This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 9, 2012 - You wouldn’t expect a guy whose nickname as a kid was “D-minus boy” to end up as head of a school.
So, what is Marshall Cohen doing as executive director of the Lift for Life Academy, one of the first charter schools in St. Louis, which is about to hold its first high school commencement?
It goes back to when Cohen, after working a long time in his family's business, started a gym with the same name. He realized that for the youngsters who were showing up there on a regular basis, exercise for the body needed to be complemented with growth mentally as well.
“We were getting the kids strong,” he said. “We were taking them all over the country to compete. But they still were not succeeding in school. I heard about the charter school legislation being passed, and I thought, ‘We have to do this. We have to give them the whole package.’”
That package today has taken a somewhat unorthodox form, physically and otherwise. The school, at 1731 S. Broadway, is in an old bank building, with bathrooms where the vault used to be and the library in the lobby. It’s expanded, with an old drive-up teller’s window now located inside. And besides the basic courses for grades 6-12, it offers electives such as fashion design and driver’s ed.
And while its MAP scores aren’t always outdistancing the competition, Lift for Life is graduating all but a handful of its 74 seniors, and the atmosphere is most often described as nurturing.
“The thing that sticks out when people visit or spend any time down there at all is the culture,” says Susan Cole, the academy's liaison with its sponsor, Southeast Missouri State University.
“It’s safe. It’s clean. It has well-mannered kids who don’t have to go through metal detectors. The kids like to be there. They stay after school for all kinds of reasons: extra tutoring, extracurricular activities, just hanging out because they like to be there.”
Adds Denise Bogard, who says she came to the school during its first year to do a four-day writing workshop and has been teaching part-time ever since:
“I think we get the best out of our kids. That’s not true of every teacher, but the vast majority of teachers are willing to give so much more to these kids. And like in any good family, the kids are better for it. They feel loved. They feel cared for. It’s small enough that there is a real commitment to making sure every child feels like he or she is really special to at least one of us.”
One-room schoolhouse
When Missouri first passed its charter school law, Cohen recalls taking advantage of it in record time – securing SEMO as a sponsor and setting up in 2000 in quarters on Cass Avenue that the inaugural class of sixth graders shared with the weight-lifters at the gym. He likened the whole process to having a baby – completed in nine months.
“It was like a one-room schoolhouse,” he said.
Later, he spotted the abandoned bank building in Soulard that was already under contract, but when that contract fell through, he managed to buy it, then hired a historical architect to do renovations that would retain as much of the structure’s character as possible.
He wanted to create an atmosphere that was different from his days in the Ladue schools, where he said he probably suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and didn’t have much use for what his classes had to offer.
“I was so bored in the classroom,” Cohen said. “If I read 12 books during high school, that would be a miracle. I had some good teachers and some pathetic teachers. That’s one thing that has helped here. I keep my ear to the ground and figure out which ones are here to help and which ones are here just for a paycheck.”
Cohen recalls taking his education into his own hands, teaching himself how to play chess and using tapes to learn another language. He’s brought that expansive attitude into the curriculum at Lift for Life, where fashion design is taught by Laura Kathleen Planck, a recent finalist on “Project Runway” and other courses are taught with an eye toward keeping students engaged and on track. Classes are small, so students get the help they need.
“I think this is somewhat of a public school with a private school feel to it,” he said. “The teachers are real nurturers. They take the time to explain things if the students don’t understand. Our teachers will do whatever it takes to make sure your child understands what’s going on.”
And how does he know he’s hiring the right teachers, the ones who will be able to keep that approach alive?
“They say, ‘I can tell the minute I walk in the door that you don’t have metal detectors, the kids are smiling, they’ve spoken to me,’” Cohen said. “They say, ‘I don’t feel nervous coming in here. You can tell that something is going on that is working.’”
'Everybody knows everybody'
That attitude by teachers doesn’t go unnoticed by members of the first Lift for Life graduating class, which will celebrate commencement May 15 at Harris-Stowe State University.
