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Birth of a school

There was one question the headmaster could not answer, and it was the first that parents asked: Where is the school?

It's a clear warm night in springtime, and the starting five are trying their best to get down to business in the dining room of Joyce Coleman's home in Dorchester. They used to meet in a bagel shop, but this is a group on the move. Soon enough, they'll have an office to call their own. But for now it's Joyce's place, and Joyce, at 38, is the oldest of the five; the rest are all around 30 and hellbent on chasing a dream.

Not an e-commerce dream. These five are entrepreneurs in education, and the dream they share is inventing a school. Not just any school, but a school that will send kids to college - an uncommon goal for many kids in Boston. Plunked on the table is a hard-plastic portable file. Taped across it is a label: Frederick Douglass Charter School. It's April 1999, and the school exists only in a box and in the minds of those at the table.

Joyce has shooed her kids away, and from the living room come the playful sounds that children are expected to make. But here in the dining room, there are surprising sounds coming from the adults, too. For all the gravity of purpose, it's like amateur hour.

"We need an action logo," urges Mike Flaherty. Mike, 30, a former speechwriter who develops educational software, is adamant about his feisty view. He's also the one who, having gotten lost on his way to the meeting from his home in Arlington, came striding in late and said, "Before I say anything - Jackie, your haircut is awesome."

The compliment, intended to divert attention from his tardiness, was aimed at a blushing Jackie Walsh, 32, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at New York University. She's the principal founder of the school who runs the meetings and is indeed sporting a new hairstyle that's short, almost boyish looking. Dressed in sweats and a loose T-shirt is her husband, Dennis McCoy, 32, a former venture capitalist now in medical school at Tufts University. The fifth founder, Ben Anderson, 27, runs an after-school tutoring program in Dorchester. In wire-rimmed glasses and tie, Ben at least looks the part of budding educator as debate resumes about, of all things, a logo.

The matter came up at the last meeting, and here it is again. Should the logo reflect serious scholarship? Maybe pen and books and a podium, suggesting both the oratorical skills of Douglass, the former slave turned impassioned abolitionist, and their own aim to build a curriculum around reading, writing, and public speaking? Or maybe, as Mike champions, the kind of NFL-type logo seen on the side of football helmets? "I love Frederick Douglass not because he read but because he kicked ass."

The others wince. Jackie passes around drawings of logos a friend has sketched out. Most are dissed. The group couldn't agree on a logo at the last meeting, and it can't agree now. Dennis prefers a silhouette of a podium. Ben likes the idea of using a profile of Douglass's face. Mike is on his feet, excitedly describing the University of Notre Dame's Fighting Irish: "This is for the kids. We have a lot of latitude here. It's got to appeal to them."

The talk goes round and round. Looking at Jackie, I see her expression go blank. Four months have flown by since this group first won from the state a chance to start a new public school in Boston from scratch, and this matter of a logo for stationery, brochures, and T-shirts is like a fat wad of bubble gum stuck to their shoes.

"We should not waste time on minor decisions," Jackie e-mails the others later. "Building, Fundraising, Curriculum and the Principal are much more important than choosing the right image for a logo." None of those cornerstones are in place - no building, no curriculum, no principal. Jackie doesn't mention the obvious, but she knows: If they don't get going, how can they expect to persuade 100 families from the neighborhood to join them in their high-minded quest in urban education?

THE FIVE FOUNDERS OF THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS CHARTER School never would have met back in 1998 if not for an experimental tutorial program Ben had been hired to run. To get more Boston kids on a college-bound track, the program was putting 32 fifth-graders through 14 months of extra instruction, beginning with a summer school program and then continuing after school throughout the sixth grade, including on Saturday mornings. Hopefully, the kids would then be ready to score high on entrance exams to one of the three gems of the city's 21 high schools, Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. In Boston, most students who go on to college come out of one of the city's three so-called exam schools.

