Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990 TAG: 9007170262
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Landmark News Service
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Long
What puts Lynchburg's Pride Center on the educational cutting edge is a sort of institutional stubbornness, a refusal to let teen-agers give up on school.
Last month, an 18-year-old mother at the center wasn't going to graduate because she was behind in English. So administrators hired a teacher to help her cram for three days, and social studies teacher James Strand picked her up at home and brought her to school.
"He actually held her infant baby while she took her exam," said Pride Center Director Peyton Barbour. "I said to myself, `Man, that's what it's all about.' "
The center, city school officials say, is the main reason Lynchburg's annual dropout rate has fallen from 7.3 percent to 3.1 percent in three years, extraordinary progress with a stubborn statistic that hasn't budged statewide despite nearly a decade of school reforms.
The Pride Center is among an array of programs put into place here for "at-risk" students under Superintendent Joseph A. Spagnolo Jr.
And with Spagnolo, 47, moving to Richmond next month to become state superintendent of public instruction, Lynchburg's schools are getting attention from school officials around Virginia.
When his appointment was announced in June, Wilder administration officials said Lynchburg's success in dealing with at-risk children was one reason Spagnolo was hired. His agenda fit with what is rapidly becoming the state's top educational priority - cutting down on dropouts and doing a better job of educating children from low-income and troubled families.
Hired as superintendent in Lynchburg in 1972 at age 29, Spagnolo elected to stay while his children were growing. That's given him the luxury of waiting for long-term programs to pay dividends. Not surprisingly, he's a blunt critic of much of what has passed for education reform in the past decade, arguing that it has failed to go far enough to reach students in trouble.
"Some of those ideas are very good, but I think they're viewed too often as panaceas," he said. "H.L. Mencken once said that every problem has a simple answer, all of which are wrong."
Spagnolo is a supporter of the theories of Yale University psychiatrist James Comer, who argues that schools can do better with at-risk children by first tending to their psychological and social needs.
Comer, whose programs in New Haven, Conn., are being copied around the country, advocates an individual approach to each child, an emphasis on self-esteem and self-discipline, and a willingness to become involved in trying to improve a child's life outside school.
This philosophy is being put into practice in trial programs at Lynchburg's Kizer and Dearington elementary schools, which serve some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. The schools combine smaller classes, specially selected teachers, computer instruction and specially written curricula.
There are after-school enrichment programs for pupils and parents and community volunteers. Lynchburg College is providing student volunteers, and for this year's class of pre-schoolers and kindergarteners, the college promised a full scholarship to anyone who graduates from high school and meets the entrance requirements.
"We do a lot of things that are perhaps being done in other places," said Kizer Principal Vickie J. Hogan. "We just have them all tied together in a nice little package."
In the first year of a three-year trial, the schools already have shown significant progress on standardized tests. In one grade, an additional 20 percent of the pupils have reached the national average on the exams.
Other results will be much more significant than test scores, Hogan said. She gushed over a fourth-grade boy who was having trouble at home, so teachers worked to stabilize his family situation and lavished him with attention. At the end of school, he made honor roll.
At Dearington Elementary, which is virtually all-black and low-income, Principal Lois Booker wrote a poem for students to recite every day with the Pledge of Allegiance. It says, in part:
"I am somebody. I am as important as any person in the world. I deserve to be treated with consideration and respect, and will treat others the same way. I own my ideals, my dreams, my hopes, my fantasies, and my fears . . . "
The Kizer-Dearington program is expensive, particularly its maximum class sizes of 15, and over the next three years will require $250,000 in supplemental state and local funds for about 400 children.
But Spagnolo is convinced it is the sort of thing needed to make a long-term difference.
"I'm a firm believer in the earlier the better," he said. "It's hard to deal with a kid who's 16 and says he's going to drop out of school. The options are limited. The best you can do in a situation like that is to nurture it, to apply plenty of Band-Aids, and to try somehow to limp along to get through."
Spagnolo has managed to buy his Band-Aids in a less-than-lavishly financed school system. In 1987-88 the city spent $3,913 per student, about $160 below the state average.
The Pride Center, which was projected to handle 80 students when it began three years ago, now serves 250 with a skeletal staff.
If the school system's anti-dropout measures succeed, Barbour said, "eight or nine years from now you won't need a Pride Center. The alternative program should be getting less and less."
In the meantime, the center has managed to make graduates of many teens who would have had virtually no chance otherwise. Of its 69 graduates this year, 50 are previous dropouts, 33 were in their fifth year of high school, 53 had jobs and 26 had children.
The center has been studied by dozens of other Virginia school systems, which are required to develop alternative programs for potential dropouts by this fall. Its fundamental innovation was to take all the standard high school courses and write the curricula into workbook format so students could handle the work on their own schedules.
By 3 p.m., when Lynchburg's regular high schools are getting ready to finish the day, the Pride Center - many of whose students work full time - is busiest. Students there work independently at desks and seek help from teachers when they need it.
Successful efforts to combat dropouts, Spagnolo argued, "can't be massive, all-encompassing things. They've got to be individual. They've got to be sitting down with a youngster who says, `I'm leaving school,' and really working with that youngster almost hand in glove, day by day."
by CNB