Public Military Academy Brings Clash of Cultures

NANCY TREJOS / Washington Post 22dec02

For Pr. George's Teens, New Marching Orders Troubled High School's Transformation Into Public Military Academy Brings Clash of Cultures

Christopher Woody insists that Forestville Military Academy hasn't done him any good, that he shouldn't have to put up with teachers who scream at him like he's a soldier, that his mother's raising him just fine without the Army's help.

He has spent the past four months -- the entire first quarter of ninth grade -- fighting change with the fierce determination that the school wants him to apply to his conduct and his studies.

But whether he will ever credit Forestville, the Christopher who first roamed its halls in August wearing baggy jeans and shoulder-length cornrows is not the same 14-year-old who today knows how to march, dresses for school in a uniform and responds to teachers in Army speak, barking "hooah" and "yes, sir."

Christopher is part of an experiment in public education, an attempt to impose military discipline onto a struggling campus that was known as Forestville High School until this year. A growing number of U.S. school systems, including those in Chicago and Oakland, have turned to the military to play a larger role in teaching teenagers -- in the hope that rigid structure and a no-nonsense approach can lead to academic success.

"I was getting desperate," Christopher's mother, Linda Woody, said of her decision to send him to the academy. "I felt like, I know this child is bright, I know he's creative. He's not dull. We can expect more from him."

He and 358 other freshmen are the initial wave of cadets as Forestville begins a four-year transformation to become one of the nation's few coeducational public military high schools.

It's a work in progress, and on many days this fall, chaos seemed to trump order. For months, female cadets used faux Armani Exchange and Gucci belts to hold up their dark-green Army pants because the military belts hadn't arrived. The faculty's approach to enforcing the rules has been mismatched as well, often splitting along the lines of those with military backgrounds and those without.

The Prince George's County school system runs the academy, which this year is mandatory only for ninth-graders. But the Army sets the tone -- and picks up the tab, about $570,000 this year for the freshman cadets' uniforms, books and Junior ROTC instructors. In 2005, the entire campus becomes a military high school, and the Army's annual contribution will grow along with the increase in students, officials say.

The stated goal is not to mold soldiers but to turn out solid citizens and promising students, no small feat at a school where the average SAT score was below 800 out of a possible 1600 last year.

"It's not about young men and women who used to say 'hey' and now say 'yes, sir' and 'yes, ma'am' and are now looking real sharp [in their uniforms]. That's not the measure of success," said Bill Jones, JROTC director for Prince George's schools. "The way we'll measure it is if young people are getting better test scores and SAT scores."

Yet appearances matter when you're in high school, and for freshmen such as Christopher, the physical changes were dramatic -- beginning in August with the hair he had spent two years growing and meticulously styling with beads, shells and even bottle caps. It took a barber five minutes to shave it down to the buzz cut the military academy requires.

Christopher, a thin, muscular football player who takes pride in tackling much bigger boys, cried right there in the barbershop.

"It was one of the worst days of my life," he said.

The changes in his behavior came later. They are quite noticeable to his mother, if not to Christopher. Last year, he came home scuffed and bruised and bloodied from the many fights he got into at Andrew Jackson Middle School. This year, his mother hasn't noticed a scratch. And his grade-point average, which had sunk to 0.5 out of a possible 4.0 during part of eighth grade, stood at 1.29 when Forestville's first-quarter report cards were mailed in late November.

His highest grade was a C, and he earned four of them, including one in his least favorite class: military science.

A Different Fashion The first year of high school is strange and intimidating enough, a whirlwind of hormones and peer pressure, without being forced to look and act differently than all the older kids at your school.

Forestville's freshmen exist on an educational island -- the military academy virtually a school within a school, their rituals witnessed and sometimes mocked by the students in grades 10 to 12, who continue in a traditional high school setting.

The freshmen must salute their "superiors," and they eat lunch with their "companies": Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, among others. About a dozen military instructors -- Army reservists or retired soldiers -- scan the cafeteria and hallways, on the lookout for untucked shirts.

If they don't follow orders, the cadets hit the floor for push-ups.

They also must endure the taunts and teasing of their older schoolmates, who call them pickles and cucumbers because of their green uniforms.