Ben, who lives in Cambridge and graduated from Williams College with a degree in English, sees education as a central theme in his own family's history. His maternal grandmother grew up poor in rural Maine, and her life took a huge turn when she was admitted at age 19 to law school at Boston University. "This was in the early 1920s," Ben says, "and it was a transforming experience." His father grew up poor in Minnesota but was recruited to play ice hockey at Harvard, and "again, education was a transforming experience." Ben's mother was a teacher and then became active at Wheelock College, and, as a kid, Ben "tagged along with her to Wheelock." He's the first to admit that his own education was "privileged" - the Belmont Hill School and then Williams, class of 1993. But that privilege, he says, "allows me to pursue what I'm interested in," and in 1998, his interest was working in a city where college is just not part of many kids' future. "Everyone," he says, "should start with an education that truly provides the basic needs."

Ben soon hooked up with Mike Flaherty, a Tufts graduate who shared his views about urban education and had worked as a volunteer tutor. Mike cut his teeth on Boston politics working as a speechwriter for former Senate president William M. Bulger, then left Beacon Hill to pursue a number of writing and high-tech interests, including developing instructional CD-ROMs about standardized testing. Dynamic and enterprising, he was quickly hired by Ben to come up with materials to use in testing the fifth-graders.

Then they met Joyce Coleman, whose daughter, Jazmine, was one of the fifth-graders signed up for the summer program. The working mother of three, separated from her husband, had left an indelible first impression. During Jazmine's interview, Joyce turned the session into her own interview of Ben and the program. Her oldest son was already attending one of Boston's prestigious exam high schools, the O'Bryant, but she had little confidence in the city's school system. She didn't like the large class sizes of between 25 and 30 students. "There's not enough time in the day when the classes are that large," Joyce says. "The kids don't have enough opportunity to speak about what they're thinking and learning." Most of all, she was exhausted by the constant challenge every parent in the city faces: "I'm spending all my time trying to maneuver around the system to meet my kids' needs."

Joyce was a seasoned consumer of city schools. "She knew everything going on in education," says Ben, "and she voiced some skepticism that was unusual for a parent. She wanted to make sure it was the right match."

Finally, Jackie Walsh showed up for a job interview at the new Magnet Program, run by the non-profit Steppingstone Foundation. Married less than a year at the time to Dennis, Jackie was just another scholar bouncing around in academic limbo, a state of mind known as ABD, or "all but dissertation." She'd completed her course work, including written and oral exams, at New York University and was spending most of her time obsessing about the dissertation she needed to complete to finally earn her doctorate. It was an examination of marriage plots in 19th-century British and American novels, a study that took her deep into Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and into Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. She and Dennis, finishing his second year of medical school, were stuffed into a tiny, top-floor apartment in a Fenway row house, living mostly on student loans. To earn money, Jackie had worked part-time as a writing instructor at Boston University and Bentley College. In all, she was on a career track to become a college professor.

Then a job notice for the program starting at the Holland Elementary School in Dorchester caught her eye, and she went to check it out. "You could tell she was really smart," says Ben, "and she was very tuned in to the concept of what we were trying to do - prepare disadvantaged urban kids to test and get into an elite school." Ben hired Jackie as a tutor in English.

None of the five knew that within a few months they would suddenly decide to invent a college preparatory school. But each was infused with a kind of can-do spirit, and soon enough they were talking education policy and philosophy, a discussion that inevitably included the charter school movement - the new big thing in education where states were awarding "charters" to groups of educators and parents to create new and publicly funded schools independent of union rules and red tape.

When Mike was working for Bulger, the legislation to allow charter schools in Massachusetts was debated on Beacon Hill. "I think the idea of starting a school was something we were all thinking about," says Ben, "but in a `wouldn't it be nice someday' kind of way."

