[Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, July 21, Baltimore County Public Schools also made the official decision to continue online learning through January 2021.]

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Baltimore City Public Schools will open the 2020-2021 school year virtually, delaying the start of a planned hybrid in-person option until later this fall, school system CEO Sonja Santelises announced in a public letter today addressed to parents, students, and others.

“The past four months have been unlike anything we have experienced before in Baltimore City Public Schools,” Santelises wrote in her letter. “We closed school buildings to slow the spread of a global pandemic, and the heavy use of online learning and video contact with teachers forced each of us to adjust in ways we never dreamed. I am grateful for all your support and willingness to fight alongside us to make sure each student has an opportunity to continue their learning.”

Baltimore City follows similar decisions made by public schools in Howard, Harford, and Prince George’s counties last week amid once-again rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in Maryland. Students in those counties will continue distance learning at least through January 2021.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools also announced Monday afternoon that they will be providing online-only instruction during for the first semester of the 2020-2021 calendar.

Meanwhile, Baltimore County and Carroll County public schools are still considering reopening schedules. Baltimore County Public Schools Superintendent Darryl Williams told The Baltimore Sun last week that he is leaning toward remote learning with a phased-in return for the 2020-2021 academic year. “We’re looking at safety first as a driving factor,” Williams said.

The agenda for Baltimore County’s Tuesday Board of Education meeting includes discussion on the school district’s scheduled reopening plan for the fall.

Santelises, who said Baltimore City Public Schools will provide an update on further plans by Oct. 16., also proposed a calendar change to the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners that the first day of school be moved back Sept. 8, following the Labor Day weekend, to allow additional time for professional learning for staff.

“City Schools strongly believes some form of in-person learning is critical for a student’s academic success, mental health, and emotional well-being,” Santelises said. “However, we do not want to rush to act based on your recent feedback, as well as health trends in our community and nationally. This moment is a vital time, and preparation for students and families is important.”

To date, Maryland, which has the 10th highest per capita death rate in the country, has lost 3,252 citizens to the novel coronavirus—as well as at least another 130 “probable” fatalities. After cases and deaths shot up dramatically this spring before peaking and ultimately falling after stay-at-home-orders were enacted, Maryland’s positive cases have begun climbing again after reopening plans were phased-in.

According to the most recent modeling, the death toll in Maryland is expected to top 4,200 citizens by Nov. 1.

In a thread on Twitter Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan requested the Trump Administration extend the national public health emergency, which is set to expire this Saturday. He also called for other federal action, including an appeal to Congress for educational funding and the need to pass a coronavirus relief package that provides funding needed by state and local governments whose budgets and payrolls are facing dramatic cuts as the economy continues to struggle.

Several hundred high school students marched from the Baltimore School for the Arts to the Baltimore City Public Schools headquarters Wednesday afternoon, demanding curriculum changes and full support for the Black Lives Matter movement from local and state school leaders.

Organized by the students—mainly from the city’s acclaimed school for the arts, but also those from other schools—speakers called on the head of city schools, Dr. Sonja Santelises—who was in attendance—and state school superintendent Dr. Karen Salmon to, “outline the ways in which their organizations will work to be anti-racist and pro-black from now on.”

“Our country is in crisis, and it has been for 400 years,” said 16-year-old Mahsati “Sunny” Moorhead, who is finishing her junior year at the Baltimore School for the Arts this spring, reading from a prepared statement. “We implore the leaders of Maryland State Department of Education and Baltimore City Public Schools to be on the right side of history and make the necessary changes to begin to dismantle the long held white supremacist ideology running so rampant within their own organizations.”

Among the specific demands from students was a more inclusive English reading curriculum, including works by Zora Neale Thurston, Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X. They also demanded social studies lessons that cover the history of white supremacy in the United States, as well units on successful black political revolutions and the role of black women in the American civil rights movement.

“The problem is we don’t see African Americans represented in our history classes or in our English classes—people who look like us,” Moorhead, who is black, later told us. “We read The Great Gatsby and The Awakening, but nothing that we can relate to or relates to ur experience.”

Students also seek an increase in mental health awareness and services for students and staff. They also called on the overwhelming black Baltimore school district to employ a higher percentage of black social workers and counselors.

