Sunlight streams through large windows, brightening the wood floors and walls, and there is a stunning view across the Inner Harbor.
For 50 sixth-graders who have known only classrooms with linoleum and institutional tile, the atmosphere alone in their new middle school could seem inspirational.
But these young pioneers in an experimental school that opened in the fall chatter about schoolwork and their teachers.
"When I first came, I didn't think I was going to do good," said LeShea Solomon, 11, with a broad smile. But just last week, "I found out I was on the honor roll and student of the month."
The Crossroads School is one of several so-called "New Schools" in the city run by nonprofit groups but funded with public school dollars. Like charter schools, New Schools have some autonomy to choose faculty, curriculum and students, but the city school board must grant them approval to operate.
Founded by a former city middle school teacher, Crossroads is operated by the Living Classrooms Foundation, a nonprofit group that offers job training and educational experiences at the Inner Harbor.
Crossroads takes advantage of its small size. Although the school has only sixth-graders this year, it plans to add a grade a year until it enrolls 150 pupils in grades six through eight.
The school's staff of four - two teachers, a reading specialist and an assistant teacher - knows each child and his or her family. Teachers enjoy teaching here, they say, because they have time to talk with children about their work rather than merely hand back papers with red marks and grades. Last year, Mindy Sjoblom taught 150 pupils at Pimlico Middle School in Northwest Baltimore. Now, as the language arts teacher at Crossroads, she has two classes of 25 pupils each, and she sees them for 2 1/2 hours a day.
"At Pimlico, we never got into those rich dialogues," she said. "I feel much more effective."
After one semester, it is too early to measure the school's success, but director Mark Conrad said that two early indicators of progress are rising reading scores and outstanding attendance.
As a group, the 50 Crossroads pupils averaged an attendance rate of 88 percent at their former public elementary schools last year. For the first two months of the current school year, the attendance rate among Crossroads pupils was 98 percent.
Most pupils seem to have a new interest in reading, according to the teachers. "We have taken a bunch of kids who were nonreaders, and now they are reading four to five novels a semester," Conrad said.
Scores on in-house reading tests show gains, but the school won't have an accurate gauge until it receives the first results of the functional tests that pupils took in the fall.
However, perhaps the most encouraging sign for Conrad is that parents report their children are more interested in reading than before.
Conrad devised the concept for Crossroads two years ago, and he linked up with Living Classrooms last year. Living Classrooms plans to build two buildings next year that will provide additional space for the school as it expands to three grades.
The school uses the Baltimore public school curriculum, and adds an approach from Outward Bound, the self-reliance training program. The approach, called "expeditionary learning," tries to link children's curriculum to the world around them. For a science experiment, children might board a Living Classrooms boat to take readings of water temperature and salinity instead of doing a similar project on the same topic at their desks.
"We want to make them journalists, scientists and historians," Conrad said.
The reality, however, is that the school first must help pupils improve their writing, reading and math skills. Most of the pupils arrived at Crossroads at least one grade level behind.
For some children, that has meant getting used to a lot more homework.
"Our kids are learning better than they did in elementary school," said Donna Martin, the mother of pupil Roberto Rodriquez. Last year, Roberto did 20 minutes of homework each night; now he does 2 1/2 hours. Teachers "are really here for them," Martin said.
Pupils have their teachers' cell phone numbers and can call them at night with homework questions, or they can stay after school to receive help.
Martin said that adjusting to middle school hasn't been easy for her son, however. One of the few pupils in the school who isn't African-American, her son sometimes has been called names or been made to feel uncomfortable, she said.
The problem has not been limited to pupils. The current school staff is all white and sometimes has had to deal with racial issues. The school population - 80 percent African-American, 10 percent Latino and 10 percent white - is unusually diverse for Baltimore.
"For many of our students, this is their first experience with diversity. ... [They] are suspicious of folks that are different from them. If something doesn't go their way, then it is bias," Conrad said.
Gladys Graham, an African-American teacher who works for Outward Bound and assists Crossroads, says the school is working on confronting racial issues. Teachers held lessons on the issue of bias and stereotypes, and pupils have read books on social culture.
"Students didn't understand how their words were affecting others," Graham said.
Conrad hopes to recruit African-Americans to fill the teaching posts for seventh grade. About 100 teachers applied for jobs at the Crossroads School before it opened; Conrad said he offered teaching posts to three African-American men, but all of them turned him down.
Crossroads also was flooded with pupils' applications from the five elementary schools in East Baltimore that surround it. So the school held a lottery to select its first 50 pupils, 96 percent of whom qualify to receive free or reduced-price meals at school.
"Families in East Baltimore are desperate for alternatives to the [public] middle schools," Conrad said.