By Lynn Conlee
The road to Freedom Preparatory Academy is rough. Abandoned buildings, a decrepit drive-in movie theater, and boarded up houses, sporadically interrupted by still-vibrant shopping centers and fast-food joints, line Highway 61 South. But on a residential street just to the west of the highway, tidy ranch houses with manicured lawns ring a brick school building with gleaming orange and blue doors that bear Freedom Prep’s logo—a bird in flight, a fitting symbol for the five-year-old charter school where the freedom to soar academically awaits each student.
Founded in 2009 by Roblin Webb ’99, Freedom Prep Charter Schools has grown from one location with 100 sixth-grade students at its start to more than 600 students on three separate campuses enrolled in kindergarten, first grade, and grades six through 10. By 2016, the college preparatory school network will offer grades kindergarten through 12 and graduate its first class.
“I saw education as a way to create an even playing field,” Webb recalls. “In Memphis, only 20 percent of adults have a college degree. In this area (the Westwood neighborhood where Freedom Prep is located), it’s only 10 percent. Both of my parents attended college. There was never any question for me, but that’s not the case for these kids. Our goal is to triple the number of college graduates in our neighborhood (from 10 percent to 30 percent).”
To assist Webb in running the school, six Rhodes alumni hold various positions, including Nora Boone ’99, the director of marketing and communications. Working in the classrooms are Jamesah Hayes ’11, eighth-grade social studies teacher and eighth-grade chair; Aubrey Diaz Nelson ’08, assistant head of school; Lars Nelson ’09, chief instruction officer; Phat Ho ’14, kindergarten teacher; and Tamra Patterson ’01, theater teacher.
Along with around 40 other teachers, the Rhodes alumni lead a student body that has reversed the achievement gap in both biology and English I and has seen its ninth-graders outperform both Shelby County Schools and the state’s public schools in biology (by 39 points and 23 points, respectively). Freedom Prep is the top performing public school in the entire state of Tennessee for reading and language arts growth and the top performing public middle school in the Whitehaven/Westwood area.
Both Webb and Boone point to the liberal arts education they received at Rhodes as the linchpin of any success they have had at Freedom Prep. And both say that the broad range of disciplines to which they were exposed has equipped them to handle the equally broad set of challenges at the charter school.
“Rhodes prepared us with a liberal arts background in ways that encourage you to look at things differently, so that maybe we look at the traditional ways of teaching in different ways, too,” says Boone.
Just north of the school on Highway 61, the road is closed where a gleaming new bridge undergoes construction. For students in the blighted area that feeds Freedom Prep, the schools function as a different kind of bridge, one that will connect them to knowledge, confidence, and aspiration. And to the new “law” that Roblin Webb practices: the one that says they can—and will—attend college.