The noon march from the Baltimore School for the Arts took demonstrators through closed city streets in Mount Vernon and Station North before reaching the school headquarters. Protestors gathered at the steps, kneeling for an eight-minute, 46-second period of silence to honor George Floyd, who died while having his neck pinned to the ground for that exact amount of time by Minneapolis police officers last month.

The two-hour march and rally included several musical, singing, and dance performances. But the focus was on the message delivered by several student speakers, notably Moorhead, who presented the students’ list of demands.

Baltimore activist Kwame Rose, 26—who has been present during the recent city protests, as he was in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered while in police custody—praised students for pushing for social and educational change.

“I think it’s important for every adult here to listen to their demands,” Rose told the crowd. “I know protesting is important to secure space to highlight the issues.”

It’s also important to work for tangible goals, Rose added, encouraging those in attendance to pay attention to budgets and email the mayor, City Council members, and school officials to advocate for increased funding for schools. Rose noted that, when he went to school, classrooms were often crowded, short of textbooks, and sometimes without air conditioning.

“There is no reason why Baltimore City police officers should make more than Baltimore City schoolteachers,” Rose said.

Santelises said she supported the students and young people advocating for, “the kind of education they want and deserve.”

She also highlighted the city school systems “BMore Me” curriculum designed to increase student engagement by focusing on Baltimore’s current events and history.

“The students are impatient to see change. We’re all impatient to see change,” Santelises said. “But I’m here listening today.”

Wednesday morning began fairly routine for English teacher LaQuisha Hall at Carver Vocational Technology High School. She was prepping her class with warm up writing exercises when Baltimore City Public School (BCPSS) CEO Sonja Santelises walked in with a camera crew and flowers to announce that she had been selected as the 2018 Teacher of the Year.

“I did receive notice that Wednesday was the day of the announcement, but you never know when or if it’s you,” Hall said. “I was on edge most of that morning just wondering. When I saw them come through the door, I got my answer.”

The 15-year teaching veteran has been with BCPSS for her entire career and at Carver since 2015. For the past two years, Hall assisted some of her English students with publishing two books relating to social justice—A City Unspoken: A Dose of Our Reality and One Nation, One Heart. 

More than a decade ago, Hall created a mentoring and etiquette academy for young girls to help build self-confidence and give back to their communities. Queendom T.E.A. has served more than 1,000 young women since beginning in 2008.

“As much as I want them to gain academic skills, it’s also important to see them develop socially and emotionally to be great people,” she said. “So, it’s important for me to empower them in that way so they can also be empowered in the classroom to learn.”

Hall says that she is honored to be recognized by the school district for her work and is grateful to be surrounded by students who are ready to learn and administrators who support her efforts. She is now in the running to be awarded Maryland’s teacher of the year in the statewide competition, which brings back memories of her days in the pageant circuit. 

“I’m not foreign to competition, I am a former pageant queen many times over and we often went through this similar process,” she said. “The difference is the people I’ll be surrounded by. They are all great educators and motivators and it makes me feel good to be among people like that.”

To celebrate her award, Hall opted to pass on the celebratory champagne toast and instead created a Facebook page so that she could create a space for those who wanted to discuss education with her.  Also, as part of the award, she will receive a cash prize and classroom supplies provided from the Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke Endowment Fund at the Fund for Educational Excellence. She will also throw out the first pitch at the Orioles game on May 10. She says she is grateful for the love she gets from her students and hopes that she leaves a lasting impression on their lives after they move on from her class.

“One of the things that I say a lot is that they can’t let their crown tilt,” she said. “I want them to be reminded that the ground that they walk on should be gold and not concrete—they should be walking at a higher place. Maybe people don’t expect them to be there, but that is their divine placement.”

It’s a steamy Friday in July and Sonja Santelises is sitting in a stuffy conference room on the fourth floor of Baltimore City Public Schools’ district headquarters, reflecting on her first year as city schools CEO. There’s a lot to reflect on. 

Since taking over from Gregory Thornton in July 2016, Santelises has faced a dizzying array of obstacles and crises. From Thornton—who was forced out by the school board less than two years into a four-year contract—Santelises inherited stalled negotiations with the Baltimore Teachers Union and an ongoing lawsuit in which 16 charter schools are suing the school system over claims of insufficient funding. 