More than anyone else, the tutorial program that summer had an impact on Jackie. "It was just supposed to be a summer job," she says. "That's all." Waiting for her in the fall was a job at Boston University, but she came to have second thoughts. She arrived at work one summer day, and waiting in the cafeteria were Mayowa, Kionne, Danielle, and some other kids talking about A Raisin in the Sun. It was the play that Jackie was reading in class with the students, and here were the kids animatedly talking about the characters in the drama and trying to guess what happens next.

"I realized I'd gotten to them," she says. In September, instead of heading over to Commonwealth Avenue, Jackie stayed in Dorchester. The decision "essentially meant I was taking myself out of the market as a professor. But I cared too much about the kids to say goodbye." She had witnessed too much - how hard the kids worked, how motivated they were - and was brought up short when she measured their chances against the larger facts of life in Boston. "The odds were slim, in the current public school system, that these kids would ever make it to college," she says. "I felt passionate there. More than I have ever felt."

That passion - a feeling she could make a difference in Dorchester - was stirring inside her in late October 1998 when she and Dennis attended a dinner party given by a friend in the South End. The talk soon turned to city education, and Walsh learned that one of the other women was also a practitioner in the field. Stacy Boyd was the director of a new charter school in Hyde Park, and Jackie couldn't help but mention that starting a charter school was something she'd begun thinking about doing - maybe someday.

"Someday?" Boyd asked. "Why wait?"

Jackie Walsh did a double take. The woman was telling her things about charter schools that resonated with her own views on education. Having recently changed her career path, Jackie was already perched on the edge. Now along came a nudge. "I left thinking, why not?"

Jackie Walsh was not alone in thinking about a school-reform movement that has spread around the country in the past decade, even as a majority of Americans still don't really seem to know exactly what a charter school is. (In one study conducted last year by a nonpartisan educational group, Public Agenda, 81 percent of those interviewed said they knew little or nothing about charter schools.)

In a nutshell, some states are allowing groups of parents, educators, and others in a community to create a public school outside of the pre-existing school system. This means school boards and union agreements do not apply. Depending on the charter school legislation, states provide some combination of start-up grants and a per-pupil tuition based on the amount of money a community already spends on a student's education. (In Boston, it's about $8,800 per pupil per year.) The schools are also free to seek grants and contributions. Finally, what a state gives, it can take away: Charter schools are subject to periodic state audits, and a school that fails to fulfill its mission and certain other benchmarks faces revocation of its charter.

Proponents and public officials who back charter schools generally argue that the schools complement and help improve public schools already in the district. But some experts consider that spin. "You do not have to be a logician to conclude that charter schools are based on the opinion that the present system is unrescuable," writes psychologist Seymour B. Sarason in his 1998 study of charter schools. Sarason, a professor emeritus at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, calls charter schools the "most radical" education-reform movement in half a century - radical not because of its challenge to the status quo but because the new schools are actually government-backed opportunities for their creators to operate "outside the clutches of the system."

There were no charter schools at the start of the 1990s. Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter school bill, and the first charter school opened there in 1992. The night Jackie Walsh left the dinner party in the South End in 1998, about 248,500 students were already attending 1,127 charter schools in 27 states, and another 7 states had charter school legislation but no schools yet. Though academics have begun to study the new schools, it's still too early to assess fully the movement's national impact. So far, however, most schools that opened have stayed open. Less than 3 percent of charter schools have failed, according to studies conducted by the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C., and the reasons are varied: low enrollment, inadequate financing, even mismanagement.

Massachusetts passed its charter school law in 1993, and the first 15 charter schools opened in 1995. By the fall of 1998, there were 30 schools with 9,425 students. Half the schools are located in cities, the rest in the suburbs and in small towns - from Marblehead to Worcester, Hyannis to Lawrence. The makeup of their student population contrasts sharply with district public schools - a larger percentage of minorities and a larger percentage of students from low-income families. (For example, nearly half the students at charter schools are classified as racial or ethnic minorities compared to a statewide public school percentage of 22 percent.) Finally, the schools are hardly clones of one another. There's no single prototype: one might stress a traditional curriculum, another the arts.

