Oyler School Against the Odds

Abstract

A new Marketplace documentary captures Cincinnati’s move toward holistic schools like the Oyler Community Learning Center.

Drive west from downtown Cincinnati, over the railroad tracks that snake beneath the 8th Street Viaduct, and you’ll find a little slice of Appalachia, nestled between the Ohio River and the steep slopes of Price Hill. When coal mining jobs in Kentucky and West Virginia declined after World War II, hundreds of families came to Cincinnati for factory work. Many eventually settled in a small neighborhood of brick row houses now known as Lower Price Hill.

I first visited the neighborhood on assignment for Marketplace, public radio’s daily business and economics program. I was reporting on Cincinnati’s efforts to close the achievement gap between poor children and more advantaged students by fighting the effects of poverty. Lower Price Hill’s Oyler School is part of a growing national movement to help poor children succeed by meeting their basic health, social, and nutritional needs at school.

From the moment I saw the stately 1930 brick and terra cotta building, against its backdrop of boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, I knew there was much more than I could tell in a four-minute radio piece. Today, Lower Price Hill is a diverse mix of white families, many with Appalachian roots, and growing numbers of African Americans and Latinos. Many of the factories in the area have long since closed, and half of families live below the federal poverty line. After a $21 million renovation, the new Oyler seemed like an oasis in a neighborhood devastated by neglect and crime.

“I could walk you outside the door, not even 15 steps away, and I could probably get just about any drug that I want,” then-principal Craig Hockenberry told me. “I could walk you another 15 feet down and there are our parents that are prostituting and hooked on heroin and crack cocaine.”

My initial story turned into a series for Marketplace, then a newly-completed documentary film, Oyler. The documentary follows long-serving principal Hockenberry and senior Raven Gribbins through a year of school, focusing on Hockenberry’s mission to transform the neighborhood and on Raven’s quest to be the first in her troubled family to finish high school. When Hockenberry’s job is threatened, it becomes clear it’s a make-or-break year for both.

The story was compelling to me because, as I learned, until about ten years ago, very few children from the neighborhood graduated from high school, let alone went to college. Oyler was an elementary and middle school. After 8th grade, most students eventually dropped out, rather than attend a high school outside the neighborhood.

Then, after an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that found the state’s school finance system unconstitutional, Cincinnati received an influx of funding to rebuild its schools. City leaders not only decided to rebuild their rundown school buildings, but to transform them into “community learning centers” that would be neighborhood hubs, providing health and social services as well as traditional instruction.

When it came time to plan for Oyler’s renovation, organizers got an earful from parents and community members. Why bring in all of this money for a new building when what they really wanted was a high school?

So they got both. Today Oyler Community Learning Center serves children from 6 weeks old to 12th grade. Inside the school you’ll find a health clinic staffed by a nurse practitioner, a vision center where children can get free eye exams and glasses, a dental clinic, and mental health counselors. Kids can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at school, and bring home food for the weekends. Enrichment programs include college advising, after-school activities, and a large network of volunteer tutors and mentors. All these partnerships are self-sustaining. The school provides the space; the organizations tap their own budgets or bill Medicaid for their services.

“Oyler” follows long-serving principal Craig Hockenberry through a year of school, as he faces what could be his last shot at transforming a neighborhood by reinventing its school. Though Hockenberry and his staff have made significant progress, he comes up against an accountability system focused on standardized test scores and the official graduation rate. Here, Hockenberry is pictured making his regular rounds of the neighborhood, talking with parents and making sure students come to school.

Glenn Hartong

Oyler’s results have been mixed. While performance on state tests climbed for six years, scores have lagged in the past two years. The school has been identified as a “priority school” by the state of Ohio, meaning it ranks in the bottom five percent of schools for its academic performance. Yet each year around 40 students graduate. Many go to college. Oyler has become a model for similar efforts around the country, including an initiative in New York City to create dozens of new community schools with health services and other resources.

According to an analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, more than half of children in U.S. public schools now qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. It’s an imperfect measure of poverty, in that it relies on families to apply for the federal program, but it reflects the deepening inequality in our country. Our schools are struggling to raise achievement against growing odds. Helping more children overcome the obstacles of poverty so they can learn and succeed has never been more urgent.