For the upperclassmen, the school's fashion code is dictated purely by pop culture: The boys dress like their rap idols, and the girls favor hip-hugging jeans.

But it won't be that way for long. Each year, a new class of cadets will arrive, until the full conversion to a military high school is complete in August 2005.

By then, Prince George's officials expect the academy to increase the number of students going on to college.

"They're asking [the students] to look three or four years up the road and see how this can benefit them, and that's hard for them to do," said Vincent McDuffie, an English teacher at the school.

Surrounded by tough neighborhoods near Southeast Washington, Forestville has been one of the lowest-performing high schools in Prince George's -- a point hammered in with each reporting of standardized test scores. Nearly 50 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, one of the key indicators of poverty.

Still, when county schools chief Iris T. Metts proposed the conversion to a military academy two years ago, many parents protested. They didn't want their predominantly African American campus to become an Army training ground. Too often, they said, minority students are steered toward the military instead of college.

Metts argued that a team of demanding teachers with military backgrounds could push students to do their schoolwork and to take college entrance exams. She modeled the program on the Chicago Military Academy, also a public high school, which has delivered some improvements in test scores but has not yet had a graduating class.

Closer to home, the District has a vocational charter school, the Integrated Design and Electronics Academy, that requires its 230 students to wear uniforms once a week and take JROTC classes.

"You must have discipline and structure everywhere. I don't care whatever job you do, you must have discipline and structure," one of Forestville's Army instructors, Sgt. 1st Class Milton McLean, told his students after they griped about having to wear uniforms. "If you don't have it, you'll be a mess."

Antonio Logan-El sees discipline as his ticket to a college degree.

Unlike most of Forestville's freshmen, he volunteered for the military academy, choosing to ride three miles every school day even though he lives across the street from Suitland High School. Ninth-graders who live within Forestville's boundaries were automatically offered a spot in the new military program, but when at least 20 wanted no part of it and opted to attend other schools, those seats opened up for Antonio and others.

At 6 feet 4, Antonio towers over his classmates. He looks as if he could win any schoolyard tussle, but he's a sensitive 14-year-old who decorates his room with Scooby-Doo and Tweety Bird stuffed animals, along with pictures of his favorite pro wrestler, the Rock.

His mother, Aishah Logan-El, had Antonio when she was 18 and never married. His grandfather, George Logan-El, a retired school psychologist, treats Antonio like a son, often driving him to Forestville and meeting with his teachers.

Antonio proclaims that his goal is to be a lawyer one day. That's why he's putting all his energy into the military academy, where teachers say he is on his way to becoming a private when they assign ranks. Already, he's on the drill team, whose members march with unloaded rifles after school -- the only student exposure to military weapons at Forestville.

He talks about the school as if he's rehearsing for a recruitment ad: "It teaches good citizenship and respect for yourself and others."

Rank Insubordination The military is not known for forgiveness; a public high school is a place where forgiveness is bestowed almost daily. Striking the right balance has been a struggle at Forestville.

"My military instructors are not used to giving and receiving excuses," said Principal Eric Lyles, who is in his second year leading the school and, like the majority of his teachers, has no military background. "I'm working with them to remember they're dealing with adolescents."

After all, he said, the cadets are "still ninth-graders, they're still rambunctious, they're just running around in a uniform."

Maj. Gen. Warren L. Freeman, now the commander of the D.C. National Guard, was supposed to team with Lyles when the academy opened in August, serving as commandant of the military program. He has not yet been released from active duty, though the school hopes that will happen as soon as next month.

Like many of his students, Lyles, 47, was raised by a single mother. His father was an alcoholic, he said, and his brother was a gangbanger and a high school dropout. Lyles joined a gang in Baltimore but quit with the help of a teacher.

"I believe that if I can come from Baltimore city, from the streets, running with gangs, doing what I wanted to do, then anyone can rise to the occasion," he said. "It's all about what you want."

When Maj. Louis D. Edwards joined Lyles's faculty, he was eager to impose the structure he had learned from nearly 20 years in the Army. This is Edwards's first year at Forestville, having taught previously at a Prince George's middle school and at schools in Alabama and Florida. Two decades ago, he was on his way to a professional football career when a knee injury took him in another direction -- the military and then teaching.

