Baltimore students come from all over the city. They are greeted by headmaster Fr. Clayton Railey, SJ, a tall, lanky man with handsome regular features and unruly, prematurely gray hair.

"Gentlemen," he admonishes the students on the first day of school, "we are in a professional environment and our appearance and our behavior should reflect that. If you are not present for the first syllable of morning prayer, I will mark you late. The dress code is to be strictly observed at all times. Violations of the dress code mean after-school detention. We call it JUG--a Jesuit word for Justice Under God."

As in the other Nativity schools, each day is filled from morning until night with classwork and activities that include sports, music, art, and social service in the community. The school environment is nurturing and disciplined, the teaching staff young and enthusiastic. "At the academy, we don't see the person in front of us first as a student and then, secondly, as a person," Fr. Watters reminds his young teachers during faculty orientation in August. "Rather, we see a person first and then a student. And just as we must care for the whole person of the student, we must care for him with our whole selves, too."

Milwaukee

Travel another 700 miles from Baltimore to Milwaukee--to the gusting winds and restless waves of Lake Michigan's western shores, and one finds yet another fledgling Nativity school, which, like St. Ignatius Loyola Academy in Baltimore, first opened its doors in 1992. It is tucked into an old parochial school building that adjoins St. Patrick's Church, built in 1876 and lovingly adorned with beautiful Austrian stained glass by Irish and German working-class families who lived in the neighborhood of modest homes. Today St. Patrick's forms the nucleus of a Hispanic community and is home to Milwaukee's Nativity Jesuit Middle School.

"Milwaukee is a good place to come back to--a small town that doesn't change very quickly," reflects school president Fr. William Johnson, SJ, in between a string of phone calls that he receives in his small, unpretentious office just up the steps and to the left of the main entrance to the school. A native of Milwaukee, Fr. Johnson spent years in Hispanic ministry. In 1992, he received an MA in minority education from Harvard. While studying in Cambridge, he taught at Nativity Prep in Roxbury, and in the fall of 1993 he and Mr. Lawrence Siewert, teacher and longtime principal of Marquette High School, together with Jean Ellman, SSND, Jesuit scholastic Marty Hosking, and a small group of lay teachers and volunteers, opened the doors of the new school.

At the Milwaukee school there is only one class for each grade; the school is adamant that it will not grow beyond fifteen students at each grade level. The goals of the school include complete bi-literacy. Almost all the faculty have native or near-native fluency in Spanish, and those, like Siewert, who have no Spanish-language background are finding that it behooves them to catch up. Siewert, for example, who grew up in the school's neighborhood in the days when it was an ethnic German and Irish community, spent two months in Mexico living with a family to make up for some of his Spanish-language deficiency.

In the seventh-grade Spanish class taught by Marty Hosking, a tapestry of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs across the hot water pipes in a good-sized classroom. In the windows are geraniums and a large ficus tree. Shelves are piled with papers, workbooks, and books. Magazines, both Spanish and English, are scattered across a large round table to one side of the room. The blue walls of the classroom are hung with maps and pictures, including an Aztec calendar.

Hosking writes the word migración on the blackboard. "What occurs to you in your mind when you see this word?" Hosking asks the class in Spanish. The boys' responses are revealing: jail, Proposition 187, danger, run, hide, murder, la gente que viene, wetbacks, escape. Discussion follows. It is a Spanish lesson and a chance for the boys to discuss fears that clearly are not as remote as the southwestern frontiers.

Shortly before the end of school last spring, three seventh-grade boys, Juan Martín, Ronald Ramírez, and Rigoberto Macías--who will be among the school's first graduates--took charge of a visitor to the school and of the discussion in their class. The day before, Siewert had asked them to think about what they wanted to be doing when they were 45 years old.

All have thought about their futures. Juan wants to be a mechanic or a marine biologist. Rigoberto hopes to be a plumber or, if he can attend college, an engineer. Ronald expresses only one ambition: "I want to be a news reporter, like Dan Rather," and, in fact, Ronald takes charge of the discussion.

"What do you think about the Oklahoma City bombing?" he asks Rigoberto. "What do you think should be done to the people responsible for this?" "Kill them," Rigo says. "No!" says Juan. "I think that it is really bad, but I still do not think that they deserve death. It's in the Bible. They should not even be put in jail. I think they should clean up Oklahoma City--for the rest of their lives." "They deserve a fair trial," says Rigo. "OK," Ronald says, "I'm going to hit you with this one. What would you do if it was one of your family members in the building?"

Boston

Heading east once again, to Roxbury, "the toughest part of Boston," one arrives at the first offshoot of Nativity Mission Center, Boston's Nativity Prep Middle School, founded in 1990 by Barry Hynes, a former teacher at Nativity Mission in New York.

The day at Nativity Prep is long, beginning when the youngsters arrive at 7:30 a.m. and continuing after dinner with an optional evening study hall that gets them home at 9:30 p.m. "Anyone passing Nativity at night will notice our lights burning," says Fr. Al Hicks, SJ, the school's principal. "It's a sure sign of evening study in progress, but, more than that, it's a sign of hope. That children are willing to put long hours into learning makes me think that they have chosen life and that they will continue to grow and prosper."

