From left, Dazha Smith, 11; Torry Lynch, 10; Christina Koester, 11; and Tiffany Tusing, 11, along with volunteer tutor Margaret Reed, 14, from Friends School.

Joseph Savoy discovered a passion for foreign languages and science during a five-week summer program at Friends School that ended Friday.

The incoming sixth-grader said last week he was learning Spanish and trigonometry and was dissecting brains and hearts.

And, he said, he was learning that all of this knowledge could help him in the future.

"If somebody goes to your school and doesn't know English, you can help them because you can speak Spanish to them," he said.

Joseph is not a regular student at Friends. During the school year, he attends Hampstead Hill Academy, a public school in Baltimore. But he's one of 400 students, many of whom are disadvantaged, who have been attending private high schools and universities this summer in an effort to prepare them for the rigors of high school.

The Middle Grades Partnership, which began last summer with a pilot program and 200 students, identifies high achievers to be in the program three consecutive summers in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

It also gives students extra instruction, tutoring and opportunities such as enrichment field trips during the school year. The goal is to get them accepted into advanced and magnet high schools.

"The partnership helps to increase students' academic skills and gives already high-achieving students an added boost," said Karen Dates, admissions and outreach director for Friends.

At Friends, 55 of the program's students, all from Hampstead Hill and Kipp Ujima Village academies, have concentrated on science, math and physics. They capped off their fourth week by launching rockets that they built in science class.

Other participating private schools in north Baltimore include Bryn Mawr School for Girls, Roland Park Country School, Park School, Calvert School and Gilman School. St. Paul's School for Boys and Towson University are also among the participants.

The program spends an estimated $2,200 per student per year, and is funded chiefly by the Baltimore Community Foundation and the Morton K. and Jane Blaustein Foundation. Baltimore Community Foundation President Ton Wilcox considers it money well-spent, to ensure that children have a successful high school experience.

The program "will help the students to strive in our strongest high schools with the criteria for entry. They have a lot to learn from each other," said Wilcox, who visited the Friends School program July 19 with Charlene Cooper Boston, interim chief executive officer of the city school system.

The Blaustein Foundation alone has raised $2.8 million to help through 2008.

"We are interested in fostering a partnership that can be built between public and private schools," said Tanya Herbick, the Blaustein Foundation's program officer.

Other donors include the France-Merrick Foundation, the Jane and Worth B. Daniels Fund, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, the Funds for Populations at Risk and the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation.

The partnership also is pushing the public school system to include Algebra I into the city school system's eighth-grade curriculum and is studying how to keep students from forgetting over the course of the summer what they learned during the previous school year.

"We are interested in this kind of program involving issues surrounding summer learning loss," Herbick said.

Public school educators such as Matthew Hornbeck, principal of Hampstead Hill Academy, are high on the partnership.

"It has created a ripple effect in which 25 students that come to camp will go back and tell another 100 children all about the cool things they learned," Hornbeck said. "Those kids will then want to come (to the program) the next year."

Many could be "first-generation college students," meaning they would be the first in their family to go to college, Hornbeck said.

Ten independent private schools in the area are participating in the program with the same goals and expectations for the students, but each school has created its own academic plan and focus.

At Friends, students receive classroom teaching in the morning and do educational activities in the afternoon.

Alexis Williamson, an incoming Hampstead Hill sixth grader, said she is enjoying her time at Friends so much that she'd like to go to high school there.

"I really like swimming and dance and my teachers here," she said. "Today in math we made houses out of measuring tape and in science we made paper airplanes from construction paper and wood."

Davanta Barber, an incoming eighth grader at Kipp Ujima Village Academy, flew his airplane outside the school, while extolling the value of communication in achieving success.

"I have learned how to get along with people that I did not know," Davanta explained. "You need to be nice to each other so you can communicate to work on projects."

More than anything the aspiring professional athlete is learning the value of a good education.

"I hope more students stay in school than stay on the corner selling drugs and skipping class - and start thinking about their future," he said.