Sometimes it takes an outsider to appreciate and communicate the truth about an institution in your own back yard. That was arguably the case for Walnut Hills High School, the grand Cincinnati public school with a copper dome, pillars representing the three classical styles, and Rookwood reliefs encircling a library bursting with more than 22,000 books. The compelling outside endorsement came in the spring of 2006 when Newsweek magazine tweaked the parameters used to determine its top 100 public high schools in America for the first time, allowing schools with an entrance requirement into the running. The door thus opened, Walnut Hills easily marched into the top 100 by virtue of the large number of its students who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams. Suddenly, the six-year college preparatory school described by retiring principal Marvin Koenig as “a well-hidden secret for many people in the Cincinnati area,” was being celebrated in the cover story of a national magazine. The achievements intimately known by Cincinnati’s intelligentsia and the school’s Alumni Foundation – with chapters in seven cities, including Los Angeles and New York – were now spelled out for the entire Cincinnati community to see.

The top 100 Newsweek ranking (No. 65 to be exact) was “a windfall for the school,” said incoming principal Jeffrey Brokamp. “It was an objective, external evaluation free of charge. It was very valid, very appropriate, very timely. It has opened people’s eyes to the fact that this place is real.”

But it did not resolve one of Walnut’s essential and enduring challenges: that of remaining excellent and exclusive within a large public school system that, while clearly appreciative, has tended to interpret Walnut’s academic affluence as excessive, if not unfair. The result is that, like a gifted child in a troubled classroom, Walnut Hills has always been at risk of being compromised by the system’s inevitable need to focus on its neediest and most underperforming students. Time and time again the school has faced efforts to depreciate its ability to adhere to its historic motto – sursum ad summum – Latin for rise to the highest. And time and again it has rallied to meet these challenges with creativity and passion.

Indeed, the fame spawned by Newsweek was not enough to ward off yet another threat to the school’s stature. In November 2006, Cincinnati Public Schools Superintendent Rosa Blackwell, faced with decreasing attendance within the district, proposed across-the-board cuts in the enrollment-based budget, and Walnut Hills, a school of 1,853 students in 2006-2007, was told it could expect a budget based on only 1,450 students for the 2007-2008 school year. Such a drop in size would have, in turn, precipitated a drop in the number of AP offerings (28) that had helped thrust the school into the national limelight.

The school’s staff, parents and Alumni Foundation responded swiftly and surely out of fear that the reduction would decimate the school’s academic values. “Diminish the AP offerings, and you take the blood lifeline from the school,” said Corky Steiner, an active member of the Alumni Foundation. In addition to voicing their concerns, parent advocates, staff and the foundation responded with a strategy out of the playbook of highly competitive businesses and colleges: they actively recruited students who had passed the entrance exam and were now candidates for enrollment. In so doing Walnut snared entrance commitments from dozens of students, who in previous years, may have opted for private, parochial or other public schools. In May 2007, as if on cue, Newsweek produced its annual rankings, with Walnut Hills ranked 34th nationally and No. 1 in Ohio. In July, with the school board having backed away from slashing Walnut’s student population and now agreeing to fund 1,850 students, Koenig confirmed that the school was anticipating an even higher enrollment of 2,000.

Balancing Act

The selection of Walnut Hills’s new principal, Jeffrey Brokamp, a veteran CPS principal, former CPS assistant superintendent and graduate of Walnut Hills, was made against the backdrop of the school’s historic balancing act with CPS leadership. In his own words, Brokamp is one who is intimately acquainted with Walnut’s uniqueness in the larger community while understanding that “every school community wants good things” for their school.

“There’s a lot of tension, and stress, involved in being a part of an urban school system,” Brokamp said. “We have this incredible school. But anyone who is working at Walnut Hills and thinks he cannot become embroiled in the tension the school district feels is kidding himself. You have to get in there, carry the torch for the school; beat the drum for the school. At the same time, part of the stress coming from a big system has to be balanced with the fact that we benefit from being part of a big system: that’s where our kids come from.”

