At the end of a hallway at Manchester Academic Charter School, 79-year-old Betty Robinson sits on a child-size chair, patiently quizzing a 4-year-old girl on pictures of different animals.

Dr. Robinson starts to answer a question from the school's chief executive officer, Vasilios Scoumis, then stops.

"I'm not being fair to you," she says to the child, who a minute before had been excitedly pointing out polka dots on the wings of a butterfly. She then asks Mr. Scoumis if he can wait a few minutes to continue the conversation.

Technically, Dr. Robinson, whom everyone in the building calls "Gram," retired four years ago. But it's tough to cut ties with the school she's spent 35 years cultivating -- particularly when it's just earned nationwide recognition.

Last week, the school was awarded a Blue Ribbon Award for school excellence, considered the highest honor that a school can receive from the federal government. Only a dozen public and charter schools in Pennsylvania won the award this year, and Manchester is just the second Blue Ribbon charter school in Pennsylvania in the last five years.

"It is such a labor of love," says Morton Coleman, an emeritus professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who served for several years on the school's board. "The school has done, on almost any measure, a remarkable job educating young people."

It's been quite a journey for a school that started as an after-school program and a preschool while Dr. Robinson was working for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, then transformed into a private elementary school, and then a charter school that initially had to fight the city school board for survival after low test scores in its first few years.

The school serves a population that is 99 percent black and more than two-thirds economically disadvantaged. But for the past five years, students have met -- and sometimes exceeded by a wide margin -- test score benchmarks required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Last school year, for example, 87.7 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient or advanced in reading on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test -- a result that would thrill even the state's most affluent school districts.

The school enrolls about 200 students in kindergarten through eighth grade and has a waiting list of more than 400 students.

In addition to small class sizes and morning and after-school programs, Dr. Robinson says the key to the school's success has been the same very simple concept that she exhibited with her 4-year-old student in the hallway: respect.

"It doesn't matter who the children are, they can learn," she says. "No matter what, if children are given respect, and are taught with respect, and the mother believes in the environment that the child is in, then the child will learn."

These days, Dr. Robinson is in the building sporadically. She currently is filling in during a maternity leave for a preschool teacher she taught in nursery school decades ago.

For the past seven years, Mr. Scoumis has run Manchester as the school's CEO, focusing some of his often 12-hour workdays on building relationships with parents. He's proud now that when he has to call a home for a behavioral problem, he's more likely to get a response of "He did what?" than questions and defensiveness, he said.

To draw parents into the building, the school hosts a family night once a month, getting about 80 percent attendance. The school also asks parents to contribute whatever skills they might have to volunteering inside the school.

"Parents are the most important piece," says Mr. Scoumis, who sports a scruffy stubble and jokes that he doesn't wear ties. "If you don't have a parent doing the homework, reading to their child -- there's nothing we can do to help that child if we don't have the parent's commitment."

To some degree, the school's success has attracted the attention and support of the foundation community. The Heinz Endowments, for example, gave the school a $45,000 grant this year for technology improvements and provided about a half million dollars for a physical expansion in 2000.

"They've just paid persistent attention to making sure kids don't fall behind," says Joe Dominic, director of the Heinz Endowments' education program. "They're really good at that."

Walking the four-story building, Mr. Scoumis opens the door to an eighth-grade algebra class, where math teacher Bill Orr has written a grisly polynomial fraction on the blackboard.

The problem invokes a feeding frenzy of responses, with students shouting out suggestions for how to factor the expression, eventually reducing it down to one simple variable.

The enthusiastic atmosphere works, in large part, because the school decided to limit class size in its middle school grades to 10 students.

"If you have 30 kids in here and you're yelling out answers, it would be chaotic," says Mr. Scoumis.

To further excite students, the school allows them to make their own schedules on Fridays, choosing from activities such as yoga, cosmetology and chess club. Sturdy boxes filled with thyme, basil and parsley line the sidewalk outside the school on Liverpool Street -- products of the school's Friday gardening club.

"We get the same amount of learning as everyone else, but we get a little fun into it too," says seventh-grader Diondrai Brown, whose four siblings graduated from Manchester ahead of him.

Diondrai, 11, enthusiastically describes his Fridays playing basketball and "building little mini-robots" for a robotics competition.

"It's like lighting up a light bulb," says Mr. Scoumis. "Allow kids to dream, that's what we do well here. We build kids up."