"D-D-C-D-D-F."

Geri Evans ticks off the grades, her voice like chalk tapping a blackboard as she tallies the sad trajectory of Orange Center Elementary School’s standardized test scores over the years. But there’s a delightful recent coda to the string: "A."

The school, a haven of hope in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Orlando, Fla., USA, is being transformed, through measures small and quite tall – the nurturing of Rotarians, the creativity of a new principal, and some big love from the 6-foot-11 star center of the Orlando Magic basketball team, Dwight Howard.

Evans, a member of the Rotary Club of Orlando Breakfast, describes the club’s involvement as a story of persistence. The club has been working with the school for six years, and in each of the past two years has undertaken nearly 30 projects there, spending up to $45,000 a year.

The club’s impact extends well beyond renovating a library and filling it with award-winning books, trimming shrubs and planting hibiscus, tutoring and mentoring, and funding staff-recognition events. The Rotarians dispense nourishment for body and mind, clothing children and their family members, donating toiletries and hygiene items, and keeping the nurse’s room stocked with juice and crackers, among other things.

“We try to call ourselves the parent-teacher association of the school,” says club president Asima Azam, who’s also vice president of the real PTA. “We do everything except academics. We go and volunteer to provide snacks, we sponsor the field trips.”

Adds Dennis Veccia, a past club president: “We give them supplies and clothing and so forth so [the children] can come to school and not be embarrassed.” 

Principal Ginny Truslow Kennerly couldn’t be more effusive in her appreciation of the Rotarians’ efforts. “They’re angels looking over us,” Kennerly says. “They donated money to the media center. It was a pretty deplorable place.”

A former administrator at a largely Hispanic, middle-class school in Orlando, Kennerly concedes that she was devastated when she learned of her reassignment to Orange Center in 2007. “I said no, not that school,” she says. “It was a place I thought I would never go. It was the lowest in everything on the state test. It was an F-rated school and it looked like an F-rated school. It smelled bad.”

The Orange County School Board recognized the Rotary club’s efforts in 2007, the same year the Association of Fundraising Professionals cited Orlando Breakfast as the most outstanding service organization in a seven-county area.

Its literacy efforts are routinely cited as a model in District 6980, a testament to the club’s willingness to embrace a cause in an area unseen by the tourists traveling along Interstate 4 from Walt Disney World to downtown Orlando.

Orange Center’s neighborhood, known as Lake Sunset, is a case study in neglect, where 43 percent of residents live below the poverty level, compared with about 16 percent for Orlando as a whole. Some 27 percent of the households in Lake Sunset, which is about 90 percent African-American, are headed by single parents. Even with a recent revitalization push in nearby neighborhoods – including Holden/Parramore, home to the Orlando Magic’s new arena – the occasional pioneering gentrifier family sends their children to private schools.

In the middle of it all is a school that serves more than 300 students from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, 99 percent of whom are black (many are of Haitian Creole descent) and a handful of Hispanic students. They live in a public housing complex across the street and are clearly affected by the distress around them, say the Rotarians, whose initial focus was to furnish the youngsters with an escape.

In 2002, the club took members of the school’s Cub Scout troop to the Kennedy Space Center, about 50 miles away. “When they got back onto the bus, we gave them a book on space that they just treasured because many of them did not own a book,” says Evans. “Then we invited the boys to come and share some of their experiences at one of our meetings, where they stood up and spoke. . . . We could see they needed help,” academically and financially.

Veccia describes the situation in blunter terms: “The kids really couldn’t read.” But rather than shaking their heads and bemoaning illiteracy and the sorry state of the educational system, the Rotarians mobilized, ultimately deciding to adopt the school as the club’s Rotary centennial project. That new sense of purpose has galvanized club membership, which has more than doubled to about 50 in the past few years.

Ongoing financial support for field trips – to historic St. Augustine, Fla., about 110 miles away, and to a local production of “The Nutcracker,” Shakespeare plays, and other cultural events – has yielded dividends, says Evans.

“One of the prompts [on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test] two years ago was to describe a field trip you have taken,” Evans says. “Before Rotary was involved, children couldn’t do that. Most of our children had never seen the ocean. Most of them had never traveled outside their neighborhood.

“It isn’t that they can’t write, it’s that they have no frame of reference,” she adds. “When we provide those experiences, we enrich their minds and their lives.”

While Lake Sunset’s malaise frustrates some, the club is energized by the challenge, says Azam. “[We] community members have a job in this community, and that is to take care of this school.”

