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[ Back to index of April articles ] Opening minds
"Watch out for deer," cautions Queen Anne headmaster J. Temple Blackwood as visitors leave an evening event at the school. He gestures into an inky country night and the oak-lined Upper Marlboro road leading away from the school. "I'm not kidding." From its rural pocket of Prince George's County, Queen Anne School may seem an unlikely site for one of the most integrated educational programs in the country, but it has become a quiet and thorough success. Blackwood has just hosted an open house that looks like every independent school's dream of diversity. The group of potential students is racially diverse, current parents testify the mixed population is what drew them to the school, and admissions numbers testify that the student body of 280 sixth through twelfth graders is 40 percent African American, 40 percent white, and 20 percent "other." Diversity in independent schools is no small feat, as any admissions director can tell you, but it is a special triumph at Queen Anne. The only college preparatory secondary school in Prince George's County, the school was founded in 1964, when busing was first enforced. It could easily have become a haven for white families balking at integration. But Queen Anne committed to diversity from its beginning, with a written philosophy that, while it may not have manifested itself immediately, has become a touchstone for a progressive community of learners.
Rather than identifying by race, religion, ethnicity or even academic ability, students identify as Queen Anne students, says Blackwood. "We believe that our separate heritages, beliefs and choices of expression help to define us as individuals," reads the school's Web site, "and that our commitment to learning about one another and the larger world unites us as a community. Differences of all kinds are acknowledged and explored with enthusiasm and respect." Queen Anne may be the only secondary school owned by an Episcopal parish in the United States. St. Barnabas Church, a colonial landmark set across the parking lot from Queen Anne's main buildings, runs the school as an outreach project, funding construction and a generous scholarship program, and overseeing the school's board of directors through its vestry. While some schools are pressured by influential donors with their own ideas about education, here, says Blackwood, "the parish is helping to keep the mission lofty." St. Barnabas was loyal to the British crown during the revolutionary war, but it grants the school an unusual measure of liberty. Through the church, the school's primary donor is William Seton Belt Jr., a St. Barnabas parishioner who left half of his family estate to the parish when he died in 1959. Part of the land was sold to the state in the mid-1980s; then, after a lively debate and national fund-raising effort that included the Nature Conservancy as well as school children anxious to save the farm's old-growth forest, plans to develop the remaining 515 acres were abandoned. Maryland bought the parcel in 1997, and the $4.5 million went into the Seton Belt Trust. Half the trust is for St. Barnabas, the other half for the Diocese of Washington. Low tuition (about $14,000) and significant scholarships (for nearly half the students) help Queen Anne reach a broader population. A concerted effort has diversified faculty as well: 30 percent are African American.
But the school does not focus on diversity per se. "At Queen Anne, the agenda is usually not about race or money or religion," says Blackwood, "but every decision we make in this school… exacts a sensitivity and consideration of race, money, and religion." Diversity is institutionalized, inseparable from the rhythm of life at the school. As one might expect, administrators and teachers encourage independent thinking. Cooperation is favored over competition: "We are aggressive about any trace of kids humiliating others," says Blackwood. "That's just not gonna happen." Faculty are encouraged to pursue new ideas: virtual classrooms, a new writing center, and a course in zoology were all initiated by teachers and students. Parents share sixth grade Latin lessons, online. "There's a lot of creativity," says Blackwood, "a lot of stretching of the limits." Giving students independence and responsibility is key during the secondary years, says Blackwood. "You have to give them freedom, if you're on the job," he says. "It's wrong to put them in a cloister and turn them in to college and say, 'Go and find a way to live your life,' without giving them some practice." The school also values teacher-student relationships. With a faculty to student ratio of 1:7, students get a high level of personal attention. Counselors help guide the older students to college, aiming at the student of average to above average ability. There is a college for everyone, they believe, and 100 percent of Queen Anne students are admitted. Once they get there, they have a unique lesson to teach, themselves: Multi-ethnic, multi-racial learning is attainable, and it works. "We have this enormous healthy responsibility and appreciation that we're living in a very different kind of world," says Blackwood. "It's a pretty ideal society." [ Back to index of April articles ]
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