How One Baltimore Principal’s Decision to Hire a Creative Poet-in-Residence Changed the Culture of Her Entire School

The morning it began was not particularly dramatic. No ribbon-cutting, no applause, no intercom announcement. A poet entered the building, found a chair by a window in a classroom that smelled slightly of old carpet and dry-erase markers, and started asking the students what they were afraid of. By the end of the week, three children who hadn’t spoken a complete sentence in class for months were penning verses that clearly disturbed their teachers.

Denise Okafor, the principal, had placed a wager. The kind that keeps a school administrator up at night wondering if she’d just spent a portion of her discretionary budget on something she couldn’t easily explain to a superintendent, rather than the kind that is documented in policy papers or mentioned at district meetings. Okafor has been the director of Frederick Douglass Preparatory in West Baltimore for six years. By October, she had seen a decline in attendance, a leveling off of classroom enthusiasm, and the fatigue of good teachers. She had attempted interventions. She had attempted data reviews. She had attempted meetings in the morning. Then she had hired a poet, almost on the spur of the moment.

The poet-in-residence program was, at the very least, unusual in a district where most discussions revolve around chronic absenteeism and standardized test performance, even though it wasn’t wholly original—a few schools across the nation have experimented with artists embedded in academic settings. It wasn’t presented by Okafor as an artistic endeavor. She presented it as a cultural issue that required human intervention. She recognized the difference.

It’s difficult to accurately measure what transpired over the next few months, which is likely why it hasn’t received the attention it merits. After class, students who had been quietly disengaged began to linger. Conversations in the hallway changed. Instructors noted that children were coming in and reading things they had written the previous evening because they wanted someone to hear them, not because they were asked to. Her English teacher described a poem written by a 10th grader who had transferred from three different schools in two years as the most impactful student work she had seen in fifteen years. The poem was about her grandmother.

The timing might have been advantageous. The burden of a city that doesn’t always make childhood easy has been borne by Baltimore’s schools for years. Many of these classrooms have grief ingrained in them, grief that standardized curricula subtly avoid and textbooks aren’t designed to address. It turns out that poetry doesn’t avoid anything. It asks the difficult question as soon as it enters the room.

Okafor understands the boundaries of what a single artist-in-residence can accomplish. She’ll tell you straight out. The structural issues remain structural. There are still funding gaps. However, as students pass through her building now, the noise has a different quality—less friction, more engagement, something that resembles a sincere commitment to being present. By the middle of the year, chronic absenteeism, which had been steadily rising for years, had significantly decreased. It’s actually unclear if that’s a correlation or a cause. However, it is difficult to ignore the timing.

Okafor realized that culture isn’t created by compliance, which is something that many education policies still find difficult to understand. Identity is the foundation of it. A student starts to realize that they belong somewhere when they see their own experience reflected back to them and treated as something worth analyzing and expressing. It turns out that a poet can accomplish that task in ways that even the most committed classroom teacher, overburdened by thirty students and five periods, can’t always accomplish on their own.

The academic year is still ongoing. It’s still unclear if this will be a recurring feature or just one noteworthy experiment. However, the poet continues to return for the time being. And the pupils continue to arrive.