Gathered around a table in the library/bank lobby, Loreal Byrd, Treavon Minner and James Pearson talked about the classes, the closeness and the food overseen by the school’s own executive chef, Ken Hayden, who came to Lift for Life after working at Meadowbrook Country Club and the Junior League.
“It’s a nice place to come if you want to interact,” said Minner, who like Byrd has been at the school since sixth grade. “There are not a lot of faces, and the teachers here are more friendly than they are at a lot of schools.”
Added Byrd:
“It’s easier to meet people because it’s a smaller school.”
Pearson, who moved into the city from Riverview Gardens to live with his grandfather and enrolled as a freshman, said, “It’s easier to learn because the classes are smaller. But you have to have patience. There may be people in the class who learn slower than you do.”
They like the relatively unusual classes, like personal finance and public speaking, because of how they tend to concentrate on skills that will be important after graduation. Pearson, who is the academy’s senior class president and prom king as well as self-proclaimed class clown, admitted he liked the public speaking instruction because “I like attention.”
The special food brought a mixed reaction. The seniors acknowledged that the food is different from the tater tots and mystery meat that most schools might dish out at lunch time, but that doesn’t always mean that teens appreciate the difference. State regulations still govern what’s on the menu, Minner noted.
“You have to have healthy food,” he said. “Sometimes it’s kind of hard to enjoy your meal.”
And like the praise for fine food that can easily turn into a backhanded compliment, the love of the small student body and closeness that such familiarity can bring can also morph into a feeling of been there, done that, time to move on.
“You learn how to tolerate some things and learn how to grow,” Pearson said. “After a while, you get tired of the same people.”
“Imagine seeing the same faces from sixth grade to now” added Byrd. “That’s a lot.”
No outside managers
Life for Life has not been able to escape one of the constant criticisms that have met charter schools nationwide, including St. Louis: Test scores often are no better than those at the traditional public schools they were meant to improve on.
Last year, for example, the school as a whole had a proficiency rate on MAP tests and end-of-course exams of 23.48 percent in communication arts and 25.8 percent in math; statewide averages were 54.6 percent in communication arts and 54.2 percent in math.
Cohen says it’s important to look not just at the raw numbers but the trend.
“The longer the students are with us,” he says, “the better the students are doing. They still are not doing nearly as good as we want, nor are we satisfied. But there is a trend that the longer they are here, the bigger increases we seem to have.”
Poor academic achievement is only one chronic problem for many charters; poor management is another. Cole, the SEMO liaison with the academy’s sponsor, said that Lift for Life has been able to avoid some of the growing pains that some other charter schools have had by having a vision from day one, then sticking with it.
She notes that her role is “not so much to walk the halls and sit in the classrooms” but to meet regularly with the school’s board and make sure it is living up to its responsibilities.
That board suffered a big loss last year with the death of John Mann, whom Cohen credits as being one of the prime movers behind the establishment and success of the school.
Cole said that his death could have shaken the organization, but instead it appears to have given it a new sense of dedication.
“Since John’s death,” she said, other board members, “have really stepped up and begun to some serious board training that had not been there before. They are taking a real active role in the governance of the school, as they should.”
Cole also said that now that the school has stopped growing and all of its grades are established, “they can take a deep breath, say, ‘We have 6-12 grades in place, now let’s move forward.”
Making sure that the board keeps a steady but direct hand on the operation at Lift for Life is crucial, she said.
“They were pretty adamant that they were not interested in a school that was being run out of Detroit or Philadelphia or New York” she said, pointing to problems that schools being run by national management firms have encountered. “They wanted to work with a school that had its management on site.”
According to Cohen, that has been the plan all along, and it won’t ever change.
“The day we bring in a management company I think would be disrespectful to taxpayers,” he said. “If you have to have a management company tell you how to run your school, what’s the purpose?”