Nationally, it's a movement that has become fodder for politics, a movement often identified politically as part of a conservative agenda and seen as a threat to teacher unions and existing school systems. But those on the ground taking the risks and creating schools hardly consider themselves part of any ideological movement. Jackie, Ben, Mike, and Joyce are all Democracts absorbed not in party politics but in education.

To a person, the decline in public education matters deeply - surprising, perhaps, since all but Joyce are bedrock members of Generation X, the label given to the roughly 50 million young adults born between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. The age group was derided as shiftless and whiny and politically apathetic in the early 1990s. How times change. More recently, these 30-somethings have been heralded as possessing the high-octane creative energy that fuels the Internet era. New studies demonstrate that many Gen-Xers now practice what's been called an "ideology of pragmatism," in which education - or, more specifically, improving public education in the United States - is of paramount concern. Maybe even just as important, it's also a generation largely unafraid about making sudden life moves.

"My mobility is my stability," Mike Flaherty likes to say.

For Jackie and Dennis, the charter school idea was one that would not go away. Over the weekend after the dinner party, they kept circling around the subject. Then, early in the week, Jackie made some calls and learned that the deadline for new applications was actually in her face - that Friday.

"You think I should apply?" she asked Dennis Tuesday night. The couple were standing in their kitchen, no bigger than a closet. Dennis didn't know much about charter schools, but, having worked in venture capital, he did know something about start-up companies. He said new ventures often get going and take on a life of their own: "They happen magically, as if they were meant to be." He laughed, realizing he was sounding like some kind of Zen capitalist. But taking risks was something he'd done in business, something he was used to.

It was all Jackie needed. The next day, she talked to Ben at the tutorial program. "Jackie just lobbed out the idea," he says. Ben pounced, and then he talked to Mike. "Pure long shot," thought Mike, "but good to get the ball rolling."

By midweek, Jackie and Ben were hammering out a mission for their still unnamed school. It may have been happening fast, but it wasn't as if they were pulling ideas out of nowhere. Since first meeting, they had often ended up talking about the kids and ways to improve education in Boston. Now their energy had a focus - a new charter school. They agreed quickly that they wanted a curriculum that would teach kids to excel at researching and writing. Then they enlarged that core idea to include public speaking. Jackie had taught a course at Bentley on research and rhetoric, and Frederick Douglass was on the reading list, and - just like that - the school suddenly had a name.

"It clicked," says Jackie. "Perfect," thought Ben. In the so-called information age, they all agreed that research and communication skills are crucial. Meanwhile, Ben talked to Joyce. "I got really excited," she says. Joyce is a graduate of Emerson College, where she often had to give an oral presentation at the conclusion of a course. "I was right on board with kids being educated around that kind of model." Moreover, Joyce lives and works in Dorchester, the neighborhood where the founders wanted to open their school.

Pushing aside her dissertation, Walsh started writing on Friday morning, and she wrote right up until she saw she had no time left. No time even to do a spell-check. Time only to hit the "print" command and hail a cab in Kenmore Square. It was a madcap affair. The cabbie cracked jokes about Monica Lewinsky while Jackie Walsh clutched whiteout as she bounced around trying to proofread the eight-page document. "I felt an enormous sense of responsibility," she says. "It wasn't just me anymore."

She arrived at the state office just before closing. "I had to throw it together in such haste for the deadline," she wrote Mike afterward. The e-mail is full of angst about the "mess" she'd turned in. She was horrified to realize she'd misspelled "Massachusetts." She told Mike: "If we don't make it this year, I am still planning to try again next year, assuming there will be more charters."

But they did make it. Mike and the others had long ago learned that Jackie was a superb writer and that any self-doubt she displayed was the price of her perfectionism. Soon the starting five got word they had survived a first cut. From a pool of 32 proposals, theirs was one of the nine finalists for the five charters to be awarded. They spent the next few weeks developing a final proposal, due on December 11, 1998, that more deeply described their plans to open a rigorous, college-preparatory school for 102 students in the fifth and sixth grades that would add one grade level per year until the school served grades 5-12 and had 416 students.

