He arrives on time despite awful traffic on Interstate 97, parks his dented Toyota in front of a roomy Millersville home and springs out, black binder at the ready.

It's a week before the start of school in Anne Arundel County, and Fatih Kandil, leader of one of the most academically successful schools in Maryland, is wrapping up his summer the way he always does: by being proactive.

Like other county principals, Kandil — director of the 330-student Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School in Hanover — has been up to his eyebrows in staff meetings, bracing for the arrival of students Monday.

But he's the only one known to visit each of his middle school's students — at home — before classes resume.

"[This] lets everyone know how seriously we take education," he says, ringing the doorbell at the home of Kristofer Burkowski, a new sixth-grader, and his parents, Mark and Cindy.

It's part of the mind-set that has helped Kandil, 36, turn CSP from shaky experiment into growing educational gem.

Inside, at the family's kitchen table, he lays out his school's expectations for homework (2 1/2 hours a night), lost assignments (automatic zero) and accountability (parents can check a 24/7 database for up-to-the-minute grades). He invites questions, cracks a few jokes.

"I've never seen a principal who cares enough to come to your house and [set] expectations, not just for the child but also for his whole family," Mark Burkowski says.

Kristofer, 11, claims to welcome the biggest workload he has ever faced.

Kandil shakes everyone's hand, gathers up his papers and heads back to the old Camry. He has three more visits to go tonight. "If a [traditional] public school is like an established army, we're a highly motivated guerrilla force," he says. "We move quickly and use everything we've got."

'Showing off'

When your school receives less than half the funding per pupil that traditional public schools do, you have to be willing to drive events. If Kandil didn't, CSP — one of just two charter schools in the county and 42 in the state — would never have earned the title of Maryland Charter School of the Year in 2009, its fifth year of existence.

Growing up in Adana, Turkey, Kandil didn't always have such a sense of direction. He was such a brilliant student, especially in the sciences, that he rarely had to push himself. He failed, in fact, to appreciate the talents of his teachers, whom he saw as a miserable lot.

"Whenever someone asked what I wanted to do in life, I said 'anything but teach,'" he recalls, laughing.

That changed in the ninth grade, Kandil says, when he encountered an educator who would have made a great model for chronically underfunded Chesapeake Science Point. Biology teacher Salih Teker made up in brilliance what he lacked in material.

"This man had a piece of chalk and a chalkboard, and nothing else," Kandil says. "Everything was stored in his brain. He didn't seem to be teaching at all. It was more like showing off."

Kandil's life plan soon took a different course.

After graduating from an Istanbul university with a biology degree, he turned down all-but-certain acceptance to medical school, opting instead to move to the United States to study molecular biology. When financial aid fell through, he remembered how Teker had moved him and his classmates. So he took a job teaching biology in the Milwaukee public school system.

"Right away, I loved working with kids," he says. He was promoted to assistant principal.

When Kandil read about a charter school in Cleveland that had become one of just six "blue-ribbon" charter schools in America, his ears perked up. Those schools encouraged innovation. When the Horizon Science Academy was looking for someone to start a satellite branch in Dayton, Ohio, in 2004, he applied for the job and got it.

In two years, he attracted 250 students to the place, an unlikely feat in a high-crime city where one-fourth of the students already were enrolled in charter schools. But in 2006, when Chesapeake Science Point was in the throes of its worst growing pains, the school board of a county he'd never heard of in Maryland came calling.

Back from the brink

On a steamy afternoon in late August, things seem quiet at Chesapeake Science Point, a low-lying brick building at the edge of a Hanover business park.

In the lobby, parent volunteers and administrative assistant June Calvert — known to all as Miss June — move papers and answer phones. A pile of new bus schedules lines a counter. And Kandil, half-formal in short sleeves and a necktie, comes and goes, greeting everyone he sees by name.

In his light-filled office, a string of artifacts tell a bold tale: the Charter School of the Year certificate; trophies from student wins in the American Math Challenge, a competition among 1,300 schools; photos of such luminaries as graduate Luke Andrada, who won a $64,000 "genius scholarship" to California's Sierra Nevada College as an eighth-grader; and cages containing Kandil's own "water slagger" canaries, members of a species miners once took underground to help them detect the presence of carbon monoxide.

There's no visible sign of CSP's troubled early days. The school, which opened for business in 2005, sparked controversy within a year, as faulty record-keeping and a lack of certified special-education teachers landed it on probation. The original director left. The school board, unsure whether CSP had the right stuff to survive, conducted a nationwide search for a new director. Kandil signed on in June 2006.

