The Boston Globe

Epiphany Prepares its First Graduates

June 17, 2001
By Jennifer Medina

Milton – Joi Cato isn’t afraid she will miss the 12-hour school days. She’s not afraid she will miss the teachers probing her life outside of school. But she’s a little nervous about asking questions at her new school here, Fontbonne Academy.

“If I don’t understand the teacher, I might look at him funny and start chewing my nails,” said Cato, 14. After more thought, she said, she’d stay after class and ask questions. Cato is one of the first graduates of Epiphany School, an Episcopal-run, tuition-free private school.She and her eighth-grade classmates are preparing for a new set of rules as they had to private, preparatory, and public schools.

Teachers at Epiphany are fond of calling it a private school with a public school mission. The only requirement for enrollment is income – students’ families must be at the federally determined poverty level. But John Finley, the head of the school, is the first to say that Epiphany isn’t a school filled with “at-risk” children waiting for teachers to save them. Nor is it a school meant to prepare everyone for Oxford degrees, he says. “We can’t say this is a place where everyone is groomed for Harvard, because it ain’t,” the Crimson alumnus said. “We just want to bring out the wonder in these kids.”

These are the kind of students many private schools are hungry for, Finley said. They will make the school more diverse, and are already comfortable obeying rules and strict dress codes. Here, boys are required to wear ties, except on dress-down days, a reward the student council created this year.

He’s not worried that Epiphany alumni won’t be able to compete with their peers. Instead, he wants to make sure they are held to the same standards as their more affluent peers. “I don’t want anyone to say ‘Well, he’s poor, so he can’t write as well,’ or ‘He can’t obey the rules,’” he said. “That’s a reverse process and they will start slipping.”

Students were required to visit the high schools they applied to and teachers helped place them to ensure that they would be comfortable in the new environment. The biggest change for Euridio Evora might be returning to an empty house. Epiphany has an extended school day so he eats three meals a day at the school and must stay for a two-hour study hall after dinner. “It might be kind of lonely at home,” said Evora, who hopes to play varsity basketball at Trinity Catholic next year.Evora was in sixth grade when Epiphany opened its doors three years ago. Then there were two grades and 40 students.

Now the school serves grades 5 through 8 and has 80 students. The school will move to Dorchester in November, but it is currently leasing space from Fontbonne. The curriculum at Epiphany is a hybrid of innovative and back-to-basics approaches. Fifth-grade students can spend the year mastering sentences and move onto paragraphs a year later. By June, each eighth-grade graduate turned in 10 “A” essays, said English teacher Frannie Abernethy. “We push them,” Abernethy said. “We want what is best for them now and what will be best for them.”

Abernethy and other teachers said they have broadened their definition of success by working at the school. “I know I’ve learned there are different roads to take,” said math teacher Michelle Gomes. “You can’t lock anyone into a track at this age. Maybe they say they want to go to technical school to be a designer now, and then decide they want to go to college to be an architect.”