What Walnut gives back to the city is a model of diversity, an environment where every child, no matter his or her race, ethnicity or household income, has a chance for success and upward mobility. “In this particular community we tend to divide our conversation about kids,” Brokamp said. “There are obvious cultural and racial tensions in Cincinnati, which are getting to a better place, but have been obvious for a long time. Walnut Hills erases those delineations of how we categorize people in Cincinnati — suburban vs. urban — because kids are from every place. We draw a lot of kids from private and parochial schools, and we have kids right out of the poorest neighborhoods. So, what Walnut Hills is to the city is the great equalizer. Walnut Hills erases those lines that Cincinnati is so good at creating for whatever reason. That’s the beauty of this school. When kids walk the hall, it’s not about where you live or how much money your parents make. Those lines disappear.”

The school also churns out leaders. “There are some high schools that are known in the city not just for providing city leadership but national leadership,” said Cincinnati School Board member Melanie Bates, whose three children graduated from Walnut Hills. “Walnut is known on a national level for being able to produce leaders on a national level. And that isn’t just a jewel in the crown in the Cincinnati Public Schools, it’s a jewel in the crown in the city to be able to support this kind of education.”

Exposing the Myth

One of the myths about Walnut Hills is that only gifted students gain entry. This is false. Walnut’s legendary diversity extends to scholarly achievement as well. The actual spread of academic abilities is the 70th through 99th percentile. The admissions test for incoming 7th-graders is a grade-level test, and every student performing at grade level theoretically should pass. “All we want are kids who are at least at grade level, and we’ll take them on from there,” said Koenig. The fact that only 15 percent of CPS students who take the Walnut entrance exam pass the test points not to the exclusivity of Walnut Hills, but rather to the failure of the Greater Cincinnati community to ensure that the vast majority of urban children receive a fundamental elementary education.

Teaching Responsibility

Admission to Walnut Hills, regrettably, does not guarantee success. Not all seventh-grade children are ready for high school. Not all will flourish in large classrooms that offer little time for hand-holding. Some will lack the family support to help them through difficult times; others will lack motivation and desire. As Sharon Draper, the former Walnut Hills language arts teacher who was the National Teacher of the Year, memorably put it many years ago: “Walnut Hills is not for those who can’t remember where their math book is, where their homework folder is, whether they did their homework, or whether they had homework.”

“Every kid attending Walnut Hills has the talent to go to Walnut Hills,” said Ray Brokamp, a former Walnut Hills principal and CPS superintendent and the father of incoming principal Jeffrey Brokamp. “But that doesn’t mean they will make it through. Some will not respond to the opportunity. But there is no child who’s admitted who is not college-capable.”

If academic excellence is the heart of Walnut Hills, then the diverse and eclectic population is its soul. “The school is welcoming to young people of all distinctions,” Koenig said.

“I think our students are prepared for life, and not just academically,” said Deborah Heldman, executive director of the Walnut Hills Alumni Foundation. “Something you have to learn is how to get along with all kinds of people. People take that away from Walnut, and sometimes when they go to college it’s like going back in time. Diversity isn’t a word here. We live it; we don’t talk about it. A lot of people will want to talk about having this percentage of this, this percentage of that. Our alumni don’t look at it that way. Certainly students don’t. When my daughter Heather went to college, there was a Korean Union, a Chinese Union. They would call that diversity, and she called it a setback.”

The uniqueness of Walnut Hills was reinforced for Jason Stuckey, president of the student congress during his senior year in 2006, when he matriculated to Johnson C. Smith University, a historically all-African-American college. “Most of the students I talk to they say their school was one way or the other – either majority African-American or majority white,” Stuckey said.

Embracing Diversity

Walnut’s student body is roughly 55 percent female, 45 percent male and 35 percent African-American and 4 percent other minority. It also includes about 100 students who are following individual education plans. Historically, the attrition rate has been highest among African-American males. But the school has made strides in rectifying that through increased tutoring and mentoring, curbing the attrition rate from seventh to eighth grade from 20 percent prior to Koenig’s arrival in 1992 to less than 10 percent today.

“We still have work to do,” Heldman said. “But I think we’re doing better as a school. If you can get in the door, we want you to graduate. We are a college machine. We get national awards for graduating African-American males. But I can’t make a family understand that [education is] the only way out. I can’t make the whole culture understand that.”

Sending an 11- or 12-year-old child into a multi-ethnic school of 1,800 students clearly gives some parents pause. It is indeed a leap, yet one that a few hundred students make successfully every year. Significantly, those most intimately connected with the system have resisted any effort to change it. “A 7-through-12 school,” Koenig said, “is the ideal arrangement in working with adolescents, the ideal setup.”

