Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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57 SEPTEMBER 2019 On a warm spring day, Elianna Mejia and Jeneice Nuñez greet me at the front door of their middle school wearing crisp white collared shirts and black slacks. As Esperanza Academy ambassadors, Elianna and Jeneice are preternaturally poised, confidently shaking my hand before leading me on a tour through their school. We pass small classrooms filled with just a handful of students each, who are engaged in animated discussions. We peek inside the principal's office, where a plaque reading "The Future Is Female" is perched at the edge of the desk. And we stop into Parish Hall, colorful with flags from around the world, where students gather for their daily morning meeting, study sessions, and special events. Esperanza Academy is a tuition-free, lottery-based independent middle school for girls from lower-income Lawrence families that offers a potent combination of academic rigor and nuanced social support. It runs 100 percent on philanthropy from family foundations, corporate foundations, private donors, and other supporters. At the time of our meeting, Elianna and Jeneice were just weeks away from graduating, after having spent four years in classrooms and study halls and on athletic fields with other girls from similar backgrounds—all lower income, all from Lawrence, mostly of color, and many first- or second- generation Americans. That Esperanza offers a learning space for these girls to be freely and fully themselves—and recognize themselves in their peers—is a rare and beautiful thing, say members of its faculty. "That freedom? That's what education is supposed to be," says Jadi Taveras, Esperanza's head of school. It's so rare that Taveras had never experienced it himself it until recently. He recalls a day when students were talking about the immigrant experience and laughing together about their families as they discussed the Sandra Cisneros novel The House on Mango Street. "They were talking about all the nuances and quirks of their parents. Of their moms and their aunts and their grandparents. Of these abuelas doing these funny, weird things," Taveras says. "For me, at the age of 35, it was the first time I was in a classroom where everybody can relate, where I could relate to everyone's stories about their parents. For these girls, that's happening for them in fifth grade." There's also freedom in being surrounded by only girls, says Kristina Dolce, Esperanza's lead English teacher. "When you come into our classrooms, every single person who's raising their hand is a girl—in math, in science, in English. There's a lack of fear of judgement," she says. "There's a freedom to explore ideas and issues that are scary to talk about in front of boys," from getting their period to systemic sexism. She dismisses the worry that such an environment is "un- realistic;" there are still men in their lives. "It's OK if, for four years, you have kind of an oasis to be together and explore comak bros. landscape design & construction peabody 978.535.1227 www.comakbros.com Since 1978 we have been creating outdoor living areas where the attention to detail goes beyond the clients' expectations. COMAK BROS. LANDSCAPE DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION 978.535.1227 | www.comakbros.com 41 y e a r s celebrating