L
EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Jan. 13, 2016
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INSIDE
Demanding solutions for voter access - 2 Talking of guns and executive actions- 6 Transportation bills scheduled for GA - 13 The simple things that are killing you- 14
Richmond & Hampton Roads
LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
Newport News HS graduate tapped to lead D.C.’s first all-male public high school PERRY STEIN
Ben Williams had 30 minutes to convince a group of eighth-grade boys that they should go to a high school without any girls. The 6-foot, 36-year-old towered over the eight black teenagers seated in the middle school library. He asked what they thought when they saw him. The students scanned Williams’s blue fitted suit, his leather loafers and coordinating caramel-colored belt. They hesitated just a few seconds before they started raising their hands. “A leader,” one said. “Respectable,” said another. “Oh, you’re one of those CEO kinds,” said a third. That all could have been true, but his pitch required the teenagers to understand that his story started just like some of their childhoods. “My father never met me. My mom was a prostitute,” Williams said. “My mother was a heroin fiend. I basically became the head of my household at the age of 3.” D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson tapped Williams to be the principal of the city’s first all-male public high school, and he wants prospective students to know that whether they come from a foster home or care for their younger siblings, a prosperous career is still a possibility. The facility, slated to open next school year with 150 ninth-graders, will be housed in a renovated vacant school building in Ward 7’s Deanwood neighborhood. Admittance will be by lottery, and Williams said
Tipate Tolson, center, 13, listens to Ben Williams talk about the new high school at the Walker Jones Education Campus in Washington. academics and past school records will not be a factor. “We are going to create a program that is specialized for young men of color,” Williams said. “Our goal is to help you become a man.” The new college-preparatory school is part of a $20 million citywide “Empowering Males of Color” initiative, aimed at increasing opportunities for young minority men — a group that is performing well below their white and female peers in the city: 48 percent of black male students and 57 percent of Hispanic male students graduate in four years, compared with 66 percent of their classmates. The high school — which has not yet been given a name — is modeled after a group of high-performing all-boys charter schools in Chicago called Urban Prep Academies that tout that 100 percent of its graduates
go on to college. “Principal Williams embodies what we want our young men to do in life: Overcome barriers to have strong, successful careers,” Henderson said. Although it is designed to help minorities, city officials say the school will be open to all boys, including white males. Williams said that he and his younger brother lived much of their early childhoods in foster care in Nevada. When he was 11, a man adopted the siblings and they relocated to the District. Williams graduated from what is now called Eliot-Hine Middle School in Northeast and moved to Newport News for high school. Williams said he earned three degrees from the University of Virginia, including a master’s and a doctorate in which his dissertation focused on the underrepresentation
of African American students in Advanced Placement courses. Most recently, he served as an associate principal at the School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens Education Campus. Next fall will be his first time leading a school. The city’s first single-sex public school is already being scrutinized. D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) has questioned whether it was legal for the city to allocate money for an all-male school without also creating an all-female school. The city’s attorney general, Karl Racine, said the school was not in violation of any anti-discrimination laws. “I believe the city recognizes there are many struggles for all students,” Williams said. But he noted that like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is pushing “to make sure we are improving the graduation rates of African American and Latino men in the city.” The school was originally billed as Urban Prep’s first school outside Chicago. Henderson said Tim King — the founder of Urban Prep who attended Georgetown University with Henderson — would be enlisted to help start the school. But a contract between Urban Prep and the D.C. Public Schools was never finalized, and the two parties are distancing themselves from each other. Williams said he would not be looking to Urban Prep as an example as he creates the new school, although the school system says it is still looking to partner with the Chicago organization.
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