How on-site daycare helps close the graduation gap for Baltimore’s teen moms

Prom was scheduled under the bright afternoon sun, but Rylee Pinkney Barnwell came dolled up for a traditional evening affair, her toenails painted red to match the embellishments on her pint-size date’s suit.

Rylee wore a floor-length black gown, and her 1-year-old son, Ramire, a tiny bowtie. They posed for photos on a staircase, then strutted down a red carpet hand in hand into the “baby prom” that Rylee helped organize.

Rylee attends Excel Academy at Francis M. Wood High School, where Baltimore students who’ve fallen behind in the haze of new parenthood can get caught up while their babies attend free preschool a few doors or floors away. At the end of last school year, she was one of 15 moms using the school’s family center. Since it opened in 2021, 89% of its moms have graduated, compared to just half their peers nationally.

Rylee, 18, is determined to be one of them.

“As a mom, I definitely have found my sense of community. Those people are like my family,” she said of her classmates and her son’s teachers. “If it wasn’t for them, I definitely don’t think that I would be able to be in school.”

Rylee was 16 when she held up a positive pregnancy test in her grandmother’s bathroom. She’d always been the “good one” and worried her family would be disappointed in her and her classmates would judge her. But initial panic quickly hardened into resolve. She was keeping her baby.

While she was pregnant, Rylee suffered from morning sickness and anxiety. The sophomore was often too physically and mentally drained to go to class. She took about a month off school after Ramire was born in late August and struggled to make up the ground when she returned. By the end of the 2024-25 school year, administrators told her she was too far behind to stay at Forest Park High School.

Rylee said her son’s father is incarcerated, leaving her a single mom. She and Ramire live with her grandmother, Madeline Pinkney-Lynch, who watched the baby during Rylee’s first year back at school.

Though the 61-year-old loves her grandson dearly, Pinkney-Lynch warned Rylee the arrangement couldn’t be forever. She could tell Ramire was going to be a handful as he got bigger and started walking.

Pinkney-Lynch said she’s watched some of her nieces have babies and never make it back to school. Not Rylee.

“She’s going to walk across that stage with her son, side by side,” Pinkney-Lynch said.

Rylee was initially hesitant about Excel Academy, an alternative high school that offers credit recovery for students up to age 21. She was similarly nervous about the free child care on-site for students’ kids run by United Way of Central Maryland.

She’d heard some Excel kids were “bad” students who’d been kicked out of other schools. She worried about who’d care for her son at the daycare. Her gut reaction: “Uh-uh, not sending my baby there.”

But seeing it in person calmed Rylee’s fears. Staff reassured her it would be a good place for Ramire to learn and play with other kids.

“I was like, ‘OK, I can go to this school if it means you get to come here,’” Rylee said. Now she’s an engaged student who raises her hand for every question, supported by teachers who want to see her succeed.

Rylee wakes up at 5 a.m. to get herself and Ramire ready for the bus that takes them from their North Baltimore home to school in Poppleton. Running on three or four hours of sleep, Rylee walks her “little nugget” to daycare, changes his diaper and lets him tell his teachers what he wants for breakfast (he considers cheese a meal).

The almost-2-year-old “busybody” is one of over a dozen kids enrolled in the daycare, which is part of a support hub for families of babies and toddlers called a Patty Center. The Maryland Family Network oversees 20 of them, but what sets this one apart is its focus on teen parents, child development specialist Keshia Nelson said.

Every month, the center sends parents home with a week’s worth of groceries to help offset the cost of feeding a growing family, Nelson said. And every year center employees take the moms shopping for school clothes and supplies. They constantly tell both mom and baby how much they’re growing.

Rylee said, when Nelson tells her she’s “rocking it,” she’ll respond that she’s trying. But Nelson always pushes back: “You’re not trying. You are.”

“I think that young moms don’t get told enough that we really are doing it,” Rylee said.

Moms will sometimes come by during school hours because they need a snack, a breather or just to see their babies, so long as they have a hall pass and teacher’s permission, Nelson said.

Staff members have hard conversations with the students about topics such as addiction. They also teach them to set boundaries with family, which can be hard for moms raising kids while living with their own parents.

The Excel Academy moms concocted the plan for the first “baby prom,” dubbed the Itsy Bitsy Sneaker Ball, when the school’s regular dance was canceled due to lack of interest.

The moms showed up and out for the Friday affair. They all helped get each baby ready, offering to apply Vaseline and tying shoelaces on tiny shoes. “Y’all is some baddies, and y’all kids are some baddies,” one said as she surveyed the packed entryway of the daycare.

The sharply dressed kids beelined for a bounce house, complete with toy balls and a basketball hoop. Toddlers and preschoolers danced (or bounced in place) to kids’ hits such as “Baby Shark” and throwbacks such as “Crank That” by Soulja Boy, a song older than their parents.

Rylee, the first mom on the dance floor, dreams of the day when she’s a nurse and Ramire is flourishing in school and playing football. But for now she’s just a mom who will always be able to say she took the love of her life to prom.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.