It started as a peer-tutorial project designed to help city high-school students pass standardized tests, but over the past year the Baltimore Algebra Project has taken on a new mission that goes beyond textbook problems. As part of a continued effort to force the state Board of Education and the city schools Board of Commissioners to pay into the Baltimore City Public School System millions of dollars as ordered by a federal judge this summer, the Algebra Project has grown into an organized student-activist group composed of teen members willing to directly challenge the adults in charge of education in the city.

At an Oct. 26 meeting of the state Board of Education, for example, members of the Algebra Project attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of state Superintendent of Schools Nancy Grasmick. At the meeting, several students from the group signed up to speak for the three-minute slots allotted during the School Board’s regular open forum. Citing an Aug. 20 court ruling by Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Joseph H.H. Kaplan, which ordered the state and city school boards to provide $30 million to $45 million in additional funding to Baltimore’s public schools, the students aggressively aired their grievances with the state, which has yet to comply with the court order.

“I am the face of the budget cuts and cost containment,” said Lorne Francis, a 17-year-old from Baltimore City College and advocacy co-chair for the Algebra Project. Francis called the board members “masochists,” “political prostitutes,” and his “worst enemy.” The meeting became heated when he singled out Grasmick for her culpability in the city schools’ recent fiscal crisis, which was revealed in late 2003 when the district realized it was facing a $58 million deficit. During the meeting, Francis tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Grasmick for “two counts of failure to obey a court order and 85,000 counts of reckless endangerment” for each of the children affected by the city schools crisis.

Francis’ arrest effort was thwarted by a swift adjournment of the meeting and the absence of law-enforcement officials to perform the arrest. Members of the Algebra Project say they thought there was a police officer present at every meeting of the state Board of Education and suggest that officials purposely did not have one present Oct. 26.

“Apparently, the School Board members had got word of it ahead of time and sent the state trooper away,” Francis said later.

The state Department of Education adamantly refutes this students’ allegation. Spokesman Bill Reinhard says that there “have been occasions where a state trooper is present when we are expecting a big crowd, but it’s not at all the norm.” The meeting was adjourned, he says, “when students refused to stop talking at the end of their allotted time.” He adds that “[the students] were making objectionable comments, and it was actually insulting.”

Though the arrest attempt was unsuccessful, the stunt did get the Algebra Project some attention, and it has since become known as an outspoken, if radical, student organization.

The Baltimore Algebra Project is the Charm City chapter of the national education project by the same name. Based in Massachusetts, the Algebra Project is the brainchild of Bob Moses, a 1960s-era civil-rights leader who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi and was an organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Troubled by the discrepancies on standardized math test results between urban and suburban communities and the short supply of math help in his children’s Cambridge, Mass., school, Moses began training high-school students to tutor their younger counterparts. What began as a local initiative to help city students soon blossomed into an expansive program thriving in urban neighborhoods nationwide. The Algebra Project now engages thousands of students across the country as tutors and mentors. Though they are given support and guidance by an adviser who is in most cases a school staff member, the day-to-day operation of the program is left to the students.

“The Algebra Project in all of its works seeks to establish a floor of mathematics literacy as the foundation for an excellent education, which is a necessary resource for a responsible citizen,” says Ben Moynihan, the Algebra Project’s national coordinator.

The Baltimore Algebra Project was started in 1994 as an initiative to help Stadium School students bring up their scores on standardized tests. The program grew quickly and now has about 50 tutors, most from City College, who tutor more than 100 students at different locations around the city.

But the thing that’s brought the Baltimore Algebra Project the most attention is the community advocacy many of its student members are involved in. For example, in April, Judge Kaplan invited a member of the group to attend and comment during a closed conference about city schools funding. Earlier this year, the group mobilized 600 students to take part in a school strike to demand accountability and a resolution to the school district’s fiscal crisis.

“I think in some ways the situation in Baltimore is unique in the way that young people have organized themselves and persisted,” Moynihan says from the Algebra Project’s national office regarding the local group’s activist bent. “I applaud these students for demonstrating their own initiative and demand for quality education in both the classroom and community.”

But the local group’s crusade didn’t start out districtwide—rather, the Baltimore Algebra Project needed to keep itself afloat. When the group started, it was funded primarily through grants and donations, but it quickly outgrew its funding sources. The increased demand for tutoring services meant more books, papers, supplies, and tutors (all of whom are paid $10 per hour for their work). To finance the growing program, the Algebra Project approached the Baltimore School Board to ask for financial support, and the board estimated that it could grant $200,000 in assistance in December 2002, members of the Algebra Project say.

But that assistance never came through for the group.

“They didn’t give us a reason but cut us down to $100,000, then $80,000, so we looked into it and became cognizant of this fiscal crisis,” says 16-year-old City College junior Chantel Morant, the Algebra Project’s historian and co-chair of its advocacy committee. “We knew it was something we had to be involved in making people aware of.”

Despite the Aug. 20 court order, neither the state nor the city school board has provided the additional funding needed to prop up the city school district. In fact, both boards filed stays with the court in November protesting the ruling—both say they have provided the school district with as much funding as they could afford. (The case is scheduled to go before the Maryland Court of Appeals.) The students of the Baltimore Algebra Project say they are frustrated by the stagnation, so they are protesting to draw attention to the school district’s plight. They are aiming their attention fully on what they believe to be their most likely avenue for additional schools funding: the state.

“The city can’t do anything,” Morant says. “They’re exhausted. [The state of Maryland is] just beating around the bush, and the students are still suffering. . . . We decided that it would be wise to keep going to School Board meetings till they listen to what we have to say.”

The group is now likely to focus on democratizing the state School Board, which is currently appointed by the governor, so that voters can hold its members accountable for their decisions. The students say they think the fight over funding for Baltimore schools is more than just a money issue—they say it’s a new chapter in the civil-rights movement and draw inspiration from Algebra Project founder Moses’ background in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“The fight in the’60s was to get rights,” Francis says. “And the fight right now is to use those rights to help the minority community.”

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