They all chipped in. Ben rounded up information to support their claim that the city needed their charter school, given the dismal statistics on college-bound students. Joyce provided input about Dorchester. Dennis put together a mock budget. Given the school's emphasis on research and writing, Mike contacted me, a journalist, as well as others, and asked us to write letters of support. "This is just too exciting," Jackie e-mailed her cofounders. "I can't sleep past 6 a.m. anymore."

To complete the submission, Jackie, Ben, and Mike pulled two all-nighters. "Thanks again for CRANKING last night," e-mailed Jackie. "Ben, thanks for waiting while I scraped the ice off my window. Winter has arrived!"

The founders then picked Mike to represent them at a January 14, 1999, interview before a state Board of Education panel. In advance, Mike discovered that one of the panelists had concentrated on Greek literature in college. No surprise, then, that when the panelist asked Mike to explain what education meant to him, Mike began quoting Greek philosophers and told the state official that no one ever defined education better than the Greeks did 2,000 years ago. " `Educo' in Greek means to lead from," he said. ("I laid it on pretty thick.") In his pants pocket he carried a religious medal his girlfriend had given him that morning, St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of teachers.

Ten days later, Mike found an e-mail from Jackie awaiting him when he got to work. "Are you there? Call me! We got the charter!!!"

Five groups are awarded charters that January to start schools: one each in Springfield, Newburyport, and Lowell and two in Boston. Four months later, the founders of the Frederick Douglass school have their state charter and a goal to open in September 2000, but little else. Everything has to be built from scratch. Everything. Meetings become an exhausting mix of matters cosmic, technical, and petty - like the school logo. "We all saw that such a minor matter was taking on too much meaning and too much time," says Jackie.

"The honeymoon ended abruptly," says Joyce, who opened her home to host board meetings. Her divorce was finalized early in 1999, and she had a full plate at Carney Hospital as director of community outreach and volunteer services. "It goes like this," she says. "Work. Leave work. Scoop up kids. Cook. Kids' homework. Baths. Bed. Then I get to those things I haven't gotten to, and that means Frederick Douglass stuff." She would print the e-mails from Jackie and Ben. "I'd read them in bed and jot down notes to get back to them." The material is sometimes deadly dull. "I was reading a draft of by-laws one night - yuk." The papers fell to her side, and Joyce fell off to sleep.

Jackie is determined to organize their efforts as efficiently as possible: "I thought it was real important to establish protocol and a process. I wanted the board to look, feel, and act like a board, not like just a bunch of people hanging out." With this in mind, she urges the others to set a proper tone. "The more formal we are . . . the better," she e-mails the others before an April 1999 meeting. But then before the meeting starts, Jackie begins winding her limbs around a broomstick like a human pretzel in a funny, private showing of a trick she had actually performed a few days earlier in a tryout for David Letterman's "Stupid Human Tricks." (She learned a few weeks later that she hadn't made the cut to appear on the show.)

The next month, Jackie, Mike, and Joyce react like a bunch of teenagers after they finally land an office for the school in the former annex of the Dorchester courthouse - space given to them rent-free by a neighborhood organization. "Mike and I went on a shopping spree this past weekend to buy supplies (as you can imagine, it was a giddy experience . . . he revels in choosing items like a Red Sox mouse pad)," Jackie gushes in a May 17 e-mail. For her part, as soon as Joyce gets word about the office, she can't wait to see it. "We talk so much that sometimes it's hard to feel we're getting anywhere," she says, "but the office is real, and we had reason for a small celebration."

It's a growth period for the founders. Two steps forward and one step back, almost like an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood who reverts once in a while. The silliness is mostly comic relief from the mind-numbing tasks at hand and the countless hours they spend trying to sculpt a school into their image. The founders are finding their way, mostly by trial and error. They talk constantly by phone, e-mail one another, visit and revisit each and every piece of a school's infrastructure, from how to organize the school office and operations to teacher salaries to class size and drafting school bylaws.

