Bloom & board: black school helps students blossom away from home - Piney Woods Country Life School

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 7, 1997 by B. Denise Hawkins

"This model for education is working, but like other independent schools, it isn't taken seriously by the mainstream education community," said Joan Davis Ratteray, president and founder of the Washington, D.C.- based Institute for Independent Education. The institute is a membership organization of nearly 400 independent Black elementary, secondary and boarding schools.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Black boarding schools, which numbered between eighty and one hundred, were a safe place from racial strife during the Jim Crow segregation years. That changed, however, with the civil rights era and desegregation.

"Most of them no longer exist because we stopped supporting them," Beady explained. "Integration led to the feeling that because we were free to attend schools of our choice, those schools that supported us when we had no choice were no longer needed. Most ceased to exist."

Ratteray agreed, saying, "These schools lost the support of the African American community."

Vividly illustrating that point, the eighty-six-year-old Southern Normal School in Brewton, Alabama, which was operated by the Reformed Church of America closed its doors in January. The Ebon International Preparatory Academy in Forsyth, Georgia, soon followed.

However, Steve Ruzicka, executive director of The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) in Washington, D.C., feels Southern Normal may reopen in the fall.

"It's happened before at other schools," he said.

While Black boarding schools are struggling to bolster the number of students on campus, the number of students of color entering traditionally White residential schools has tripled since 1985, according to TABS.

Financial Realities

With little government funding Piney Woods is struggling to woo celebrity and church donors. Only a handful of families actually pay the school's full tuition $8,300 a year. The average tuition paid is just under $2,000. Beady estimates the cost of educating a student on campus at nearly $22,000. The school usually makes up the difference between the cost of tuition and what the students families can pay.

The school has a $30 million endowment, approximately 10 percent of which goes toward its annual budget of $6.8 million. A new fund-raising program, called "Circle of Churches," is soliciting donations from a host of religious institutions to underwrite the cost of tuition for many students.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey, in 1996, donated $43,000 to hire the school's first in-house social worker. Cartoonist Charles Schulz, of "Peanuts" fame, donated funds to build a girls' honors dormitory.

School officials are also stepping up efforts to reach more alumni.

While alumni giving is up, it remains at less than 10 percent of all donations received, according to Beady. "They give, but not at the level we would like."

The struggle for the survival of Black residential and independent schools is seen as critical. More than forty years after Brown v. The Board of Education, "visible racial distinctions still remain in America's public and private schools," concluded a study released in June by the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute of the College Fund/UNCF. The impact has negatively affected the academic achievement of African-American students in preschool through high school.