The few people who are lucky enough to receive Nativity’s education are grateful and will hopefully give back to the community in some way. If most of the kids that come to Nativity give back to New Bedford, New Bedford will be a much better place.

This is the re-birth of the ghetto, or slums, that New Bedford citizens have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. No longer will a person have to worry about getting an education, going to a good high school and being safe at the same time. Nativity will change the feeling of worry into a feeling of confidence.

Nativity is also an outlet to me. The teachers are understanding and easy to get along with. The teachers are there for our help. If I have any trouble in class, I like to talk to the teachers about it. They offer great criticism and help for any problems that people may face. The teachers especially helped me on my first year here at Nativity.

My first year at Nativity meant a new life. I went from “that kid who everybody knew” to “that kid always wearing a tie.” Most of my friends would make fun of me because I wore a tie. This made me want to show them how successful I could be in life without going to the local schools they went to.

I wanted to visit them in their local schools one day and see how they were doing. If it was the same as I recall in elementary school, they were settling with Bs, Cs, and mostly Ds. I did not want this for me. I wanted to do better. Nativity was the perfect place for me because I have always strived to do better.

Nativity opened my eyes to a whole new group of friends. These friends were more like me. These were the kids striving for the A, like I was. I got to know my friends and teachers better than I ever could have if I went to other schools.

Nativity classes usually have around 15 kids in the class, and everything was stripped from us, from our hair to our clothes. Because of this, we all saw each other as the same. There were no cliques, gangs, or separations. We were just students, all alike and for the same cause as we believe in today, to better ourselves and to turn Greater New Bedford into Even Greater New Bedford.

I come here 11 hours and 30 minutes a day, and I will cherish every second that I have of it here at Nativity.

By ISAIAH RATTI

Isaiah Ratti lives in New Bedford. He is graduating from eighth grade at Nativity Preparatory School this year.

June 15, 2010 12:00

According to the folks at Nativity Prep, the challenge was for a 15-member team to compete in a Math, Basketball and Chess Tournament (The MABACH comes from the first two letters of each competition.)

All told, 11 Nativity Schools from the New England area, New York and Pennsylvania took part.

Although NB’s Nativity lost in basketball, the local students won the math and chess matches and received the most cumulative points. Points were awarded for each game won with the most points winning the coveted MABACH Cup which is kept at the victorious school for a year until the next tournament.

The tournament emphasizes academic as well as physical skills and has become an extremely popular event among the Nativity network of schools, local officials said. In addition, the MABACH provides an opportunity for students to interact with students from other Nativity schools who share their commitment to education.

The trophy for Most Spirit was won by Our Sisters School of New Bedford.

Nativity Preparatory School of New Bedford is a tuition-free middle school for boys from low income families. For more information, call the school at (508)-994-3800.

And you can send him to Nativity Prep.

On the street, that boy will learn about “bling,” the illegal drug business, and that women don’t count.

At Nativity, he’ll learn about chess and organized sports, how to study, and how to respect himself and the world at large.

Now, in its eighth year in New Bedford, Nativity — a nationwide grade school franchise aimed at providing low-income youngsters with a prep-style education — is sending graduates to some of the best high school prep schools in New England, including Deerfield Academy, the Groton School and St. Paul’s in Concord, N.H.

Its graduates are also attending area Catholic high schools, and even vocational schools if the graduate is so inclined.

Anyone who has encountered the firm handshakes, the “Yes sirs” and “No sirs,” and the singular career-mindedness of a of a local Nativity grad won’t easily forget it.

“They taught us right from wrong from day one. And just, how to be a man,” said 15-year-old Preston Cooper of Wareham, who graduated from Nativity last year.

Nativity uses the prep school model of strictly structuring its students’ time, and emphasizing an atmosphere where everything from the way the boys dress to the way they talk to teachers and other students is about respect.

