Throughout the winter and spring, teams of educators and elected officials were visiting Baltimore’s Abbottston Elementary School at Loch Raven Boulevard and Gorsuch Avenue. Something extraordinary was reported to be going on in this mostly-black school on the fringes of the inner city, and they wanted to see for themselves.
What they saw in motion was a program, two years on the drawing board, with no less a goal than insuring that every student in Baltimore’s Chapter 1 (qualifying as “low income”) elementary schools will reach the fourth grade with reading skills sufficient to have him or her reading at grade level. The program, eventually taking in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, hopes to break the cycle of school failure for disadvantaged children. Because “Success For All” has such far-reaching consequences for the Baltimore community, The Abell Foundation feels it serves the community to bring the program into public view, in an effort to indicate what it is and what it is not, and what can and cannot be expected of it.