Also inherited from previous administrations is the 21st Century Schools Building Project, a $1 billion initiative to renovate or replace decrepit city school buildings. Then there are the perennial struggles: stemming declining enrollment, improving test scores and graduation rates, attracting and retaining high-caliber professional talent.

On top of all that, Santelises encountered some specific challenges: Last December, news broke that the school system was facing a $130 million budget gap for this fiscal year, a shortfall that would likely necessitate cutting about 1,000 positions, combining classes, and eliminating programs like art and music. In the end, lawmakers, parents, educators, and activists rallied, eventually extracting an extra $60 million in state funding to help close the deficit. Layoffs still resulted—115 positions in total, including 13 classroom teachers—but disaster was avoided. 

So how does she evaluate her eventful first year in charge of the district that educates 82,000 kids, employs 11,000 people, and commands an annual budget of roughly $1.3 billion?

Santelises hoots at the question with the knowingness of a prisoner who has just escaped the guillotine and begins a long answer that grows in certainty and righteousness as she continues. 

“I mean, there are always some regrets . . . personnel-based ones here or there, but overall, to be sitting here and not have combined first-, second-, and third-grade classes throughout the district because we had to cut 1,000 teachers? I’m okay with that.”

She yawns—due to the stuffy air, she says—but rhetorically, she’s ramping up. 

“I mean, yes, do I regret that we’re not funded at the level that outside experts, commissioned by the state, have said that we should be funded? Sure. But I am also thrilled that we had a community that mobilized on behalf of its children. . . . We had advocates, we had parents, we had young people, we had principals and teachers who all poured out and said, ‘Our kids are worth it, and you might not give it to us, but we will be heard.’ And I think people were surprised. [People initially thought,] ‘Well, it’s just Baltimore.’”

Nothing frustrates Santelises more than hearing the district and its students maligned. In fact, it was hearing such talk during the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death that motivated her to pursue the CEO position. At the time, Santelises—a married mother of three—was working a cushy job at The Education Trust, a prestigious Washington, D.C., think tank, where she enjoyed a healthy work-life balance and the freedom to research issues deeply and advocate for educational equity without politics and public bureaucracy. 

But watching students from Frederick Douglass High School clash with police at Mondawmin Mall that April afternoon—and listening to subsequent characterizations of those students as hopeless delinquents—“incensed” her.

From 2010 to 2013, she had been chief academic officer for Baltimore City Public Schools, so she knew a different side of the school system and its students, one that bore little resemblance to the caricatures being perpetuated on cable news.   

“At least at the time that I was here as CAO, Douglass was really on the rise,” she says. “Like, I had been in Douglass. I had been in an AP English class. I had seen the cheerleaders getting ready for the football game and the band practice. I just had this thing about proving people wrong, and I felt like our kids were just being blanketed as something that they are not.”  

Almost exactly a year after the clash at Mondawmin, she accepted the CEO position, and then began her new role on July 1, 2016. 

With degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Harvard, and more than 25 years of professional experience as an educator and administrator in urban school systems under her belt, it is a position for which she is eminently qualified. Her best asset, though, may be her “nothing-to-lose” attitude. 

“I told a group of funders when I came back—they were pushing on something—and I said, ‘Let me be real clear: I am not back here because I need a job. . .  . I am back here because of the kids and families of Baltimore.’” 

Growing up in Massachusetts, just north of Boston, Santelises was drawn to education early. 

“If you hear my mom tell the story, I always loved chalkboards and writing. I loved playing school,” she says.

Her father, Jackson Brookins, a chemist-turned-industrial-relations-executive for Eastman Kodak, was supportive of the idea. Her mother, Verna, a former social worker who headed up community relations for Polaroid, was not. 

“For [educated] black women from her generation in the South there were two [options],” Santelises explains. “More than likely, you became a pastor’s wife . . . or you became a teacher. So in my mother’s mind, she wanted something else for me.”

While her mother may have initially discouraged education as a profession, both her parents worked to create a culture of learning for Santelises and her younger sister, Shahara, now a college professor. Santelises’ father, whom she has described as “her intellectual anchor,” was the ringmaster of the dinner table, instigating intense debates on current events. From her mother, who was a district minister in the Pentecostal church, Santelises inherited what she calls “the speech oratory piece” of her personality. 