When 14-year-old Alec Rodriguez, who grew up on the hard streets near Claskey Common Park, is asked what’s the most important thing he learned at Nativity, he doesn’t hesitate. And he doesn’t say it’s academics, sports or study habits.

“I’d have to say it’s self-respect and respect for others,” he said.

Preston Cooper and Alec Rodriguez are now attending Boston College High School.

Preston, during the week, is staying with family from Mattapan, but Alex rises at 5 a.m. each morning, rides with his dad to the Lakeville train, and then returns after football practice, arriving back home around 7:30 p.m.

His mother, Amber Jordan, notes that it’s actually an earlier end to the day for Alec than when he attended the fifth through eighth grades at Nativity.

The downtown prep school provides for evening study halls for its students, a practice aimed at providing a quiet environment for youths who live in a city where there is no shortage of ways to waste after-school time.

“Everything he is today is pretty much because of Nativity,” said Amber.

Amber patiently waited three years to get Alec into Nativity Prep.

She came across a flyer for the school when Alec was in second grade, put it away in a drawer and called every year to check in with the school until her son was old enough.

She was determined, she said, because of her own experience getting lost in the large student body of New Bedford High.

“I myself just got lost in the system there,” she said. “It was just so big, and I didn’t want that to happen to him.”

Preston Cooper’s mother is just as enthusiastic about the school as Amber Jordan.

“The hard work is going to pay off in the end. ” said Anika Cooper, noting that it already has provided dividends for Preston and Alec, since they’re attending a high school their parents could never have imagined possible.

When he was in fifth and sixth grades, Alec had a negative attitude, said his mother. But she was determined to work with his teachers and the principal to keep him on the right path, she said.

By seventh-grade, the school finally clicked for Alec and he matured quickly.

“I learned a lot more about the school and what they were doing,” he said. “And that’s when I started to like the school more.”

For Preston, who didn’t start Nativity until seventh grade, it was even more challenging.

Although he’d had homework at the Wareham middle school he previously attended, it was nothing like the two hours of study he had at Nativity every night, he said.

“Sometimes he got stressed out,” said Anika so she talked with him about the pros and cons of the school. “He decided to stay, and he did it,’” she said.

Preston said his decision to stick it out at Nativity, and then go on to B.C. High for more challenges was about the way he came to think about life while at the prep grade school.

“All my life I’ve been through challenges,” he said. “So why not take the bigger challenge and see what you can get out of it.”

At Nativity, all students must be involved in a sport — and the school offers everything from basketball to tennis.

So both Preston and Alec are now playing football at B.C. High, though Preston decided to forego basketball in order to devote two-thirds of his school year to concentrate on academics.

It’s a remarkably mature decision for a 15-year-old, especially when you learn that both Preston and Alec excel at sports and are aiming for a professional career.

Although they haven’t taken their eyes off the professional sports prize, both quickly say they’re not expecting it.

“Academics come first because sports might not work out,” said Alec. “But I’m still going to play sports as long as I can. And I have a great education so I can still make a living.”

It’s not easy, at first, to put your finger on just what it is about Alec Rodriguez and Preston Cooper that make them more mature than an average adolescent. There’s just a self-possession about them that seems unusual.

Claire Carvalho, the director of development at Nativity, said she thinks it’s about the attitude of the faculty, administration and many volunteers that run the shoestring budget school.

“They know they are valued,” she said. “Whether it’s from the principal who gives them a tough time and gives them detention because they didn’t do their homework, or the teacher who harps on them.”

Anika Cooper and Amber Jordan says it’s about the very nature of the 55-student school (60 will be its maximum size).

“They pay attention to these kids. It’s a one-on-one type of deal here” said Anika.

Editor’s note: Nativity Prep will hold an open house on Wednesday, March 11 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. It is now accepting applications for fifth and sixth grades. Nativity Prep costs as little as $10 a month for low-income families although parents are expected to pitch in to help maintain the low-budget school.

Contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@s-t.com

The original story appeared here

When the music stops and everyone returns to their ranks and files, Principal John Rompf addresses the well-groomed students about upcoming events and then leads them in prayers for friends and family, prompted by the boys, who raise their hands in turn.

Morning assembly concludes with everyone in the chilly gym, known as “The Icebox,” holding hands in a huge circle and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Prayer, uniforms and classical music appreciation are some of the things to be found at Nativity that won’t be found in most schools. But the faculty and staff will tell you that these are really the outward signs of something larger: an atmosphere of mutual respect and self-respect, of civility, of dignity, of pride, of purpose, of support and of achievement.

And it’s no accident that they are all boys from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Nativity Prep represents the reality that given an extraordinary effort, boys don’t have to drop out of school at a far higher rate than girls in New Bedford and elsewhere; that they don’t have to be put into special education at twice the rate of girls; that they don’t have to wind up in remedial education at three or four times the rate as girls from the same social background.

“These boys can all compete academically with anyone,” said Claire Carvalho, director of development. “They have learned that their school provides an equal playing field.”

How equal? Each year a handful of students do so well that they win full scholarships to the most prestigious private prep schools in the land: Andover, Choate, Darlington, Tabor. Most of them will re-enter public school, where they will be at a distinct advantage as they shoot for college.

So why do these boys succeed while their neighbors slip into the cracks so often?

The school setting has a lot to do with it, but the faculty emphasizes: not everything. Not by a long shot.

James Mathes, director of the SMILES mentoring program in SouthCoast, said he has come to the seemingly radical conclusion that the schools aren’t the cause of underachievement and the dropout problem at all. The man who spent a career as a fairly conservative executive, running the local Chamber of Commerce, now finds Hillary Clinton’s book title, “It Takes a Village,” escaping his lips.

For the Nativity students, that village includes everyone in their lives, especially their parents, even if it’s a single parent. For one thing, Nativity students have to apply there and pass an entrance exam, and those who do already understand what Nativity is all about and what is expected of them.

Rashard Perry of New Bedford, who spent Grades 2 through 5 in Florida’s elementary public schools, said that during one of his summers in this city during those years he was taken on a tour of Nativity, “and I knew I wanted to come here.”

That despite the school day that lasts until late afternoon and sometimes into the evening.

He might never have known it even existed if it weren’t for his mother, he said. And once there, he might not have known about such prestigious private prep schools as Darlington, outside Atlanta, where next year he will start high school with a full scholarship.

Rashard is a prime example of the possibilities inherent in every boy (and girl).

But what Mr. Mathes says, and others agree, is that the atmosphere in a child’s household, and in the neighborhood, and in the greater community, can make or break a child’s future.

“There’s a lot of research that says the leading indicator of the educational success of a child is having a caring and competent adult in their life. I don’t mean to call people incompetent. I don’t say that to hurt anyone. But the point is, if a child is born into a home without high school graduates, if will be very difficult for that family to support you with education … as opposed to a family with a bunch of college graduates.”

Heather Larkin, director of guidance for the New Bedford public schools, said the pattern shows itself early, especially with boys. Many start kindergarten or the first grade unprepared, she said.

Behavioral problems, which often lead boys into a spiral of intervention leading to a high likelihood of quitting school, appear early. “If you grow up in a house where all you do is fight, you’re going to learn to fight,” she said. “If you grow up in a house where you talk things out, that’s how you are going to do things.”

Worse, she said, “a lot of the attendance problems are not caused by the student. They’re caused by the parent allowing them to stay home. When a kid gets to high school, at that level he is making conscious choices. But when it happens in kindergarten, it’s atrocious.”

Attendance officers, she said, visit the homes of children as early as kindergarten, where the child — most often a boy — is being allowed to skip school by the parent(s). “We’ve heard every excuse in the book,” Mrs. Larkin said.