A school like this can only thrive, the new head announced, if everyone gave their all, from students and staff to parents, neighbors and the board of directors. Most responded. Teachers showed up unpaid, before school and on Saturdays, to offer tutoring sessions. Ferhat Avsar, coach of the math team, and colleagues held academic camps in the summer. Parents arrived to paint and cut grass.

It didn't surprise Kandil that students responded to the sight of their elders offering more than was required.

"That kind of positive interaction is very powerful," he says.

Since then, a school that spent its first four years in rented space in a business park has settled into a dedicated building, thanks to $250,000 in funding from County Executive John R. Leopold, more than $1 million in support from new landlord Douglas Legum and another $1 million in private funds raised by school officials.

When Kandil learned last month that Fairfax County, Va., was ready to give away $31,000 worth of library furniture, he and another staff members drove down in a 26-foot truck, disassembled the shelves, returned to Hanover and put it them back together. Now the school's 4,000 books have a place in the Douglas Legum Media Library.

"We have something unique going on here," the principal says.

Feedback

At 8 the next morning, Kandil, a married father of five who lives in Ellicott City, convenes a meeting among teaching advisers Shana Gist and Ali "A.G." Gurbuz (teachers in their own right) and the new school counselor, Gail Gugerli.

In a way, the principal is a victim of his own success. A new charter school in the city, the Baltimore IT Academy, hired away his two top assistants recently, and these three will fill their former roles, helping Kandil brainstorm activities for faculty meetings the next day as well as for the daily calendar the arriving students will follow.

His style is mildly formal — everyone is "Mr." or "Ms.," a practice befitting a school where students wear uniforms — and his pace is quick, though he drives the agenda by way of so many jocular-sounding questions that he scarcely seems in the lead at all.

"What did you think of the activities yesterday?" he asks, fielding several minutes' worth of replies, nodding sagely as he takes them in.

"We thrive on feedback," he says with a courteous smile.

As the panel goes over the details of the sort of school day — and week, and month — they want students to experience, accountability is clearly a major theme.

All students will carry "agenda" notebooks in which they'll track each homework assignment (to be initialed daily by assigning teacher, parents and another teacher at study hall next morning). After two weeks of school, the faculty of 24 will convene to discuss every student, assessing how hard each should be pushed ("differential learning").

The more advanced sixth-graders will be placed in a section in which students will have a chance, over the next three years, to earn five high school credits (Algebra I and II, Geometry, Spanish I and Biology 9).

The panel epitomizes what Kandil says he looks for when hiring: flexible thinking and broad capacity. Gist, the head of language arts, gushes with ideas on reading as well as interdisciplinary study. Gurbuz, a trained physicist and engineer, grasps in a flash the scheduling implications of every new idea. When she's not thanking "Mr. A.G" for his organizational vision, Gugerli is carefully framing her role as the school's first guidance counselor.

"Let's not use [the term] 'discipline' so much," she says. "Behavior management is more positive." Kandil agrees.

Saying yes

Back in his office that day, the principal gives the impression of a man who is prepared for the new year, yet fully aware that it will bring surprises. That comes from knowing his purpose.

In some ways, he says, CSP is a controlled experiment in education. Because students are admitted by lottery, not merit, he believes his student body represents the same sort of cross section of the population that any public school does.

That must be a comfort, given that CSP students routinely outperform their counterparts elsewhere in the county, at least on standardized tests.

"It's never the kids. It's the experience they're offered," he says.

To that end, he demands an almost tactile sense of expectation. Students and teachers will spend three days going over the student conduct code during the first week of school. Basic rules, as always, will be posted in hallways and classrooms. Even his home visits are aimed at ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page.

"Everyone should understand what they're saying 'yes' to," he says.

The Burkowskis seem to. Kristofer's dad, Mark, was disappointed to learn that the school's long-awaited gym won't open this fall as planned, because of permit complications, but rather next summer. Still, he's glad Kandil told him why during their conference.

Meanwhile, he has been showing up on campus, doing yardwork on his own. "It's the least I can do," Burkowski says.

And Kristofer? A good student, he's not too worried about understanding new course material, but he has misplaced a homework assignment or two in his day. CSP's zero-tolerance policy has him thinking.

"You can get organizers and sticky notes and that kind of thing," he says. "I've had my moments in the past. My plan is to eliminate them."

jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com