Though her family was Protestant, Santelises attended Catholic high school, an experience for which she is now grateful. She says her school’s focus on faith and service fit her personality. Furthermore, the school—in its own way—promoted what educators now call “equalizing educational opportunities” and “growth mindset.” (In layman’s terms, an “equalizing” environment is one in which every child—regardless of socio-economic status—is believed to have great potential; “growth mindset” is a philosophy that states that hard work and discipline are skills that can be developed.)

“I remember Sister Mary Louise reaming somebody out who had, like, close to perfect SAT scores,” Santelises says. “She was saying, ‘I don’t care what your SAT scores are, because if you can’t get your work done on time and it’s not done well, nobody cares what your doggone SAT score is!’ 

“So there was really a work ethic,” she continues. “It was the assumption that you work to get smart. And for an African-American girl in a predominately white school, it actually was a big deal. . . . There was really this sense of, ‘You want to come in here and do the work? Go into any [level] class you want to.’”

After high school, Santelises headed off to Brown University, where she double majored in English and international relations. What she was going to do after graduation, though, remained a question. She toyed with the idea of applying for some kind of government post in West Africa, or maybe going back to grad school for international relations. But a stint substitute teaching in her hometown sealed the deal. She loved teaching. It was as simple as that, and her mother would just have to understand. (“She’s long since been okay with it,” Santelises notes.) 

Soon after this realization, Santelises met with a young go-getter named Wendy Kopp at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. Kopp was hatching an idea for a corps of teachers who would be deployed to some of the most disadvantaged districts in the nation. Santelises signed on and moved to New York City to help recruit and place promising candidates for what became Teach for America. From there she became a teacher and curriculum specialist at an elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, eventually helping to found its affiliated middle school. After that, she took a job with the New York City chapter of the Algebra Project, a nonprofit that works to increase math skills in low-income students. 

Also while in New York, Santelises met her husband, Luis, an entrepreneur and businessman. The couple moved back to Boston, where Santelises enrolled in the selective Urban Superintendents Program at Harvard University. Though she loved the program, she still wasn’t sure she wanted to commit to a career as a district administrator. 

“I was like, ‘Central office? Who the heck would want to go work in a central office?’” she says, mock indignantly. “Like, that is the most unimportant, unrelated work. [The important work] is here, it’s in the schools.”

Gradually, though, she came to see the possibilities, joining Boston Public Schools as assistant superintendent for professional development, then interim deputy superintendent, and finally assistant superintendent for pilot schools, a roll that saw her supervising 23 pilot schools in the district.

Then in 2010, Andrés Alonso, a former Harvard classmate, reached out. He was three years into his tenure as schools CEO in Baltimore and he needed a new chief academic officer. He had offered—and Santelises had declined—the same position in 2008, but he sensed that, this time, she was ready.

“I had enormous respect for her always, and now she had had a set of experiences in a district that was doing some interesting things. I thought that she had probably gotten stronger over time,” says Alonso.

But there were other candidates in the mix, so Alonso arranged for he and a team of trusted Baltimore colleagues to travel to New Jersey for a day of secret interviews with the finalists. 

“I did not signal to the team that I had a preference because they were all strong,” recalls Alonso. “What was so funny was after her interview, during the small debriefing, a couple of people sort of turned and said, ‘Do you really think we can convince her to come to Baltimore?’”

So in 2010, Sonja Santelises and her family—which by then included her eldest daughter, Katriel, and fraternal twin girls, Francesca and Talia—relocated to Baltimore, settling in Roland Park. 

She got to work right away, assembling her own team of deputies who helped her identify and expand upon “pockets of excellence” and standardize teaching practices. 

“One of the things I was most proud of as CAO was we developed a rubric for ‘This is what good teaching looks like in Baltimore City,’” she says. “It’s not idiosyncratic. It’s not what you feel. There is a craft. Yes, you absolutely adapt situationally, but you don’t just rip up everything we know just because somebody feels like they might want to do it a little differently.”

She also identified what she terms “content-anemic” elementary curricula. “Second graders can learn about the Aztecs. You don’t have to give them generalized stories about pets all day,” she insists.  