That sets the tone: The parent either doesn’t value education, or can’t do their duty to get the child to school. When it’s a single-parent home, it’s most likely headed by a woman, and if the child is a boy there could well be a lack of a male role model in his life.

Bottom line: 90 percent of the truancy cases that are taken to court involve boys. And by the time a child reaches high school, “the attendance issue blurs into dropouts,” Mrs. Larkin said.

Mr. Mathes said that even if class sizes in public schools could drop to 12 or 15, as they are at Nativity, “It’s not just the academic presentation that’s necessary. It’s the whole child that comes into that school, that classroom, and it’s the behavior of that child toward his or her education.

“Laying problems at the feet of the superintendent, school leaders and teachers is to abdicate parenting and family and community responsibility for raising children,” he said.

Male role models for boys are especially prized — and hard to find in a community that suffers from such low demographic scores in education, several people interviewed for this story said.

And when problems have their origins in the very early grades, that spells trouble.

“Most of the teachers you see in elementary school are female,” said Dr. Portia S. Bonner, recently chosen as the next superintendent of schools in New Bedford. “Mostly, the middle schools are a nice little mix. And at the high school level, most teachers are female.”

The SMILES program, which began by targeting the middle grades, attempts to put all children, but especially boys, in a one-on-one relationship with an adult who can show that child that education has a purpose, that it is taking them somewhere.

Dr. Bonner echoed that, saying, “The student needs to know the purpose for what he is studying. School needs to be meaningful, purposeful, not, ‘This is just another thing I have to do to get out of this class.’ They need real-life experience and see the application. They need to problem-solve and think critically.’”

And the boys need adult males to guide them.

At the co-educational Nazarene Christian Academy in New Bedford, Principal Susan M. Helm said, “We understand the importance of male influence. We try to involve as many young men in our program as we can.”

High school boys from 14 to 18, she said, “need other young men to be with them and mentor them and work with them and play with them. We have young men, college men, involved in gym classes and aiding in classrooms, young men helping in the after-school care program.” The volunteers, she said, come from “the community: churches, the Salvation Army, Christian camp. They’ve basically found us by word of mouth.

“Kids today have such a lack of men in their life that when the young men are involved in school, the kids flock to them like magnets,” she said.

Mr. Mathes said that as successful as SMILES is in the region, it doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of attention boys receive at Nativity. “If you were to compare the two, SMILES is a four-door sedan and Nativity is a top-of-the-line Cadillac.”

Mr. Rompf, principal at Nativity, said that he goes to great lengths to recruit male teachers, which is proving to be a challenge for the public schools as well, especially in the elementary grades. The job is made much harder at Nativity because teaching there is essentially missionary work: Teachers work long hours and are paid only a few hundred dollars a year, plus room and board. Those who teach there are usually on an educational or career track other than teaching, but they want to do it for a time, Mr. Rompf said.

As a result, teacher turnover typically approaches 75 percent a year.

It’s not a model that can translate to public education. But Mr. Rompf said that there is a public school model that is similar to what happens at Nativity, and that works better to keep boys on track: the neighborhood elementary school.

“Parents may have known teachers there for 30 years,” he said. “They know the school, they know the principal.” Parents are involved in the school, in the education, in the support activities. “There’s a rapport.”

“Then in the middle grades, they’re assigned to one of three great middle schools,” he said. “This is the most pivotal time for young men growing up,” he said, adding that the signs are already apparent as early as the second grade.

“At Keith (middle school), one-third of the students don’t want to be there. That’s why we catch them as young as possible,” in the fifth grade, he said.

A national debate has been under way for nearly two decades about the way boys are taught in school, and whether they have fallen behind girls after federal legislation corrected imbalances in spending and boosted girls’ educational performance.

Some dispute that a disparity even exists, saying that analysts make too much of statistics that show more boys reading poorly, dropping out, being suspended, being held back, or failing to attend college and graduate once they get there.

Among those who are concerned about the fate of boys in public education there are two strains of thought.

