E.K. Powe Elementary School is housed in a stately brick building on Ninth Street a quarter of a mile from East Campus.
But despite the school's affluent environs-its neighbors include fashionable restaurants and upscale apartments-virtually no Duke faculty and administrators send their children there.
"If you want to find Duke professors' children, look in Chapel Hill," said Powe principal Cheryl Fuller, who previously headed Chapel Hill's Ephesus Elementary School. "I had many more there than I do here."
Dissatisfied with Durham's underperforming public education system, many faculty and professional employees send their children to private academies or move to Chapel Hill to enroll them in top public schools.
"The problem for parents is that you may want to support the public sector in principle, but you want your children to go to the best schools," said Professor Emeritus of Biology Peter Klopfer.
"Some of my colleagues don't want their children to go to a school that doesn't have adequate mathematics instruction, even though they want to support the public schools," he added.
Powe's principal said racial considerations also might have an effect.
"You have a faculty that is mostly white, so I think that plays a part in it," Fuller said. "I think race plays a part in a lot more issues than people are willing to talk about."
She said the student body at Powe is about 80 percent African-American, 15 percent Hispanic and five percent white. Less than two-thirds of Powe students read at grade level, and the school underperforms in comparison to state and district averages.
Freshman Nate Jones, the son of Divinity School Dean Greg Jones, attended East Chapel Hill High School. He said the school benefited from well-paid teachers and the "gene pool" of a student body largely composed of professors' children. "If you have money and you want your kid to go to a good school, you either go to East Chapel Hill High or a private school," Jones said. "I bet the two [public] high schools in Chapel Hill have more sum intelligence combined than the eight in Durham."
He estimated that, at any given time, 50 students at ECHHS have parents who are Duke employees.
"Last year in a class of 25 students, I had six people whose parents work at Duke," Jones added.
In contrast, Fuller estimated that only seven children at Powe have college-educated parents working at Duke.
The children of Kenneth Reckhow, professor of water resources at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, spent their entire academic careers in the Durham public school system. They graduated from Riverside High School, and both matriculated at Harvard University as undergraduates. "I think the Durham public schools get a bad rap," Reckhow said. "Aside from a lot of dollars every year, I think [private school students] are missing the occasional opportunities that kids in the public schools have to meet kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds."
Reckhow added that most of his colleagues send their children to private schools.
Officials at Carolina Friends School and Durham Academy, both local private institutions, said children with at least one parent working at Duke make up 15 and 20 percent of their respective student bodies.
Klopfer helped found CFS shortly after moving to Durham in 1958. He said he was horrified by Durham's segregated schools and hoped CFS would prove integrated education could work in the South.
Klopfer added that since his children graduated in the mid-70s, white flight to independent schools like CFS has ironically caused de facto segregation.
Freshman Marion Kennedy, the daughter of Senior Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy, spent her academic career before Duke at Durham Academy, which has an annual tuition of $16,025.
"A private school was definitely a better option for my personality," Kennedy said. "My largest class in high school was 21 students. I think if I hadn't gotten into DA it might have been a better option to move to Chapel Hill."
Kennedy's father said the family chose Durham Academy for both Marion and her brother Joseph Kennedy, Trinity '05, because of the personalized education the school offers.
"There's absolutely nothing wrong, from my point of view, with public schools in south Durham," he added. "There's no question you could go to Jordan High School and get a very good education."
Some Jordan graduates, however, said the school suffers from a pervasive gang problem.
The woes of Powe and other Durham public schools are not necessarily standard for schools whose districts include top private universities. A school in a similar geographical position is Lucille M. Nixon Elementary School in Stanford, California.
Like Powe, Nixon's district includes the entire campus of a private college-Stanford University-and serves an economically and racially diverse population.
Unlike Powe, Nixon educates many children of professors and administrators.
Nixon Principal Barbara Welch said between 35 and 40 percent of Nixon students fall in this category, compared to less than two percent at Powe. "We have very high parent education," she added.
Four percent of Nixon fourth-graders read below grade level, compared to 39 percent of their counterparts at Powe.
Welch and Fuller both attributed the disparity to different levels of parent involvement. "[Professors'] availability in the evening to go to events is going to be different from a single mom working two jobs who can't come to a school event on the one night she has off," Fuller said.
She added that university faculty prefer schools with high-performing students and specialty programs that cater to their children's interests.
"Or is that a nice way of saying they're too snobby?" Fuller asked.
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