PUBLIC LIVES
For Principal, New Boys' School Is a Call to Action
By LYNDA RICHARDSON, NY TIMES, September 23, 2004

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DAVID BANKS sounds like a proud father as he chats energetically about his hopes and dreams for the Eagle Academy for Young Men, the new all-boys public school in the Bronx where he is the founding principal.

"It is one little academy, but what it represents is a call to action,'' says Mr. Banks, 42, looking every bit the practicing lawyer he once was in charcoal-gray pinstripes. "At some point, somebody has to do something."

Mr. Banks knows the bleak statistics as well as anyone: that a disproportionately high number of black men in the United States cycle in and out of the criminal justice system, and that a recent study found that nearly half of black men 16 to 64 in New York City were not working last year.

"I don't know how you can be a conscious black man and not be alarmed by it,'' says Mr. Banks, pacing in his office, adorned with portraits of his heroes: Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Paul Robeson as Othello.

There are, of course, many calls to action this fall, with the opening of 60 new small public schools, including three single-sex schools. The goal is to create a more intimate learning environment that will reduce dropout rates and increase student performance.

Yet when Mr. Banks talks about a call to action, he has something more specific in mind. He says the Eagle Academy emanates from the spirit of the Million Man March in 1995. A personal reminder of that march in Washington rests on a corner table in his office.

It is a framed cover from Time magazine. Isn't that Mr. Banks and his family on the cover? The portrait was taken in 1995 outside Mr. Banks's childhood home in Cambria Heights, Queens. The Banks men were featured for an article about the march. "We, Too, Sing America," the headline reads. There is Mr. Banks; his two younger brothers, one a New York City police inspector, the other a New York City Transit supervisor; and his father, a retired police lieutenant.

Mr. Banks's face lights up when he recalls the sense of fellowship from that march. "It was almost like a big church revival, almost a spiritual movement," he says.

That brings us to today, and the Eagle Academy on East 163rd Street. Mr. Banks is a board member of One Hundred Black Men in New York, a civic group that sponsored the academy and traveled by bus to the 1995 march. The group promises to provide successful role models and mentors for each student.

"We dubbed it the Eagle Academy because of the majesty of what an eagle represents,'' he says. "The eagle doesn't flock. It soars above the clouds. We wanted our young men to see themselves as eagles, with strength, courage, vision and power. We wanted them to aspire to the highest ideals."

The high school, which opened last week with 115 ninth graders, is in a five-story red brick building that houses the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice, a high school with 575 boys and girls. Mr. Banks was also the principal of that school, founded in 1997.

The Bronx School for Law has a reputation for pushing struggling students to excel. It has a graduation rate of 80 percent, though only about 47 percent of its ninth graders come in reading at grade level, according to Insideschools.org, a nonprofit Web site that tracks public schools.

Mr. Banks says he expects the best from his students. With all those law-and-order types, his own upbringing was strict and traditional; his mother is a secretary.

A PRODUCT of the public schools, Mr. Banks dreamed of becoming a lawyer. And he did, graduating from St. John's University School of Law in 1993. But even as he studied law at night and taught at a Brooklyn school by day to earn money, he says, he had doubts about whether law was his true calling.

After law school, he worked in the torts division of the city's Law Department and then as a community affairs liaison for the state attorney general. But when an election changed the office's leadership, Mr. Banks said, he knew he was at a crossroads.

He attended three colleges simultaneously to earn enough credits in one semester to become a school administrator, and by September 1995 he was an assistant principal at Public School 191 in Crown Heights.

Mr. Banks is a Baptist and considers himself a person of deep faith. "I try to listen to God's voice, and he has led me and guided me." Every school day, Mr. Banks arrives at the Eagle Academy at 6 a.m. from Teaneck, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Marion, a public-school teacher in Newark, and their four children.

The other morning, he bounded down the building's spotless and hushed corridors. He peeped into classrooms where the boys sat in neat rows, in crisp blue shirts, dark ties and black pants. He knows all the students' names. He knows their families.

During a class break, he pulled aside one sheepish young man, whose school uniform was hidden by a hooded Old Navy sweat jacket. Mr. Banks shook his head. It would simply not do.

"He's going to need some help," Mr. Banks muttered to no one in particular.

But he remained in good spirits. "I'm beyond hopeful for the boys in this school," he said. "To fail is not an option here."