Away from the diesel-scented highway, past a stretch of run-down mini-marts, a quaint little church sits on a leafy west-Akron hilltop. Chirping birds and quiet winds displace the typical urban sound-scape for daydream-esque moments. The early morning sun reflects off freshly painted Victorian homes on perpendicular streets. It is here, in the back of the Antioch Baptist Church on Wooster Road, that Edward W. Crosby’s dream is tangible. “I don’t know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and the dreams you had that night lead you to do things that you later wonder why you got into,” Crosby says, sitting comfortably in his living room in an armless chair.

His dream was to found an academy to take children beyond the bounds of public education. His dream became the Ida B. Wells Academy. “The purpose of community schools is not to emulate and copy what has already been established, but to change it,” Crosby says. “Not to change it for change’s sake, but to change it to make it better.”

In 1994, Congress passed the Improving America’s Schools Act, allowing states to create charter school laws at their discretion. Ohio adopted legislation for charter schools in 1997 but calls them community schools.

Crosby, an emeritus professor of Pan-African studies and Germanic and Slavic languages and literature, founded the academy in 1999.Charter schools are non-sectarian, publicly funded schools designed to provide educational alternatives for students. Crosby’s school caters to students whose parents feel public schools have failed to provide an adequate education. At the Ida B. Wells Community Academy, each child is taught at a level suitable to his or her own abilities. The traditional correlation between age and grade is ignored to ensure that every student is learning.

Smaller class sizes and flexible administration are supposed to foster room for educational innovation. Although funded by the state or an eligible school district, charter schools are free from many of the regulations pertaining to districts. Still, they are charged with achieving the same academic standards as public schools.

Crosby has founded academic institutions in the past. In 1969, he founded the Institute of African American Affairs at Kent State. In 1976, the institute became the department of Pan-African Studies.

“After having taught at Kent State for 25 years, I retired,” he says contemplatively. “But then I had a dream, and I woke up, and here I was going to teach elementary kids, something which I had no experience with. But I knew that some things had to change at whatever level.

“When they got to [college] age, minds had already been set, and if those minds hadn’t been set correctly in the first instance, then they’re not going to be set straight in the later instances.”

Plans for the academy began in 1998, when Crosby attended a meeting with Jean Calhoun, a Cleveland school-reform activist, and local parents disenchanted with the public school system. Crosby told the group they were taking the wrong approach by trying to change the existing school systems. He suggested they start their own school, which was now possible under Ohio’s new charter school law.

“When you have a monopoly on the educational process, then you don’t care what happens with a kid,” Crosby says. “You lose this one, there’s another one coming.

“When choice enters the question, you have to be more careful on how you get students.”

After the meeting and an information-gathering trip to Columbus, he began drafting a charter proposal and presented it to the state. That year, he also brought Perkins Pringle, a former student in his black educational development class, into the planning.

“He said to me that one of the things that he would like to do is start his own school,” Crosby recalls. “Perkins was one of the few students I had that, when I would suggest a book to read, would actually go and read it. I like that academic curiosity.”

On May 4, 1999, the proposal was accepted and a five-year charter was awarded to the Ida B. Wells Community Academy, a school named in honor of the black journalist, early equal rights advocate and founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Crosby chose to name the school after her because buildings are rarely named after African American women. 

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