Inner City Boarding School

In my reflections on Chapter 1, where the concept of negotiating identity was introduced, I wrote about the boarding schools that have often been used to erase the identity of (usually) indigenous children so they could become "productive members of society." Thus I was struck by an article today in the New York Times Magazine "School Issue," The Inner-City Prep School Experience, about the SEED School in the Southeast section of Washington, DC. It sounds almost like the same sort of experience that these other children experienced. And yet it isn't entirely. The children go to their homes and neighborhoods every Friday afternoon and return Sunday evening to what become the sanctuary of the school, where they are dressed like the child in the picture, which would certainly not be accepted in the 'hood, and have to negotiate their identity all over again. According to their website:

SEED’s model is unique not only in that it is a boarding school for public school students, but also in that it is located within the students’ local community. Proximity to the local community nurtures positive contact with family and community leaders. It also provides students the opportunity to serve as role models and improve their own communities through service. SEED offers resources for local families, thereby strengthening both students’ support structure and the surrounding community.
(SEED School website/Experience)

But how do the kids manage their two identities, the school identity and the home one? For one thing, the Student-Parent Handbook says it "is is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” (Jones, p. 1) so the students are permitted a certain amount of the hair styles, jewelry, etc. that is important to their home identity. One girl told the writer that

SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”
(Jones, p 2)

The students' need to negotiate their identities is very clear from this quote:

To survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams [the head of the school.] But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”
(Jones, p. 3)

Certainly Adams' attitude is the exact opposite of the leaders of the old boarding schools! These students are protected from needing to negotiate their identity constantly by being at the school 5 days every week, but their position at home is the same situation we described in blog reflections on another book for a CGU class this summer, The Adolescent Dilemma (which we tried to direct at high school students, but instead got reactions from other teachers.)