To prompt greater parental participation in the children’s education, the club contributes food for family events and has created a Parent Pride program, rewarding attendance at meetings with points redeemable for chances at gift cards. “A lot of people think these are parents that are irresponsible or disinterested,” says Azam. “But really, some of them have four kids and they’re trying to hold three jobs to get by.”

Azam, who assists with self-esteem mentoring at Orange Center, says of the young students, “When you consistently tell them, ‘You can go to college. You are beautiful,’ you can see the confidence in their faces.”

A Rotarian-led chess club is a literal example of the club’s hands-on approach to changing attitudes. “Seeing [the student players’] excitement when they see they’ve got me on the ropes is a great experience,” says club member A.J. Spencer, who prefers to engage pupils with “something that pertains to the mind, not sports.”

“It impressed me that so many successful men and women in business would be so heavily involved with the school,” Spencer adds. “Being a young African-American male, it surprised me. It’s a ray of hope, and it’s motivating.”

In addition to games, mentoring, and the legendary supply closet – “now more like a room” and replenished weekly, notes Kennerly – the Rotarians have pitched in as cheerleaders when the students take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

“Because there was such intense instruction, there was not a wasted minute,” Evans recalls. “One of the things we could provide was relief” in the form of ice cream socials, the reading of Dr. Seuss stories, gifts of chocolate and mint chewing gum (to “ease anxiety,” Kennerly says). 

The testing, which extends over several weeks, is rough on the children, says Kennerly, who, after one year at the helm of Orange Center, is sought out by other educators eager to learn the secrets underlying her success. She chuckles at Hollywood’s portrayals of principals-turned-turnaround artists. “What was that movie where the principal in New York City walks the hallways with a baseball bat?” Kennerly says, laughing at that version of the “tough love” approach – although she has her own.

“I had to change what I did when I got here,” Kennerly says. “We teach bell-to-bell. We began to look at who didn’t succeed and [to ask teachers], What are you going to do about it? I’m not taking any prisoners.”

Kennerly brought in a new reading curriculum and put more children on computers to work at their proper grade levels. She also eliminated substitute teachers, distributing students to other classrooms when their teacher is absent – and spending the money instead on twice-weekly tutoring. “I was never tough before. But it’s my job,” she says. “We can’t lose children.”

Kennerly is also unafraid to tell the community exactly what Orange Center needs, as Linda Landman-Gonzalez, vice president of community relations and government affairs for the Orlando Magic, attests.

Landman-Gonzalez met Kennerly at a luncheon for a program that promotes the arts in schools. “I asked, ‘How can the Orlando Magic help you with the arts programs? How can we support you?’ She said, ‘We don’t have an arts program. Most of my children don’t have shoes.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Let’s see what we can do.’ ”

Landman-Gonzalez enlisted Dwight Howard, the team’s franchise player. “He very quickly agreed to it,” says Landman-Gonzales, of the decision by Howard, and his sponsor, Adidas, to provide athletic shoes to every student. Evans scrambled to find shoe-size mats and helped school staffers measure feet. Rotarians donated socks to go with the shoes, which were presented during a school assembly.

Wearing a paper crown that emphasized his towering height, Howard hugged the children as he handed out the shoes. The kids were dazzled, but Howard said he was the one most impressed. “The teachers are very proud of you guys. So am I,” he told them.

Howard, who was fresh from winning the slam-dunk contest during the NBA All-Star Game festivities at the time of his school appearance, says: “I love giving back to the community and giving my time and effort. It’s the best way to show people how I care about the community.”

Landman-Gonzalez recalls that Howard asked the assembled students whether they’d seen the slam-dunk show, telling them: “I’ve been practicing that for years. Just like Dr. Kennerly says, you can’t be an ‘A’ unless you work hard at it.”

Kennerly says the pressure to repeat the school’s “A” performance is stressful.  “People are saying it must have been a fluke,” she says. “Our teachers are feeling that pressure. I am too.”

With help from friends, though, she’s confident they can pull it off. Continuing the shoes motif, Kennerly recalls a parable about Gandhi dropping a sandal while boarding a train, then throwing the remaining one to a beggar below, “so the man could have a pair,” she says. “We are a pair,” Kennerly says of the Rotary-Orange Center connection. “[Rotary is] one of the shoes, and we are the other.”

Rotarian Evans clearly agrees: “There are still a number of children who need help, but we’re on the right path. We want to be on the journey with them.” With peppermint gum and chocolate in hand.

Brad Webber is a freelance writer based in Chicago.