Cathy Young, an author at Reason magazine, described in the magazine a 2001 conference in Washington, D.C. in which one group occupied one room, the opponents another.

“In one room, there was sympathy for boys who yearn to be gentle, nurturing and openly emotional, but live in a society that labels such qualities as ’sissy’; in the other, there was sympathy for boys who want only to be boys but live in a society that labels their natural qualities aggressive and patriarchal.

“One camp wants to reform masculinity, the other to restore it; one seeks to rescue boys from patriarchy, the other from feminism,” she wrote.

“Early ’school turnoff’ may cause boys to develop an anti-learning mind set the British have labeled ‘laddism’: a mirror image of the pre-feminist notion that it isn’t cool for a girl to be too bright. ‘The boys have become oppositional and band together in the belief that manly culture doesn’t include grade grubbing,’ observes University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld.

“For black boys, this attitude may be exacerbated by the notion that learning is a ‘white thing,’” Ms. Young wrote.

What happens when a motivated boy enters school?

Dr. Bonner is one who thinks that teachers may not be prepared to deal with the way boys naturally behave, their boisterousness and fidgeting. When boys act out, she said, “we don’t really take the time to say, ‘Are we educators doing everything we can to assist?’”

Further complicating the picture is the spread of prescription drugs to remedy ADHD or other problems, which with some diligence might be handled without medication. “In most cases a teacher is able to work with a student without putting a student on a drug, which has a lot of side effects,” she said.

She said her own teaching experience required her to adjust to the learning needs of children with attention deficit disorder, often boys. “I altered my teaching, knowing that students are able to take in information in multiple ways. I also know their attention span is limited, so there’s a limit to how much you can feed that person for a day before you have to engage in other activities,” she said.

“You have to differentiate the instruction, knowing the needs of the child.”

Even with this knowledge, educators say that some teachers simply don’t know how to handle boys’ behavior, and much prefer the girls, who are more likely to sit quietly and complete their lessons.

Ms. Young wrote, “Perhaps the social changes of the past three decades have made young women more self-assured and eager to use their new opportunities, while leaving many men unnerved and confused about what’s expected of them.

“It may also be that boys, particularly those from low-income families, often become alienated from school early — both because their slower developmental timetable causes them to fall behind girls and because school is a ‘feminized’ environment with mostly female authority figures and boy-unfriendly rules that emphasize being quiet and sitting still.”

Anne Wheelock, a retired education analyst in Boston, told The Standard-Times that boys in particular are likely to be held back a grade or two, often because of learning and behavior issues. Once that happens, and as the grades go by, the child feels too old for the class. And an 18-year-old in the 10th grade may well have a job, a marriage, or even children, a perfect recipe for dropping out.

At Nativity, and in many other schools across the country, holding a child back is the last thing that’s going to happen, but it’s not “social promotion.” Nativity, for instance, will require students to spend additional time in the evening, possibly with a parent (who may, by the way, be helping with the custodial work since the school has no janitor).

The boys are so closely monitored that there simply isn’t time for them to waste, or opportunity to slip behind without being noticed.

The same goes for Nazarene Christian Academy. Mrs. Helm said, “We’re very fortunate because we live in a small community where we’re able to meet the needs of those type of students under a very sweet, intimate relationship.

“Where others might be up against a child being agitated or angry or fighting and all of that, there’s a tendency just to try to keep things calm because there’s not enough help to go around,” she said.

For Mr. Mathes, that principle applies to the entire community. The first thing a city like New Bedford needs to do is understand its predicament. “Now that I understand the circumstance that exists, step two is to decide for ourselves as a community what we are going to do about it. Because I guarantee you nobody in any other community is going to do it for you A community can either take care and fix its problems or suffer them,” he said.

“The issue then becomes a call to arms for everyone not to just get involved but to accept some of the responsibility for helping to fix the problem.”

-Steve Urbon, The Standard-Times