Whatever the opposite of buzz is, this school had it. The year that Pierce entered the school lottery, only one family, citywide, had listed Mendell as its first choice for prekindergarten. None had ranked it first for kindergarten. The Kilmer and Lyndon schools in West Roxbury, by contrast, were each the first choice of more than 60 kindergarten families.
“I thought it was going to look desperate, because I was desperate at the time,’’ Pierce said of her first visit. “Instead I found a lovely, cheerful, well-lit place, where kids were happy and engaged.’’
Three other mothers of prekindergarteners - also white, in their 30s, and coming to terms with a school that wasn’t their first choice - had the same surprised reaction. After their children had settled in, after they had gotten over their amazement at the marble floors and art and music classes, outdoor classroom and dynamic principal, they remained amazed by one thing: how much other parents did not know about Mendell.
“It was completely off the map,’’ said Karen Pfefferle of Jamaica Plain, curator of a corporate art collection, who enrolled her twin daughters there in 2009. “People were saying, ‘What is that, a private school?’ ’’
They might have shrugged and let the school’s low profile go, but then, in the middle of their children’s first year there, the district reassigned the principal they loved. For the four mothers who had embraced Mendell - Pierce, Pfefferle, Kristin Barrali, and Flavia Graf Reardon - the principal, Karen Cahill, was a huge part of its appeal. With her transfer to a larger, more popular school in Dorchester, they worried that Mendell was “a sinking ship.’’
As they fought the reassignment and helped choose Cahill’s replacement, they came to a realization: Raising awareness of their school, and polishing its reputation, could prove vital to its long-term survival.