Their friendships deepen, but, inevitably, tensions surface. "Dennis is obviously trying to start an argument," e-mails Mike after a board meeting in late May 1999. "I suggest we ignore responding to his e-mail and let his righteous anger cool off." Dennis had missed the meeting at which the board had voted to add a new member, and he's not happy. "We cannot do this," he announces in his e-mail. He insists that his protest is not about the person they voted for, "rather it is about protocol."

For all of them, it's bigger than the Frederick Douglass school. Their lives are changing, too. Mike has gotten engaged and taken a new job with IBM. On June 1, Ben also gets engaged. Not all news is good news: Jackie and Dennis decide in June to separate. Soon Dennis is off the board. Dennis had always said he wanted to be the first to leave the board, but the idea was he'd move into fund-raising for the school. Now he's gone for good from the Frederick Douglass Charter School.

Jackie's busy on other fronts, too. She stops tutoring at the Magnet Program, a sad parting because that job was what got her into this business of starting a charter school in the first place. But she's overwhelmed juggling the school and her dissertation. She's gotten two chapters approved and is revising a third. She wants more than anything to be finished by the time the school opens.

Throughout it all, their commitment is unwavering. "It's the mission," says Joyce. She means the kids and the school's plan to keep class size to 17 and to stress research, writing, and public speaking, so that whenever students complete a unit of English or history, they will have to write about it. "I think inner-city kids lose their voice along the way," Joyce says.

The founders devise "action plans" and keep at it into the summer of 1999. Even so, the weeks pass with little concrete progress to show for their efforts - the school office, to be sure, and a brochure, and a draft of bylaws, but still no idea where to locate the school and still no school headmaster. "I spend nearly all my time on this," says the usually unflappable Ben about the fruitless search for a site, "and that's time not spent on the education program."

Of all their tasks, they realize that finding a home for the school and hiring a headmaster are the most vital. To find a school head, they retain a headhunter. Jackie, Ben, and Joyce comb through resumes, screen applicants, and interview a half-dozen finalists, but the process, lasting throughout the summer, fails. They don't even get to the point of making a job offer.

"This was a really hard decision to make, to pick someone to take over our dream," says Jackie. "It was kind of like handing over your baby, so we want to be really careful and thorough." The school's opening may still be 12 months away, but there is a growing sense of urgency. Time, once on their side, now seems to be working against them. They'd gone through a well-organized search and come up empty-handed. "What are we going to do?" Jackie is asking.

But no amount of hard work can account for serendipity.

Vacationing in Maine at the end of August 1999 is a man named Jim Bower. The 61-year-old educator has never started a school from scratch, but he has done something none of the founders at Frederick Douglass have: run schools, including a charter school. For 15 years he was the headmaster of the Dedham Country Day School. For three years he was the head of the Benjamin Franklin Classical Charter School in Franklin, a position he had left in June following a power struggle with the school's board. His tenure may have ended on a sour note, but Bower had not soured on charter schools.

Sailing and relaxing in Maine, Bower is dining one night with friends when his host's son mentions that a friend is part of a group trying to start a school in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. The friend is Mike Flaherty, and the school is the Frederick Douglass. "My reaction was - well, they'll certainly be looking for black educators," says Bower, figuring that would count him out. But he's intrigued, and he calls Mike. Quickly, Mike sends Jim Bower materials about the school. "The clarity of their mission caught my eye," says Bower, "a college preparatory school in Dorchester that would be an option to the exam schools." His wife cautions him against getting too excited.

Mike, meanwhile, is exuberant. "I got a call from Mike, and he says he's got a great candidate," says Jackie. "To me, this was just another name, until I saw the resume."

