Strawberry Mansion High School continues to fight an old reputation. But students say the school is an oasis.

When Patience Wilson shares with people that she attends Strawberry Mansion High School, they often shake their heads and tell her all the bad things they’ve heard about her school.

But Wilson, a smiley 17-year-old senior, knows the real Mansion, the one behind the hasty headlines and deep-seated stereotypes.

The real Mansion, she says, is different: a place where students can start on a path to a building trades career, partner with nonprofits, spend their lunchtime in clubs and activities, and have access to trips, career and technical education programs, college classes, and adults who surround them with expectations and supports and love — no matter where they’re coming from or how long they’re able to stay.

“People usually judge us based on what’s happened in the past. But they’re not focusing on what’s happening right now,” said Wilson.

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For years, Strawberry Mansion has fought on several fronts: against the challenges of its surroundings (the neighborhood has the highest number of shootings this year in the city; a full 52% of children under 18 in the immediate area live in poverty, according to Philadelphia and federal data), against a mismatch between available funding and concentrated student need.

It’s coped with a system that, because it emphasizes choice, has made things tougher for comprehensive high schools, which accept all students who walk in the door. Less than 10% of the students who live in Mansion’s attendance zone go to the school, according to district data, and those who do tend to be the most vulnerable.

In 2018-19, the year after the community beat back the Philadelphia School District’s efforts to close Mansion due to declining enrollment, The Inquirer spent a school year inside, chronicling efforts to revive the school at 31st and Ridge Avenue.

Four years later, Mansion now has a full complement of students — it restricted enrollment for a year as a way to help restart the school’s climate but now has ninth through 12th graders again — new reasons to hope, and new challenges.

Principal Brian McCracken welcomes every student who walks through the heavy red doors of Strawberry Mansion — about 230 students attend a school built for 1,800.

But churn is constant: Some weeks, as many as five new students might enroll.

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About half of the school receives special-education services — that’s more students than four years ago — and more await evaluation. Many students are experiencing homelessness, returning from juvenile placement, involved in the foster-care system, or have otherwise complicated lives.

By virtue of where the students live, trauma is universal. When seven people, including five teens and a 2-year-old, were shot Feb. 23, it happened a few blocks from Mansion.

And yet, McCracken said, “parents feel safe with their child in school here.” McCracken came to the school as an assistant principal in 2017 but won the community’s trust when he stepped up to run Mansion after a mostly absent principal disappeared. He never left.

Living with the trauma of gun violence is everyone’s backdrop at Mansion. But the adults in the building do their best to shield students.

On a recent day, staff walked a student who felt unsafe to her bus stop and waited with her until she got on, McCracken said.

And while a traditional high school experience includes clubs and activities, students staying after school isn’t Mansion’s reality.

“They have jobs, family responsibilities. And it’s just not safe,” said McCracken. “We can’t continue to provide programming after school and ask, ‘Why aren’t kids showing up?’”

So the staff uses lunchtime creatively. There’s tutoring, and students with strong attendance can choose from an array of programming, from open gym time to film club. There are mentorship opportunities, and the school hopes to start a group to teach entrepreneurship.

“Workshop Wednesdays” provide students with exposure to careers and other opportunities, and the building-trades partnership that Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. and City Council President Darrell L. Clarke have publicly touted is a fast-track program to union jobs. Though the aim is to expand the program to other schools, Mansion was chosen as the district’s pilot school, and Watlington has said he sees it as becoming a hub for that kind of programming.

The partnership also gives Mansion students a taste of possible career paths without requiring the onerous commitment required by traditional career and technical schools, where students must log an unwieldy 1,230 hours in vocational classes, an impracticality for those who are often transient.

But those who do have to leave Mansion are usually reluctant, even if they’re struggling.

A case in point: One student with significant behavioral and academic struggles came to Mansion after being out of school for three years, and could not read and write. But he enrolled because a cousin told him the school was welcoming.