This is the work Santelises hopes to continue now that she has returned. In July, she unveiled the district’s “Blueprint,” a strategic plan outlining the school system’s priorities, which include literacy and student wholeness—i.e. providing an environment that nurtures a student’s mental, physical, emotional, and academic needs.

“We’ve got to be able to do both,” she insists. “You can create a nurturing environment that’s validating . . . but without setting a standard? That, for me, is professional malpractice.”

She is also realistic about the fact that—for now, at least—she will have to do this with fewer resources than she would like. Without naming names, she questions the wisdom of the special tax increment financing deals the city has approved for mega developments (like Harbor Point and Port Covington) because—among other reasons—they initially add population without collecting commensurate taxes. But she is undeterred. 

She happened to be reading a biography of Mary McLeod Bethune, the pioneering African-American educator, during the budget crisis, and says it “grounded” her, reminding her that there are people who have had to do more with even less. 

“Black churches have opened basements, people have taught kids to read in swamps when it was illegal. Like, we will educate people,” she says. 

“I come from a long line of African-American educators—and the same is true in the Latino community and the same is true in low-income communities in West Virginia—there are always people who are going to care about the education of the most vulnerable.”

Wednesday was a big day in Clifton-Berea, a disadvantaged neighborhood in East Baltimore that usually doesn’t receive a lot of attention unless there’s a tragedy, like the six homicides the neighborhood has experienced already this year. 

But this week’s commotion was of a celebratory sort, as residents, educators, and public officials gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the neighborhood’s new Fort Worthington Elementary/Middle School. 

The school is the first building completed as part of Baltimore City Public Schools’ (BCPSS) ambitious 21st Century School Buildings Program. The program—a partnership between BCPSS, the Maryland Stadium Authority, the city, and the state—dedicates $1.1 billion toward the renovation or reconstruction of at least 23 city school buildings within the next decade. Funded in part by Baltimore City’s 5 cent bottle tax, the initiative aims to modernize learning facilities throughout the city, many of which suffer from unreliable heating and cooling systems, antiquated amenities, and even unsafe drinking water. The new Fort Worthington, which can accommodate up to 700 students in grades K through 8, was completed on time and on budget at a cost of $37 million.

The new school’s opening heralds a victory for public education advocates who lobbied for the 21st Century School Buildings Project and its atypical funding model. Normally, school districts use capital improvement funds to pay for construction and renovation on a per-project basis. But BCPSS’s capital improvement funding is so anemic—and its need is so great—that an alternative financing model was sought.   

“If we had had to wait for [capital improvement funding] money to get new schools, we’d be getting, like, one school every two years,” explained Sonja Santelises, the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, who we profile in our September issue. 

The 21st Century School Buildings Program’s $1.1 billion in funding allowed BCPSS to launch several projects at once, and now those projects are coming to fruition. One other school, Frederick Elementary, located in Southwest Baltimore, will open this month. Two others—John Eager Howard Elementary School and Lyndhurst Elementary/Middle School—are slated to open in January 2018. And more schools around the city are in various stages of construction. Information about the 21st Century School Buildings Project, including status reports on the other schools, is available at the 21st Century Schools website.   

On Wednesday, community members oohed and ahhed as they streamed into the gleaming new facility filled with natural light, vibrantly colored furniture, and tech-equipped classrooms. 

RaShawn Stanley, a rising seventh grader at Fort Worthington who spoke at the ribbon cutting ceremony, says she loves the new school and thinks that it will provide an improved learning environment. “It’s hard to learn when your school is broken down and you have so many distractions around you. So this will be better,” she said.

In addition to new classrooms, there’s an art room, band and music rooms, a guidance center, a media center with an attached video production studio, and a technology lab. The 102,000-square-foot school also houses spaces that can be used by the community, including a health suite and indoor and outdoor recreation and play areas. 

“Take a moment to look at where we are,” said Cheryl A. Casciani, the chair of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners. “You are in a Baltimore City public school and it is beautiful. And that is what our children deserve.”

Santelises agreed, telling the crowd in the school’s new blue-and-white gymnasium that the project “says we are not educating [students] for a past. We are educating [them] for a future that many of us adults will never see.” 

With that in mind, scroll through the slideshow below to see images of the brand spanking new Fort Worthington Elementary/Middle School.