Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 17, 1993 TAG: 9308260251
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Peter Lewis, who has had the herculean job of establishing and, until this year, running Roanoke's Alternative Education Center, says he's angry. He's angry that more people aren't angry. About the crack. About the guns. About the foul language.
About the kids.
The kids Lewis is angry about are not bad kids, mostly, but undisciplined kids. Kids who don't get the parenting they need at home, who don't get the guidance they need from family or church or neighborhood models.
Kids who have been too disruptive to get the instruction they need at school, instruction in how to get along in life as much as in any particular academic subject.
So the Alternative Education Center is trying to give all of those things to these kids, who are not bad kids, but who will be lost absent serious and continuous intervention.
To do this job, 28 staffers work in a wing of one of the city schools. They are underpaid and overworked. They work longer days than their counterparts in other city schools, reaching out to the most difficult, hard-to-reach students in the system, the ones who disrupt learning in the regular classrooms. Yet, despite years of experience, most teachers earn a beginning teacher's salary.
Is this fair? Shouldn't they be paid at least to scale?
Alternative-ed staff members don't mention compensation when they list the things they need. They say: their own building; their own food service; an art teacher; a music teacher; a vocational program; more professionals to assess and treat students; a nursery for the children's children; a gym.
Quite a list. It's doubtful they will get everything on it, or should. Specific requests would have to be - should have to be - individually assessed. Given limited funds, what should be offered in an alternative education setting that already is offered at regular middle and high schools?
Should there be a separate vocational program, for instance, when city schools already offer vocational education? The city could not afford to set up parallel school systems. Nor would it benefit alternative-ed students if the program got so big that it lost its most important advantage - lots of individual attention.
On the other hand, shouldn't these kids get to take art? Shouldn't they have a music teacher? A gym? Wouldn't some of them benefit, perhaps more than most, from a school psychologist?
These items are all debatable. It could be argued that they're all available to students at their regular schools. If they would improve their behavior, the students could take the classes that taxpayers already have paid for.
But who would question the need for the program itself, and the need to give it enough resources to succeed? Whatever the cost , it has to be far less than the cost of failure.
For failure, in many cases, means a life ruined by drugs, violence, crime and jail. That, too, gets expensive for taxpayers. And it can cost the kids, most of whom are not bad kids, their lives.
Too many lives are being lost as it is. There should be more outrage about this.
by CNB