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Mansion surrounded him with as much support as it could muster, but there were limits; he got into fights often. Eventually, he struck a teacher. So staff helped find him a school with more behavioral health supports. (Mansion has students with emotional support needs but an unfilled emotional support teacher position; it also has two open climate jobs and is missing a crucial behavioral health case manager.)

His family didn’t want the student to leave Mansion. Despite the teen’s struggles, teachers and administrators saw his promise, and tried to help him progress.

“The family said, ‘This is the first school that helped my son,’” McCracken said. “We always say, ‘You’re a Knight for life.’”

Njemele Tamala Anderson was looking to leave a charter school for a district teaching position when she met McCracken at a job fair.

“I just liked the way that McCracken talked about the school, about his students,” said Anderson. “I liked the way this white man was talking about brown children.”

Anderson took a job as an English teacher in 2019, and kept adding roles. Now, she’s a school-based teacher leader and also the “restorative dean,” helping the school reframe what discipline looks like.

As Philadelphia and districts around the country shift away from reactive, exclusionary responses to student behavior, some schools have struggled to find balance while enforcing consequences.

Mansion, though, has found a way. Its corridors are quiet, absent of hall-walkers. And although some students struggle, learning is prioritized.

“Students are professionals at their jobs; they are going to buck the system. But the way you interact with them is what makes it restorative. They still get their consequences, and we love them all the way through the process,” said Anderson, who has developed a “Mansion flow chart” and trained every staffer on how to appropriately handle young people who act out.

Students with egregious behavior are taken out of the classroom, and into a “reflection room” where they write about what they did, whom it affected, and how they might approach the situation differently. But unless an act is dangerous enough to warrant immediate removal, that doesn’t happen until teachers have followed a procedure that includes asking the student, “Are you OK?” and giving them chances to self-correct.

Situations that aren’t solved by the reflection room result in student behavior contracts, with students themselves choosing an adult to hold them accountable, and offered resources. If teens are caught with a marijuana vape, for instance, they are pointed toward drug and alcohol services.

On paper, Mansion’s statistics are startling: By the district’s measure, last year, 41% of the school’s ninth graders were on track to graduation. Just 9% met state standards in reading, 2% in math.

But the intense needs of Mansion’s students mean those numbers require lots of context. Consider the student who’s never been identified as requiring special-education services but who reads at a second-grade level. Or the teen whose attendance and grades are spotty but recently had been removed from his family’s care and now lives with a foster family, whom the school can’t reach.

“We will meet our students where they are, and really work to get them to their highest potential,” McCracken said. “While we always want them to be at the finish line of success, graduation, that’s not always where we are.”

Budget season also brings worries. McCracken projects that Mansion will have 260 students next year, and the district’s number is pitched even lower, 200.

While the district gave the school great latitude on staffing after it committed to rebooting Mansion to give it runway to succeed, now, fewer students will mean fewer teachers, less money for programs and supports. When community outcry saved Mansion, the mandate for school leaders was to revitalize the school, to make it a place students want to attend. Though Mansion has achieved that for a group of students who need support most, administrators say the school’s low numbers worry neighbors as well as McCracken, especially with a master facilities plan looming for the district.

“The community’s concerned; it’s this big beautiful building, this prime real estate,” McCracken said.

For now, the immediate focus is on what next year looks like, on how to support the children in front of them.

Assistant principal Zoe Rooney loves Mansion’s students — smart and frank and funny and relationship-driven. But even a staff willing to tackle any challenge for its kids has limits, she said.

“We don’t have the capacity to meet everybody’s needs, and so we end up having to prioritize between things that should not be prioritized,” Rooney said.

The day a SEPTA shuttle bus rolled up to the school, delivering students displaced from another Philadelphia school that had been temporarily closed because of asbestos, parents and community members were standing outside to welcome them.

It didn’t matter that Building 21 parents and students had reacted with alarm at the announcement, publicly disparaging Mansion.

Guests were coming, and Mansion wanted to make them feel welcome, to show them who they were.

But the “never Mansion” arrows stung, students said. They’re always fighting an old narrative: “We’re not dangerous,” said Aniyah Lewis, a senior. “Just the opposite.”