Ray Brokamp fondly recalls the first day of the school year and the arrival of seventh-graders, who earned the nickname “Effies” generations ago when classes were identified in alphabetic rank (A for seniors, B for juniors, and so on, down to F for seventh-graders). “That was a very interesting moment in that these youngsters came from environments that were much, much smaller and suddenly there they were,” Brokamp said. “And their eyes were wide open, so they needed a lot of TLC and assurances that life is good. And so the staff, counselors and teachers all were very attentive to those precious moments. I reflect on that with real pleasure and positive feelings. By the time the first week was over they were functioning like seniors. They had arrived.”

National Influences and Guardian Angels

Ray Brokamp was principal in 1970 when the Board of Education made an effort to eliminate the junior high portion (grades 7 through 9) of the Walnut Hills program. “The theory was that these bright youngsters should be distributed across the schools of the district,” Ray Brokamp said. The board scheduled hearings, and so many people requested an opportunity to speak that the hearings were moved to a larger venue and two dates had to be set. “The number of people who wanted to speak were almost entirely Walnut Hills advocates,”Ray Brokamp said. “People came from various parts of the country to make sure their voice was heard. At the end of second night, the board voted, 7-0, to continue the school as 7 through 12 school.”

If the school has a guardian angel, it is surely the Alumni Foundation. Koenig points with pride to the establishment of an independent foundation during the school’s centennial in 1995, three years after his arrival from Chapel Hill, N.C. “It guarantees the existence of this quality of school,” he said.

In 1999, Walnut Hills celebrated a historic $20 million capital campaign – an event unprecedented in public education in the United States – with the opening of a $13 million arts and science building and a renovation of the school’s auditorium. Other projects are in the works, Heldman said. The Jewish community has been especially generous to Walnut Hills, although donors come from all walks of life. Four individual donors have given or pledged at least $1 million.

Still, the Walnut Hills leaders agree that the Alumni Foundation must remain vigilant. Koenig, his official retirement less than two weeks away, sat in his office going over worst-case scenarios of overcrowded classrooms were the school to be funded below its needs this fall. Because of the wide range of academic abilities at Walnut Hills, class size, teaching assistants and laboratories all matter. “Every one of our admitted students is capable of doing college preparatory work if they’re willing to do that and if we don’t overburden the classes with numbers,” Koenig said. “We literally have classes of 28, 29, 30, 32, 33 right now.”

Meeting Needs

This numbers game leads, eventually, to a truth that every parent understands: all children, whether they are gifted, ordinary, successful or troublesome, have needs. A talented, anxious child from a middle-class, two-parent family may be just as needy as an obstreperous child from an impoverished home. “Just because students are capable of doing well doesn’t mean they are automatically the ‘haves’ and don’t have needs,” Koenig said. “Just because they have brainpower doesn’t mean they don’t have needs.”

That is, perhaps, one of the more subtle lessons of diversity, and one that Walnut Hills will, and must, continue to teach.

Walnut Hills High school…The Great Achiever, The Great Equalizer | By Cindy Starr

Walnut Hills at a Glance

• Founded 1895;
current building opened in 1931

• Student population: 1,853 in 2007

• Diversity: 55 percent female,

44 percent minority,
36 percent African-American

• Out-of-district students paying

$5,000 to $6,000 in tuition: 50-75

• Advanced Placement courses: 28

• Advanced Placement success:
82 percent scored a 3, 4 or 5

on 1,300 AP exams taken in 2006;

nationally, 62 percent score a 3, 4 or 5

• Honors program: 7th and 8th grade classes

• Faculty: 100 percent have a master’s

degree or equivalent, or above

• Colleges: 100+ visit every spring

• Athletic teams: 50+

• Extracurricular activities: 50+

2007 Graduating Class

• 100 percent passed state proficiency tests

• 19 National Merit semifinalists

and 21 commended students

• $16.5 million in scholarship offers

• College acceptance sampler:
Brown University,

Case Western University,

University of Chicago,

Columbia University,

Harvard University,

Kenyon College,

University of Pennsylvania,

Tufts University,

Washington University

• Students planning to attend area colleges:

University of Cincinnati (82),

Ohio State University (19),

Northern Kentucky University (9),

Xavier University (8),

Miami University (6)

