Bold By Choice Podcast | S3 E7: School as Community | Overview
In partnership with the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition
Overview
What happens when a school is built around a simple, demanding belief: students learn best when they are deeply known, fully included, and trusted with real agency. In Season 3, Episode 7 of Bold By Choice Podcast, we travel to Baltimore to visit City Neighbors, a public charter network that has spent nearly 20 years proving what’s possible when creativity, authentic relationships, and rigorous learning are not extras, but the foundation.
City Neighbors began with a living-room conversation among families who wanted something more for their children. They weren’t walking away from public education. They were leaning into it, advocating for a school experience that reflected the world students live in and the world we want them to help shape. Their design choices were grounded in community, belonging, and purpose, aligned with a core DCSC truth: inclusive, intentionally diverse learning communities do not happen by accident. They are built.
Today, City Neighbors includes three schools, two K–8 campuses and a high school, serving about 900 students across Baltimore. Each school is intentionally small, designed to keep relationships close and student experience visible. The schools are project-based, arts-integrated, and inspired by Reggio Emilia’s view of children as capable, creative, and worthy of deep respect. That philosophy shows up not just in what students learn, but in how the environment treats them: as contributors, not passengers.
This episode features two leaders who have shaped and carried this work: Mike Chalupa, Executive Director and long-time school leader, and LaShawn Bowser, a school leader at City Neighbors Hamilton. Their stories are personal, but the throughline is structural. When you start with different questions, you build different schools.
Mike’s clearest middle school memory is watching the second hand of a classroom clock tick toward the bell, waiting to leave. That experience became a professional obsession: how do we create learning spaces students don’t want to escape. How do we build school around curiosity and meaning rather than endurance.
LaShawn’s pathway began working with young people connected to the juvenile detention system. She noticed how school experience shaped everything else. When students felt unseen or incapable during the day, the impact showed up that night, every time. It became clear that learning environments influence identity, behavior, confidence, and trajectory. If we design school with intention and care, we can change outcomes and, more importantly, restore possibility.
One of the most powerful moments in the episode is a reminder that culture is measured in human sentences, not just performance metrics. At the start of the year, City Neighbors leaders interviewed incoming students to understand what they needed to feel safe and ready to learn. One student shared she had moved often and had learned how to change herself quickly to fit each new environment. Weeks later, she offered something different: “I feel like I can be the best version of myself here.” That is belonging made real. That is a student describing the conditions that allow learning to begin.
City Neighbors also reflects Baltimore. Approximately 70% of students identify as Black, around 20–25% identify as white, with a growing Latinx and Asian population, and about one in four students has an IEP. The network’s approach to inclusion is not separate from its academic model. It is integrated into how learning is designed and how community is built, grounded in the belief that students benefit when they learn alongside peers with different experiences, identities, and perspectives.
The leaders are also honest: this is not Stepford school. This is human work. Not every day is perfect, and the goal is not perfection. The goal is a culture where it’s safe to try, safe to reflect, and safe to grow. Students learn to reframe struggle as evidence of learning rather than proof of failure. Adults practice the same mindset.
City Neighbors is a powerful example of “better together” in action: students and adults building community through meaningful work, shared responsibility, and a deep commitment to seeing one another fully. This episode is a reminder that when schools are designed for agency and belonging, students don’t just do better. They become more fully themselves.
Listen to the Episode
🎧 Season 3, Episode 7 – “School as Community”
Featuring Mike Chalupa and LaShawn Bowser, City Neighbors (Baltimore, MD)