Raven Gribbins, aged 17 when the documentary begins, grew up in Cincinnati’s Lower Price Hill and has been a student at Oyler since kindergarten. Her father and grandparents all attended Oyler, but none had finished. Raven is determined to be the first in her family to graduate from high school and go to college. “Everybody used to tell me… ‘you’re not going to make it through high school, you’re going to have a baby by 16,’” she said. “I’m glad to prove all them wrong.”

Glenn Hartong

Oyler School, with its gargoyles and ornate terra cotta trim, looms large in Lower Price Hill. It’s named for a popular former principal, George W. Oyler. The current building was built in 1930. After a two-year, $21 million renovation, the new Oyler Community Learning Center reopened in 2012.

Glenn Hartong

Today, Oyler Community Learning Center serves children from six weeks old through the 12th grade, with additional classes and services for adults. Like many of the services at Oyler, the preschool is run by a nonprofit group that provides its own funding in exchange for the rent-free space.

Amy Scott

Oyler School sits near the Ohio River, just a few miles—but a world away—from downtown Cincinnati. Once home to many factories and retail businesses, the neighborhood became an “economic desert,” says Hockenberry, plagued by industrial pollution. Recent efforts to improve riverfront access and replace a noisy viaduct that bordered the neighborhood are expected to improve the quality of life.

Amy Scott

A memorial of Styrofoam cups pays tribute to Brian Thompson, 27, who was murdered across the street from the school in the summer of 2012. Thompson was an Oyler parent who had attended the school as a child. When the new Oyler School reopened later that summer, Hockenberry hoped its presence would help slow the crime in the neighborhood.

Glenn Hartong

The Lower Price Hill Historic District is characterized by its Italianate-style brick buildings, some dating to the 1850s. The area surrounding Oyler School was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Many residents still call their neighborhood “Eighth and State,” a reference to the major intersection.

Stacy Doose

During much of her childhood, Raven lived with her grandmother, Darlene Gribbins. Raven’s mother and father both struggled with alcohol and drug addiction and spent time in jail. “They learned not to do drugs,” Darlene says of her grandchildren. “You lose everything you got. You even lose your own children.”

Stacy Doose

Before her senior year in high school, Raven moved back in with her father, Michael Gribbins. A recovering cocaine addict and alcoholic, he had been sober for several years and became more involved in Raven’s life. “This is probably the only year that I’m going to have to spend it with my daughter,” he says, “so I feel lucky that I got this opportunity.” Though he made it through the 11th grade, Michael never learned to read and write, and he works as a maintenance man. “Not having an education, sometimes work’s hard to find,” he says. “You struggle.”

Stacy Doose

Timothy Drifmeyer, age 13, tries on glasses at the OneSight Vision Center inside Oyler School. Opened in 2012, the center provides free eye exams and glasses to children throughout the school district. Established through philanthropy, the clinic sustains itself by billing Medicaid or, if a family has it, private insurance. Before the clinic opened, around 140 kids at Oyler failed a routine eye screening each year, but many went untreated. “Poverty interferes with children getting health care,” says Marilyn Crumpton with the Cincinnati Health Department.

Stacy Doose

Friends Joe Saylor (left) and Gary Thomas talk in front of Thomas’s house in Lower Price Hill. Thomas has lived in the neighborhood for more than fifty years and volunteers at Oyler School. “You always seem to find somebody who you can lean on and talk to,” he says of the close-knit community. Saylor grew up a block away from Oyler and was a student there. Now he teaches at the school.

Glenn Hartong

Mark Tobin, age 7, wears a University of Delaware crown. Every year Oyler devotes a day to talking about college with children from preschool through the 12th grade. Older students attend a college fair in the gym, teachers decorate their doors to represent different schools, and younger children tour the halls learning about various universities. The idea to is to build a college-going culture in a neighborhood where most of the parents never finished high school. “You have to plant that seed early,” says teacher Joe Saylor.

© 2013 American Public Media

“Oyler” is a documentary produced and directed by Amy Scott, in association with American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Glenn Hartong