Over the next several weeks, Bower talks to the founders by telephone, and then he makes several trips into Boston for lengthy interviews with Jackie, Joyce, Ben, and others. The founders meet an educator who certainly looks the part of a preppie. Jim Bower favors gray slacks and loafers with tassels and often wears a tie. But there is nothing stiff or buttoned-down about him. Calm and relaxed, he's got a quick smile and exudes a boyish enthusiasm whenever he talks about kids and school.

Bower does have questions for them: "You sure you want to have me, a white guy, to run your school?" The founders shake off the query. Race, age - doesn't matter. "We want the best-qualified candidate for the job, that's it," says Jackie.

Ben checks out his background and his references, and the founders meet on September 15. "This is what we'd hoped for but never expected to find, because charter schools are so new," says Ben. They are facing their biggest decision yet, but no one hesitates. Quickly and unanimously, they agree to offer Bower the job - it's a two-year contract with an annual salary of $68,500. Ben calls Bower afterward at his home in Providence, and five days later the headmaster commutes to Boston for his first day of work, determined to bring the work-in-progress that is the Frederick Douglass Charter School to the finish line.

Ten-year-old William Glass Jr. - friends call him Moose - flips through the pages of the application his father has told him to look over and fill out. The boy is stretched out on a bed in the room he shares with his younger brother, James. It's a cold night in January 2000 on the quiet side street in Mattapan where Moose and James and their father, Skip Glass, live. The beige triple-decker sits next to an empty lot and across from a redbrick manufacturing plant that is shut down and boarded up.

Moose picks up a pen. "I would like the Frederick Douglass school to be supreme in English and History." He writes in cursive letters that are large and curling. "I would like to gain 100 times as more knowledge than I have now. I am smart. I write stories. I think I'm going to be a famous story writer. Right next to William Steig!"

Skip Glass had read about the new charter school in an advertisement Jim Bower placed in the Dorchester Community News. He took his son, then in fourth grade, to a coffee on January 10 at a church in Roxbury. It's one of five coffees held to recruit students, and Jackie, Ben, and Joyce speak at them all.

"To explain an idea is to own it," says Jackie, invoking a line that has become a school slogan. Joyce describes her involvement: "My voice at the table is as a parent." Their presentations are polished, as if they've all grown into their roles as founders of a school. The image of Jackie wrapping her limbs around a broomstick seems a distant memory.

Bower, however, has clearly taken over as lead spokesman: "This isn't my school. Or the founders' school. It's our school." He speaks for nearly 20 minutes, and it's more like he's having a conversation than giving a talk. He urges parents to ask questions and check out the school and think hard in deciding if the school will be a right fit for them.

Skip Glass comes away impressed. The 47-year-old bricklayer is a recovered drug addict who is raising his boys alone. "I would like my child to have a better education than I did," he writes in the parents' section of the school's application. He earned a high school diploma and wants his sons to go to college. He likes what he heard about Frederick Douglass being a college-preparatory school. "It sounded like a well-structured program," he says. He liked the emphasis that Bower, Jackie, Joyce, and others who spoke placed on writing. "The teachers he's had say he's a good writer and storyteller," he says about his son. He liked the commitment to keep class size to 17. Most of all, he liked the idea that teachers would push Moose, who, he says, is "always whining the work is too easy."

By the end of February, Moose joins 101 other kids who enroll in the new school. (By law, charter schools have open enrollments, and after reaching 102 students, the school put applicants on a waiting list.) Like Moose, nearly all of the kids are African-American, and nearly all of their families live in Dorchester, Roxbury, or Mattapan.

"Know what a great leap of faith this is!" says Jim Bower, a favorite line he expresses to parents throughout the recruiting season. It is no exaggeration, because the one question Bower cannot answer, and it's the first question parents ask time and again, is: Where is the school?

"I wish I could say exactly where we'll be," sighs Bower.

