St. Frances Academy, Baltimore

St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, is located in a district that is poor and African-American.

Potential is being Realized
 
Potential is being realized at St. Frances Academy. St. Frances Academy is proud that over 90% of recent graduates enroll and succeed within a college environment. What drives St. Frances Academy, however, is more significant than impressive college acceptance rates. St. Frances Academy is an institution that prioritizes healthy relationships within school, within families, and within communities. In tandem with a challenging academic curriculum, relationship-building empowers students to acknowledge that they are young men and women of integrity and have a responsibility to treat themselves and others with respect.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence are the first congregation for women religious of African ancestry in the Roman Catholic church. They wre founded by Mother Mary Lange, OSP, in 1892. Most notable are the thousands who have benefited from the learning experience provided at their pre-eminent institution, St. Frances Academy-the oldest continuously operating African American Catholic educational institution in the nation, founded by Mother Mary Lange in 1828.

Baltimore's public institutions aren't doing well by African American youth. According to Camille Cosby, "76 percent of African-American males who do not finish public high school in Baltimore City ... and more than 50 percent of Baltimore ninth-graders [who] drop out of public schools."

Baltimore columnist Gregory Kane points out that the Oblate Sisters get results that the local public school has not been able to:

the work the Oblate Sisters continue to do to this day at St. Frances Academy in one of the roughest, toughest parts of East Baltimore. Contrary to the notion of those who apologize for failing public schools by saying private schools get to cream the top echelon of students, St. Frances has taken public school kids who were flunking and turned them into the 92 percent of the academy's students who go on to college.

"We always try to help those who are in the greatest need," Sister Mary Alice said. "However, [the students] have to work themselves up into some kind of academic performance or they can't stay."

Students who do improve their academic performance at St. Frances - which teaches grades nine through 12 - are, Camille Cosby pointed out, from the same demographic that the Baltimore public school system serves. St. Frances manages to get 92 percent of its students from that demographic to attend college. (The national average is 65 percent.)

Baltimore's public high schools, at least since 1996 and through the school year ending in June last year, have yet to graduate 59 percent of their students, according to the Maryland Department of Education's Web site.

What's the difference? Maybe it's the leadership.

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