Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women graduates first class

by Erica L Green
published in Baltimore Sun

Seven years ago 120 girls bedecked in purple polo shirts and plaid skirts walked into an experiment — a Baltimore public school modeled on those originally designed for affluent white girls whose families could afford to send them to "finishing school."

On Friday, half of those girls, all but one of them African-American and most from working-class families, will don white robes to make history as the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, the city's first all-female, public middle-high school.

The 60 graduates, all of whom are going to college, embody the fulfillment of a dream that there could be a school where girls from across the city could come together and "transform Baltimore one young woman at a time."

The motto represents the mission of Brenda Brown Rever, a local philanthropist who founded the public charter school in 2009 with the help of a board of directors that now includes such prominent figures as Carla Hayden, CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, who is set to become librarian of Congress....

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