As freshman Tierra Strange finished loading her mother Elsie’s van with all the belongings that she would take to her first home away from home, Elsie suggested she take one last look around their West Baltimore rowhouse, to make certain nothing had been left behind.
“I know I didn’t leave anything,” replied a confident Tierra. “I packed to go.”
It was last Thursday, the morning of Sept. 1, and the day freshmen from around the world would converge upon Johns Hopkins, the prestigious university on North Charles Street.
Strange would have one of the shortest distances to campus of anyone that day – she was merely traveling across town from North Calhoun Street. But she began packing three days earlier and stayed up until 3 a.m., struggling to sleep as she awaited the dawn.
You would have thought the Dunbar High School graduate was bound for distant environs, far from where she grew up.
In many ways she was.
Home is a quiet, working-class, African-American neighborhood bordering some of Baltimore’s most desolate streets. The newly renovated brick brownstones highlight a street where locals sit out on their front steps and catch up on current events with neighbors – just blocks away from weather-beaten, boarded-up buildings and tattered storefronts.
It’s a place where Strange has dreamed of becoming a doctor since age 7 – and 10 years later, it’s a place she must leave to fulfill that dream.
Her destination: a school confronting its reputation for being virtually off limits to students such as her – a campus in an upmarket setting where African-Americans make up just 7 percent of the undergraduate student body. Additionally, only 13 percent of undergrads were born in Maryland and, for each of the past three years, an average of just 11 students from Baltimore City public schools were admitted as freshmen.
It’s a place where, like Duke, Georgetown, Yale and other prestigious schools in urban settings, you can walk along the campus yard and straightaway forget what city you’re in.
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But as Elsie Strange headed in her van toward her daughter’s dorm, and trash-strewn streets gave way to manicured lawns, she felt assured that her daughter’s dream is in good hands.
Things are changing for Baltimore public school students at Hopkins. In fact, one of the reasons why Strange applied to Hopkins is it guaranteed her a full ride upon acceptance, enrolling her as one of the first participants in its inaugural Baltimore Scholars program.
The Baltimore Scholars are Hopkins-bound, high-achieving students from Baltimore public schools who in the past may have been overlooked by the university.
Hopkins president William Brody announced the program in June 2004 at Dunbar, hailing it as “one more step to support our city and especially our public schools.” The program offers scholarships to city public school students who are admitted and ultimately enroll at Hopkins.
Already, the program has borne fruit: There were 33 such students accepted this year, more than double the 14 who were admitted last year, and 22 have enrolled.
“If it keeps up at this rate, by the time these kids graduate we’re going to have approximately 100 students from Baltimore City schools,” said Matthew Crenson, a lead faculty adviser to the Baltimore Scholars program and a Hopkins graduate.
“What we’re looking at for the long term is a pipeline program where we go into middle schools to try to identify and prepare students not only to come to Hopkins but to apply for college in general.”
The program has been such a godsend for Tierra Strange that she abandoned plans to leave the state for college. She considered Hopkins only after failing to gain admission to Stanford, yet ultimately chose it over Gettysburg, Towson, Temple and the University of Maryland, College Park.
She’s no stranger to going across town for schooling, having chosen to attend the east side Dunbar over the high school in her jurisdiction – Frederick Douglass – because the former was a more career-oriented school that offered courses related to her interest in medicine – including biology and an Emergency Medical Technician course.
Yet Dunbar is also predominantly black, like other schools she’s attended all her life. In Hopkins she has found herself among the most diverse demographic she’s ever been part of, and she’s enjoying every minute.
“I’m looking forward to meeting new people, trying to find my independence, doing hard work,” said Strange, whose roommate, Clare Bernard, grew up on a horse farm in Sherborn, Mass. “The diversity appealed to me because I like being around different people.”
The Baltimore Scholars program assures she will be exposed to different worlds, yet she need only catch a cab when the need for a home-cooked meal kicks in.
For Hopkins, it means students from other areas will get a perspective on Baltimore from someone who actually grew up here.
The program began after director of undergraduate admissions John Latting wondered a few years ago why Hopkins attracted so few of the city’s public school graduates.
“As I looked at these numbers I thought to myself, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. We’re right here, there just aren’t many [Baltimore] kids applying here. Why is that?'”
As the school probed for answers, Latting said, many surfaced, among them: A widespread perception among even the brightest Baltimore public school students that Hopkins was more interested in out-of-town kids.
“Because we recently have not had a real good track record, they didn’t know personally people who had come here,” Latting said. “And for a lot of people going to college, especially if your parents didn’t go, it helps to have a brother or a neighbor who went.
“And for some, the cost of Hopkins was intimidating. They would say, ‘Whoa, this place costs $40,000 a year in living expenses and tuition. Also schools like [the University of Maryland in College Park and Baltimore County] had some good programs that they were using to make the case to say, ‘We want you on our campus, Baltimore students.'”
Latting knew that if the school could make itself more attractive and affordable, it would get its share of local students – particularly from the elite city schools, such as City College, Polytechnic Institute or the School for the Arts. And, in fact, all of this year’s Baltimore Scholars, except for Strange, are from those three schools.
Yet it seems fitting that the Scholars program was announced at Dunbar, for how well Hopkins does there might become the true measure of the program’s success.
“I’ve always thought of Hopkins as being a really good school [yet] I thought it was a really hard school to get into,” said Strange.
“I’ve talked to people from Dunbar who graduated from there,” said Strange, who is one of three current Hopkins students from Dunbar, “and they’ve told me good things, that it’s a nice campus and you get to meet a lot of people. And they gave me a heads-up on certain classes, like calculus.”
Asked what it means to be among such a small group of Dunbar grads to gain admission into Hopkins, Strange said, “It says I’m a hard worker. I work hard at everything I do.”
The work paid off: Strange graduated first in her class at Dunbar and was in the National Honor Society.
“I don’t know what it says about Dunbar. I really don’t. I guess it says not all Baltimore City schools are bad, and good does come out of them. You just have to look for it.”
Strange was not hard to find.
“She’s a tough little girl, a kid from the neighborhood with a whole lot of energy,” said Dwight Lassiter, coordinator for the Dunbar-Hopkins Health Partnership, a program that helps the high school’s students get a taste of the medical profession. “She showed she wanted the scholarship.”
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Lassiter said Strange could pave the way for other Dunbar students.
“This year, I have about four or five rising seniors that I believe will compete for the award,” he said. “The Polys and the Citys are going to get their share, but youngsters from Dunbar are starting to come through and build their academic achievements.”
Strange knows it won’t be easy her first year. Already she’s bemoaning the first real separation from her twin sister and confidant, Sierra, who left for the Philadelphia School of Art a week before, as well as her older sister Julie, 23, and her mother, who works as a packer at Procter & Gamble.
But she’s determined to fulfill her dream, and on the day she left West Baltimore, it seemed as if the old neighborhood was trumpeting her efforts: There on the bulletin board at Trinity Baptist Church on Druid Hill Avenue was a title for a coming sermon that seemed to speak volumes to the 17-year-old on her way to the great unknown.
“Don’t Look Back.”
<!– ART CREDITKIM HAIRSTON : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTDunbar graduate Tierra Strange negotiates the stairway of her dorm at Hopkins. At left, she gets a goodbye kiss from Shirley Strange, her grandmother.
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ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTTierra Strange is closing one door and opening another as she leaves West Baltimore for the Johns Hopkins campus. Her mother, Elsie Strange, is at left.
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ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTBaltimore Scholars student Tierra Strange (front), roommate Clare Bernard and Tierra's mother, Elsie, have a laugh before the new students leave for a retreat.
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