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The Waterside School in Connecticut is the Product of a Businessman's Dream to Create Leaders
Chip Kruger started a school for children without the wealth that could get them into other private schools. He is a businessman who dreamed that he could give these kids - mostly minority - a goal and a dream, and he has succeeded. So, people in business can build a good school, but it takes the right motives.
          
October 25, 2006
On Education
An Independent School on the Downscale Side of the Seventh Green
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN, NY TIMES
STAMFORD, CONN.

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On the mornings when Chip Kruger hacked and sliced his way up the fairways of the Innis Arden Golf Club in Greenwich, Conn., he usually started to lose patience somewhere near the seventh green. The hole was notable for another reason, as well. It ran right up to the border of Stamford’s depleted South End, and more than once, a player had been mugged between putts.

As Mr. Kruger knew from reading the local papers, mugging rated as a gentle crime by South End standards. During one five-day period in 1988, three people were murdered in the South End, largely as a result of drug trafficking around the Southfield Village housing project. A 7-year-old girl in the neighborhood died in 1993, when a stray bullet struck her as she was eating a slice of birthday cake.

On his own side of the dividing line, Mr. Kruger helped run a brokerage firm. He sent his children to the finest independent schools. One of those was the Brunswick School in Greenwich, with a century-long history, a 118-acre campus and an endowment in the tens of millions of dollars.

The image of two polar worlds, separated beyond the seventh hole by a rusty wire fence and a tangle of vines, haunted Mr. Kruger. It symbolized the distant chance of achieving the American dream for those on the far side. “No matter how hard they worked,” he put it recently, “they were missing out on the other part, which is education.”

So, five years ago, Mr. Kruger put together $2.5 million in seed money, much of it his own, and opened a private elementary school in Stamford just a shanked shot outside Innis Arden. He wanted the Waterside School, as it is named, to offer the closest possible approximation of a Brunswick education to children blocked by birth and family circumstance from any realistic hope of attaining it.

AND to Waterside he has attracted more than a dozen top administrators and faculty members from Brunswick and other elite private schools, educators willing to move beyond the tokenism, noblesse oblige and self-congratulation that can characterize “diversity” efforts in their former realms.

The executive director of Waterside, Duncan Edwards, was the headmaster of Brunswick for 14 years before retiring in 2001. The principal, Jody Visage, spent 20 years in various private schools, ascending to assistant head of school at Greenwich Academy. The director of admissions, Ugina Covington, taught at the academy. Jamel Keels, a third-grade teacher, was hired away from New Canaan Country Day School.

“What struck me about Waterside was the impossibility of it,” Ms. Visage said. “It was somebody’s dream taking form.”

“In all my years in independent schools,” she continued, “the quality of the school was just one aspect of so many advantages, so many good things in those children’s lives. And here at Waterside I saw kids for whom school was the main place you could make a difference. The stakes were so much higher.”

Nearly every one of the 100 pupils now attending Waterside, which covers kindergarten through fifth grade, is African-American or Latino. Most come from working-class homes, with both parents typically holding jobs like housekeeper, nurse’s aide, landscaper, secretary. The household income comes to an average of $35,000, hardly abject poverty but a long way from privilege.

Absent Waterside, many of the children would have attended public schools in Stamford. While the system as a whole performs solidly, a racial achievement gap has hobbled it for years. Nine of 20 schools here, including those taking children from the lower-income areas of the South End and West Side, are categorized by the state and federal governments as “in need of improvement.”

“I worried my son would’ve been lost,” said Angie Murphy, whose son, Khalil, has been at Waterside from opening day. “There’s a lot of kids in public school classes. The teacher can’t get to everybody. And I was concerned that as an African-American boy, he’d be even less of a focus.”

The other morning at Waterside, Khalil was a focus of the principal herself. Ms. Visage worked with groups of six fifth-graders for a half-hour at a time, taking them through a vocabulary lesson — “elaborate,” “toil,” “marine,” “temperament.” Some of the pupils then got personal tutoring from an assistant teacher.

To find pupils like Khalil, Waterside administrators have relied mostly on word of mouth, asking around at local churches and Head Start sites, and dropping fliers in the lobbies of apartment houses. In making the admissions choices — for this year, 22 spots for more than 100 applicants — the school uses some standardized tests and heavily weighs a family interview.

Ideally, the admitted children come from stable, striving families, but also families that probably have no one with a college education. They are families that abhor being pitied, disdain being described as poor, and yet cannot afford the Broadway shows, overseas vacations and weekend trips that add up to a reservoir of cultural literacy for affluent peers.

BOTH educational and financial challenges result. With an annual budget of $1.8 million, Waterside spends about $18,000 to educate each pupil, one-third more than the figure in Stamford public schools. Because each family pays several hundred dollars per child for tuition, Waterside must raise 96 percent of its operating expenses. It rents classroom space from a Roman Catholic church and a nearby business.

Academically, the 5-year-olds who enter Waterside already lag a year and a half behind those starting at Brunswick, said Mr. Edwards, the school’s executive director. So Waterside generally embraces a traditional curriculum, believing in its structure and rigor. The school runs mandatory summer classes for all pupils, builds in late-afternoon homework sessions, and holds Saturday classes to prepare fifth graders for the standardized test used by independent schools for admissions.

The progress has come, though fitfully. The first group of Waterside children to take the I.S.E.E., as that test is commonly known, scored in the lower and middle ranges. Nine of 15 children in last June’s graduating class, the school’s first, earned scholarships to private middle schools, with the rest going to regular public or magnet schools.

Which only raises Mr. Kruger’s ambitions. “It’s not enough to create a good factory worker, a good employee,” he said. “Maybe I’m naïve or romantic, but I wanted to put all my efforts into creating a cadre of leaders.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

 
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