Notable Alumni

• 1897, C. Miller Huggins,

Coach of New York Yankees,

Baseball Hall of Fame (’64)

• ’45, Willis Gradison,

Former U.S. Congressman

• ’48, Tony Trabert, Wimbledon & United

States tennis champion

• ’50, Stanley Aronoff,

former President of the Ohio State Senate

• ’54, Stanley Chesley, class-action attorney

• ’60, Stanley Prusiner, M.D.,

Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, ‘97

• ’61, James Levine, Artistic Director,

Metropolitan Opera

• ’64, Richard Steiner, Broadway producer

& Tony Award winner

• ’74, Elisabeth Bumiller, White House Chief

Correspondent, The New York Times

A Personal Perspective | By Cindy Starr

OK, I admit I’m biased about Walnut Hills High School. Both of our children graduated from Walnut (’04 and ’07). I coached the boys’ varsity tennis team last spring. But my biases run both ways. While this is one incredible school, it is also one tough school.

Walnut Hills, boiled down, is two things: a meritocracy and a melting pot. Walk in the front entrance and the first thing you will see is the honor board, where your child’s academic status rises and falls for all to see. Walk through the teaming halls and you are unlikely to see anyone who looks or dresses like yourself. Students graduate from Walnut prepared for college, steeled for a competitive world, intellectually capable of making life better, and intuitively able to get along with all kinds of people. This is all you need to know to say yes to Walnut.

Within that context, every parent’s story will be unique. Furthermore, every parent’s story about every child within the family will be different.

Our daughter ran with the AP (Advanced Placement) crowd, a group of about 40 students who led the academic pack. She studied relentlessly, enjoyed fabulous teachers (including the remarkable Dr. Rosanne Gulino), developed a handful of close friends, and kept her very real needs to herself. She rebelled against the AP vortex, even as she was swept into it. She once wrote an essay entitled, “To AP or not to AP?” Go the AP route – with three, four and even five AP classes a year — and you boost your rank, maximize your chances of going to a prestigious college, and attend every class with the same academic elites. Pass up an AP for a regular class, however, and you enter a conversation with musicians, artists, activists and survivors — the real diversity that Walnut offers. When her class rank dropped during her senior year, she heard about it from an acquaintance of another student who, obsessed with such things, had figured it out and was letting the AP crowd know.

Our second child, more extroverted and less ambiguous, studied less and enjoyed his life. He had many friends. There were athletic friends, musical friends, tech-savvy friends, poker-playing friends. He met some of his best friends the first week as a result of a child-friendly scheduling process that clusters seventh graders in smaller groups and keeps them together in three core classes.

Melanie Bates, a Cincinnati School Board member, said that after the death of her husband, Phil, her college-aged son turned to his friends from Walnut Hills. That is consistent with a comment from former principal Ray Brokamp, who noted: “In many cases Walnut graduates are closer to high school friends than their college friends. When they get back to Cincinnati, in many cases they gravitate back to their high school friends. In our own family, that was the case. My son [Jeffrey] married a Walnut Hills girl. It’s not unusual. They’re together for six years; they endure a lot; those friendships are very deep and lasting.”

I have heard people worry about sending a boy to Walnut Hills. Walnut is an amazing school for boys. The roster of male teachers deserves to be enshrined in a Hall of Fame. Mr. Ken Williams, Mr. Brian Sweeney, Mr. Donald Stocker, Mr. Ferd Schneider, Mr. Marc Raia, Mr. Jim Martin, Mr. Jeff Lazar, Mr. Naseer Chughtai, Mr. John Caliguri: we will appreciate you forever.

Walnut Hills is stricter than your typical private school, and failure is a very real fact of life. You break the rules, you pay the price. You fail to study, you fail. Neither family name, nor status, nor the fact that you had three tests today and a school-related commitment in Dayton the afternoon before will save you.

Financial shortcomings are real. Some of the equipment in the engineering class this year was broken. The nurse’s office is not open every bell. One of our children had four different tennis coaches in four years. And I will I never forget the photocopied, 40-page summer AP reading assignment that was virtually illegible. Having entered type-B mode with child No. 2, I agreed that this was an omen and we should bag the class.

But these are minor complaints in the big picture. And if you have a complaint at Walnut, you do one of four things: speak up, donate, volunteer, or coach. Bottom line, do I recommend Walnut Hills to others? Probably, mostly, and absolutely.