Semaj Arrington hadn't missed a day of school in almost four years at Tenor High School, a small charter school downtown. It was a pretty remarkable record, given his background, which was, um, not out of a textbook for school success.
Then one morning last spring, he didn't show up at school. The principal, Jodi Weber, called his house. Arrington said he'd hurt his ankle and couldn't walk. He couldn't catch the bus to school.
Excused absence, right? Wrong. Mark Schneider, the dean of students, drove across town to Arrington's house, helped him to the car, and brought him to school.
"They have ways of making you be more professional, just have your head on right," says Arrington, 19, now working on becoming an electrician at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
In 2005, I wrote a story about what I called the Marcia Spector school district, a set of small elementary schools and high schools under the umbrella of Seeds of Health, a nonprofit organization headed by the smart, entrepreneurial and forceful Spector.
There were about 900 students in the schools, all of them funded with public dollars but operating outside the traditional public school system. Each of the schools had high energy, a distinctive and well-executed program, and a record that made them valuable parts of the local school scene.
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