High School in Baltimore

Baltimore’s high school culture

By Elinor Spokes

For those who moved to the Baltimore area as adults, adjusting to its unique culture and breaking in well-established social circles, can be a veritable challenge. Particularly, as many of those social circles were established in high school.

Most perplexing to outsiders is the fact that the Baltimore high school identity still seems to hold a place of importance decades after a person has graduated. The answer to the perennial question — “Where did you go to school?” which is shorthand for “What high school did you attend?” — seems to reveal who you knew in high school and in which neighborhood you were raised.

“The Outsiders”

“That phenomenon of where you went to school stood out,” for Gina Hirschhorn when she moved to Baltimore after college for a corporate training program. Because she was in the program with other newcomers to Baltimore, socializing as a single in the city was easier, and most of her friends were from other places.

Although she never thought she would stay in Baltimore, she is now married to a native and raising her two sons in Roland Park. She still thinks that the social circles here are a bit closed among native Baltimoreans.

“It’s a tough place to break into, which is why outsiders bond. The native Baltimoreans don’t have the inclination to make new friends because they have so many of their high school friends still here,” she says.

In her hometown of Edgemont, N.Y., a suburb of Manhattan, most kids went to the same public school. Although she still maintains very close friendships with high school friends, most are no longer in the New York area and have scattered across the country.

“There is, here, an assumption that you will return to Baltimore. That was not true in New York,” Hirschhorn notes.

Growing up in Lewiston, N.Y., near Niagara Falls, David Lunken says that most of his high school friends didn’t return to the area after college due to economics and opportunities elsewhere.

In Baltimore, he notes, “People come back here because there is something to come back to, deep roots and social connections.” Therefore, being identified by where one attended high school does take on seemingly great importance.

“Here it seems the high school relationships stick and that people are classified and contextualized by where you went,” he adds.

In Lewiston, “No one had to ask you where you went to school because everyone went to the local public school, except perhaps the kids who attended Catholic schools,” he says.

Lunken moved to Baltimore after graduate school and he is now raising his three daughters in the city’s Cedarcroft neighborhood. From a professional standpoint, Lunken feels that not having grown up here has its advantages, too.

“Initially it might have helped having a social network in place; now I have built a community that works for me. And because I didn’t have any preconceived notions of which social set I was a part of, I can cross over to different groups and I have the leveraging ability to tap into all different pockets of the community without any boundaries,” he says.

“Depending on what you do,” adds Lunken, “being from here, going to high school here, gives you a better starting point. But ultimately, your success depends on what you do and what you do with it. Even here, where you went to high school can only get you so far.”

“The Insiders”

Randallstown High School alumnus Louis Malinow admits that the high school mystique looms large in Baltimore social circles.

“When you figure out where people went to school, it gives you an idea of who they knew and opens up ways to network and memories you may have in common with someone,” he says.

Growing up in Randallstown, where most of the neighborhood kids attended Randallstown High School, says Malinow, “private school was not a big thing then.” He admits there is a certain judgment made based on the high school one attends. “No one really cares about where you went to college, just high school,” he adds.

After college and/or graduate school, many of Malinow’s friends returned to Baltimore. “Baltimore has a way of pulling you back,” he notes. “It’s a comfort zone; there is something about being here.”

Malinow, a doctor who now resides in Owings Mills, remarks that sometimes this can be a professional advantage. “It was easier to return to Baltimore and build my medical practice because the network of friends existed,” he says.

Steve Luray agrees that it was easier for him to begin a business in his hometown because he had gone to high school here and had developed such a strong network. Now living in Reisterstown, he remembers his days at Pikesville High School and notes that 30 years ago or so, most of the Jewish kids either attended his alma mater or rival Randallstown High School.

“You either went to one or to the other. Very few Jewish kids went elsewhere,” he recalls. (There also was a smaller contingent of students attending Milford Mill High School at that time.)

Luray says that those from outside Baltimore should not read too much into the question ‘Where did you go to school?’ because it most often refers to the Pikesville-Randallstown high schools.

“We just want to find out if we know the same people or had the same teachers,” he says. “It is that simple.”

High school today

Today, Luray points out, the Jewish community in Baltimore is much more spread out and therefore the Jewish kids are attending a wider range of schools.

Andrea Polsky grew up in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, where most kids attended the same high school, St. Louis Park High School. She had many friends living in her neighborhood.

Now a mother of three sons living in Reisterstown, she has noticed that as a consequence of the fact that children in her neighborhood attend many different schools, her children don’t really know the neighborhood kids. She doesn’t know her neighbors very well either.

“Our friends are really scattered and I have to carpool to play dates instead of my kids going down the street to play with their friends,” she says.

She also observes that people seem to be judged by the schools one chooses for their children. “In many urban areas around the country, city kids would attend private schools to escape poorly performing urban schools, but Baltimore has a different migration pattern. Here, suburban kids attend private schools,” she says.

October 2009