Edwards is a broad-shouldered math teacher who rarely smiles in class and regularly carries a pointing stick. He began the school year unwilling to accept flimsy excuses from any of his students. Not when they were late for class, or out of uniform, or talking during his lectures.

In their outbursts, he detected a deeper problem: the frustration that comes from trying to learn algebra when "we still have kids going through middle school who don't know what 12 plus 6 is."

From the get-go, several of his ninth-grade cadets complained that the Army reservist was too tough. He described his style as "rugged but effective." Cadets talked openly of how they resented him, and that has made for a volatile mix.

One day in his fourth-period math class, a girl wrote her name in purple bubble letters as she sang an R&B tune, while two of her friends giggled their way through the morning's lesson.

"We'll get rid of the troublemakers. This is a military academy," Edwards declared as he escorted the three girls to the principal's office.

"My mother is going to get him fired," one girl boasted, loudly enough for him to hear.

Later in the fall, wearing battle fatigues, Edwards announced to a class that several failing students would switch to other teachers for remedial instruction.

"Oh, happy day," one boy sang.

"You can be happy all you want. I'm telling you, I'm doing flips myself because I'm here to teach," Edwards responded. "I'm not here to baby-sit."

The way Edwards sees it, the military academy won't be successful until it involves all of the students and teachers. "There's not enough consequences," he said. "We have teachers who are used to the traditional way of teaching, so they'll let the kids slide. [The students] break rules and get away with it, and it shouldn't be like that."

McDuffie, a nonmilitary teacher, readily acknowledges that he treats the students in his English classes as regular ninth-graders. "I'm not looking at them as the military academy kids. . . . If we label them military academy kids, then they will feel totally separated," he said.

Since August, 40 freshmen have transferred out of the school, but their seats were quickly filled by others. Some cadets vow to leave after this year, if they can persuade their parents to let them.

"They don't know how to talk to people here," said Alexandria Russell, 15, a small girl with a big voice who left two weeks ago to attend a private school in southern Virginia, where some of her relatives live.

Her mother, Kristi Russell-Shaw, had pushed Alexandria to attend the military academy but over time began to question whether the Army could require good behavior of teenagers.

"You can't whoop and holler at these kids and expect that they're going to follow the rules," Russell-Shaw said.

Symbols of Authority "Woody, what's your problem?" boomed the voice of Sgt. 1st Class McLean, a longtime soldier who has been teaching for two years.

It was mid-September, and the teacher was taking attendance. Christopher Woody sat at his desk, instead of standing at attention like the rest of the class. When he finally stood, Christopher slouched and dangled his arms by his side, which made McLean stare at him even harder.

Days before -- and miles away -- Christopher sat in his mother's Suitland apartment and explained why he disliked standing at attention. "It's too controlling," he said.

He is a shy, soft-spoken boy who plays chess, writes poems and talks about becoming a photographer. He is being raised by his mother and is fond of saying, "I don't want a father figure."

His mother looks at him and sees great promise -- if he can buckle down.

Last year, she gave Christopher a planning calendar to keep track of his homework, but he continued to log his assignments on scraps of paper. To keep him off the phone, she had the phone company block calls to his favorite numbers. She took the antenna off the TV and fixed the computer so he couldn't get onto the Internet.

Underneath her glass coffee table, she keeps a box that's filled with brochures from Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia, a boarding school she considered before Forestville. She stares at the words printed on the Fork Union box: "Your son's future is in your hands."

Linda Woody wants her son to be a leader, and she believes the military academy at Forestville can make him one. "I don't know if I would have gotten this from him at another school," she said.

But Christopher is not at all convinced. "The military is not for everyone," he said. "It's not for me."

He voices disdain for upperclassmen who participated in JROTC last year and already have received ranks such as sergeant and lieutenant.

That dislike of the academy's rank system was evident the first week of October during an English class.

A 15-year-old sophomore sergeant began ordering the students to do push-ups because they had talked in class.

They didn't listen. Then he ordered the youngest-looking student to do 20 push-ups. The boy protested.

"Be a rebel," said a classmate.

"[Expletive], man, why are you making him do that," yelled another at the cadet sergeant.

Before he knew it, Christopher was urging calm.

"Everyone shut up and do your work," he snapped, sounding more like a leader than he wanted to.

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