Progress has been made on so many fronts. By spring, Bower and the board have hired a dean and five of the six teachers they'll need (three for each grade), drafted a student handbook, established that the school day will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and decided that students will wear uniforms. Students have undergone diagnostic testing, and 50 will attend a summer school program funded by a $56,725 grant from the Nellie Mae Foundation.

But there's still no site for the school. From the moment he began work in September 1999, Bower has chased down leads, and by November he complains that the effort is "sucking me under. I'm spending 75 percent of my time searching for a site." Eternally optimistic, he also displays a flash of frustration: "A lot of this should have been done a while back. The board knows that, knows it frittered away a lot of time." He, Ben, and others ride around checking out a former district police station, an empty warehouse, and a former nursing home. They get close a couple of times, but then reality bites. The warehouse, for example, would have cost $1.6 million to buy and renovate. "I'm pulling out straws here."

Bower finally has something in early May. "Dear parents," he writes on May 5. "At last, I have great news." He excitedly announces that their school will be housed in the lower floor of the Lena Park Neighborhood Development Center in Dorchester. The space, once renovated, will be large enough to hold them for two years, and Bower eagerly promises to show them architects' drawings at the first-ever meeting of the entire school community, on May 20 at the Lena Park center.

But then comes a meeting with contractors four days after the letter goes out. "We have the heating guys there, the ventilation guys, the asbestos crew," says Bower. The cost of the renovation - originally projected at $300,000 - has doubled. "We couldn't possibly afford it."

Instead of a grand celebration on May 20, Bower stands up to break the grim turn: For financial reasons, they will not be occupying the Lena Park site. Worse, he says, they still don't know where the school will be located. "There could have been a massive walk-out at that point," says Bower. But no one leaves. The day, says Bower, turns out to be "a unifying event."

Ultimately, Bower devises a quick fix. By the end of May, he negotiates with the Catholic Archdiocese to rent the second floor of the Most Precious Blood School in Hyde Park. The lease is for one year and costs $77,000. Thinking their Lena Park site would be under construction all summer, Bower had been talking to officials at the Hyde Park school about renting space to conduct the Frederick Douglass summer school program. Now he grabs it for both the summer and for the school's first year: "It's the only plan I had left, and I was plain sick of going to empty warehouses."

Time has expired, and Jim Bower knows it. High-minded hopes have buckled to the weight of necessity and pragmatism. But even after finding a short-term solution, the headmaster hits a low. The school will be in Hyde Park rather than the neighborhood they'd been so determined to inhabit. It's a 3-mile ride by bus from the Forest Hills T station. And there isn't enough room. Upstairs, they will have to divide one room into two in order to have the six classrooms needed for their two grades. Bower and the dean will have to share an office, and so far there is no space for a faculty room. "We're faced with some bleak options," the headmaster writes to the board.

Bower admits to tossing in his sleep, but by the time the board meets at the end of June, he has regained his bounce. "We will be underserved the first year, both the students and the faculty, but there is no other choice," he tells the board. "We will paint it and we will clean it and we will make it shine so when the kids come, they will be proud."

The summer program began on July 5, and on Wednesday, the Frederick Douglass Charter School opens officially. One hundred and two students will march through the front doors of the redbrick schoolhouse and make their way to the second floor.

Monitoring the opening but staying out of the way are the school's original founders.

Ben, who still runs a tutorial program, is married. Mike has married, too, and he's changed jobs again - he is cofounder of a TV educational network. Joyce changed jobs and is working at ReadBoston. Jackie was not able to finish her dissertation, but she's due to this fall. She and Dennis, attempting to work things out in their marriage, did take a vacation together in June to Provincetown.

The school is squeezing into its new quarters, but Jackie remains buoyed by a comment one educator made to her back in 1998: "Charter schools are not glamorous. There isn't enough money for glamour. It's about education; that's first. The facilities, they come later."

In the end, they succeeded - mixing commitment with compromise and occasional luck - so that the parents of 102 kids, disenchanted with Boston public schools, were willing to take the leap and give a scrambling start-up school a try.

Even if there is still no school logo.