Jesuit novice David Henry, who taught and tutored at the school, says he "initially viewed the boys as sixty toughened, street-smart kids." The realization that they were also good students was forcefully brought home when he proctored his first evening study hall. "I was amazed to see more than thirty kids running around the playground at 6:40 p.m. waiting for the building to be opened up."

At the St. Francis de Sales Church in Roxbury, the school graduated its first class in June 1993. At the following years' graduation, student Troy Lewis tried to sum up what the experience had meant to him. "Now what," he asked, "could we have experienced during our years at Nativity Prep that made such a difference? It was the whole school's willingness to cooperate with each other to learn."

"Many teachers at Nativity," Troy said, "feel that they have an obligation to give back to education because of the way they have benefited from their own education. That sense of obligation has been transferred from teacher to student."

All of the Nativity schools strive to keep their teachers for several years. Salaries usually amount to little more than a monthly stipend with room and board provided in creaking and crumbling inner-city dwellings. But the children work their magic on the staff--as does the opportunity to develop as a person and a teacher. Maranda Loengard, for example, has spent five years at Nativity Mission. Though she thinks that it is time for her to continue toward a doctorate, she is torn.

"It's a difficult place to leave," she says thoughtfully. "You always see how you could do things better the next year. There's a real desire to keep on going--to keep on improving." She stops for a few moments, and then continues. "But, of course, the main reason anybody stays is because of the students."

Like LaDuca and Loengard, Tom McDermott, who teaches English and history at Nativity Mission, lives in one of the dilapidated apartments that the school provides, sharing living quarters with another teacher in Chinatown, a fifteen-minute walk from school.

"Chinatown!" he says. "That's a story in itself. It's a different world down there. The apartment is a complete mess. You have to finagle all the faucets to get the hot water to work. There are mice and falling plaster, but I'm not particularly a neatnik anyway, so it's fine for me."

McDermott learned of Nativity through his involvement with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. "Actually," McDermott says, "this is my first job."

In the classroom McDermott is dynamic and always interesting, even when discussing topic sentences.

"That's a good idea, Franklin," he says when Franklin Valerio reads aloud his topic sentence about a woman singing on the bus, "but remember that the whole paragraph is now going to have to be about the woman singing--four detailed sentences. So, you see that you are limiting yourself. If you can, go for it; but realize what you're holding yourself to by using that as your topic sentence. Give it some thought."

Without the slightest hint of embarrassment, Franklin does give it some thought and decides that he can, indeed, write four descriptive sentences about the woman singing on the bus.

"Being a teacher is draining," McDermott says. "It's a job to be there and have to get something across and corral ten or eleven personalities to do it."

In Baltimore, religion teacher and coach Phil Spears, a graduate of William and Lee College in Virginia, where he studied English and was a star athlete, readily admits that his first term of teaching at St. Ignatius Loyola Academy is the toughest job he's ever had.

"I look at it this way," he says. "I don't think my teaching will ever be more demanding than this. If I can make this work, if I can make a difference in these kids' lives as a teacher, a coach, and a person, then I think I will have the outlook for the rest of my life that I can do anything."

Every evening, these and the many other teachers of the Nativity schools--lay teachers, Jesuit priests and novices and scholastics, and sisters--say good-bye to students who will be back in their lives by breakfast the next day. The bonds are close. Even after the students have gone home, the teachers' hearts and minds are still filled with thoughts about their students as they grade homework and prepare for the next day.

"Rolando is a good kid," McDermott remarks on the way back to his apartment. "He is very well developed in his personal values and in standing up for them. Now, Franklin," he muses, "deals with more inner-city roadblocks, both academically and in real life. He's a good example of the kind of boy we're here to help and teach."

Similarly, in Baltimore, a tired Spears stands outside with Dana and Dwayne, waiting for a fellow-teacher to bring the van around to pick them up and drive them home. The boys are loaded down with books and assignments.

"Well," Dana says to Dwayne, "I want to get A's and B's so I can go on to the seventh and eighth grades, then to Loyola-Blakefield Prep, and then to Loyola College." He stops for a moment and glances at Spears. "And then," he adds, "I want to learn to be a saint."

"No," Dwayne responds impatiently. "You just want to be top SJ around here."

At the end of the school year, teachers, family, staff, and students joyously celebrate graduation--and this year, for the first time, there will be five Jesuit middle-school graduations. Though the schools keep their doors and hearts open for their students and follow their progress closely, it is a time of parting, a time that seems to appear with inexplicable suddenness after three years of continuous activity together. Each year, it is the graduates themselves who most beautifully capture the intense feelings of these moments, as did Eduardo Fernández in 1993: "Every day of our lives we go into the world, where sometimes there's hatred, drugs, and bad people. Nativity stops all this at the door and gives us a chance to shine. When we go into high school, we'll still shine no matter what, and keep you in our hearts forever."