Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 14, 1993 TAG: 9306140332
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Some have already lived science: They've conceived or borne children.
Some have lived whole chapters of social studies: They've dealt drugs, been in jail, seen people killed.
Sometimes their troubles are undramatic. A girl terrified of Roanoke's two big high schools - a good writer - who needs the haven of small classes. Another girl who never misbehaved but had no guidance at home and needed more attention than regular teachers could give. A big boy, threatening to many, whose patience with little children inspired teachers to get him a job at a day-care center.
A city's worth of pain and struggle converges in the back corner of Addison Aerospace Magnet Middle School - home to the center. Kids come here from all over town, sent by schools that were no longer able or willing to deal with them.
\ Some of the healthiest-looking kids bear the saddest stories.
One is a girl, radiant, bright, well-dressed. She's nearly always laughing. You think when you meet her: She could do anything.
Turns out, she's been removed from her home. Her parents are into crack. She's had a baby who died. She's been in jail for theft. She is 15.
One morning in February, she strides down the hall and calls out, grinning, to a guy: "You punk-ass nigger!" and rambles on, beaming back at him.
Staff members see her potential as well as the trouble that tempts her. "She'll charm the socks off you," one says.
They aim to guide her through these tough times, get her through high school, maybe into college. Just when things are looking up, she leaves town.
\ Death drove a 19-year-old guy to Alternative Ed.
His best friend was shot and killed two years ago. Then his cousin was charged in another murder. Last winter, a teen-ager he knew was gunned down.
He was selling drugs a couple of years ago - not crack, though, he adds.
"He said he didn't know why he did it," Ray Williams, the center's administrative assistant, says. "Just got caught up in it. Some of it's just the camaraderie of being in that group."
The fellow's mother has a good job. He comes from a loving home, so you can't blame his crimes on a dysfunctional family.
He has a 2-year-old son. He wants to go to college. Says he's begun to see the benefits of the straight life. Says he's quit dealing drugs. He wants out of Roanoke.
"I want to meet new people," he said. "I want a good job, something I can be proud of."
Students look up to him. But for all this and all his upbeat talk, teachers have trouble getting him to come to school and do his work. Teachers feared he might become one of the ones they read about in the newspaper. In the obituaries. On Wednesday, he graduates.
\ Even when teachers keep a student in school all year - against great odds - something can screw things up in the end.
A senior girl took eight classes this semester, going to Alternative Ed during the day and at night to its night school, the Drop-In Academy. She needed to take all those classes so she could graduate this month and live out her dream of getting a computer job.
She has a toddler. One day, the girl brought a bottle of guava-flavored spring water from home. Baby food floated in the liquid. The young woman laughed and chugged it down anyway.
This spring, her father, estranged from her mother, came to town. The young woman went to see him. Furious, her mother kicked her and her baby out. The young mother fled to North Carolina.
At the end of the school year, the staff tried to find her and arrange makeup work so she could graduate. They recently found her and hope she can finish this summer.
\ Other stories are more heartening:
William Fleming High School athlete Michael Tolliver came to Alternative Ed on his own. "My grades were kind of slipping, so I asked to come down here. Teachers here, they will come around and help you more individually."
"Mike has been a stabilizer with the high school students," says Al Holland, one of the staff. "He can say `chill out' and not lose face."
Now a junior, Mike's touring colleges.
Brian Terry, 18, will graduate from Fleming on Wednesday. "If it wasn't for this school," he said, "I wouldn't be able to get out." He's thinking about the military.
A few years ago, Alternative Ed staffers heard about a girl in her third year of seventh grade. She had potential, but her parents were disabled. They had trouble keeping her on track.
This week, she graduates from high school. She wants to be a nurse. She is a bright-eyed young woman who's proud of herself. So is the center's staff.
A kid wearing a Mohawk and black leather came to school a while back. Most of the students and staff are black, and this white guy announced he didn't like black people.
He nearly died in a car wreck a while later. Peter Lewis, then center director, and counselor John Crawford went to see him in the hospital. Lewis hugged the kid. "That may have been the first time a black man hugged him," Crawford said.
The boy returned to school, chastened. He earned straight A's. He went to Virginia Western Community College, then into the Marines.
\ It's hard to generalize about students at the Alternative Ed Center.
Especially about what's gone wrong with them.
Or what will make things right.
Some have potential that astounds their teachers.
Staffers say they've had kids with IQs higher than 130.
A former student in Alternative Ed's night school scored 1,250 on his SAT.
"They've got a lot of anger and they've got a reason to be angry," says Sara Holland, youth services director of Roanoke's Total Action Against Poverty. "There's a lot of profanity, but they have no vocabulary and that's the only way they know how to deal with their anger. Their behavior's so obnoxious in many cases, and they get criticized by their peers and by their teachers."
The kids show their cleverness as they vie for attention. A middle-school kid claimed his sisters went to coach Al Holland's alma mater. Holland wasn't buying it. What are their majors? he asked. "Building trades and driver ed."
The same kid interrupted when a teacher and a student talked about a grownup they knew. "You know my mom?" the kid asked. Who's she? "Harriet Tubman."
Crawford, the counselor, says other schools demand obedience from kids, but the students who come to Alternative Ed don't understand why they should obey anybody.
"Most of these kids don't have a thinking process," Al Holland says. "That's why they're here. They just react."
For whatever reason - family breakdowns, parents working two or three jobs to make a living, parents using television as a baby sitter, probably a lot of things - kids are going out of control as toddlers.
"When they're 2 and they're going to the cocktail table and pulling stuff down, you have to handle it then," says Peter Lewis, on leave as the center's director this year. "You need to set some appropriate limits. You need to be firm and caring."
Lewis has seen a kid shake his fist in his mother's face.
Parents call Lewis, begging for help. Fathers tell him of their sons: "He threatened my wife. He's breaking up the furniture. What am I going to do?"
Sometimes Lewis can get the kids to behave. Then he'll ask, "Why would you do it for me and not for your mama?"
It's scary when a parent says to him, "You do it; I can't."
All the while, Lewis says, the kids are screaming for direction from home. "They haven't had it. They want somebody to set some limits."
They need lessons in life, too - instructive stories from their parents' own lives.
"We aren't taking time to pass on the best of what we got from parents and our grandmothers - respect for self and family and others, early on."
In his day, Lewis said, the older generation sacrificed for its kids. He doesn't see that happening much anymore, either.
He tries to get kids to see the power they hold over their futures. Every day, in how they behave, he says, "they are making a career decision." Many are putting themselves outside the mainstream. Some may never be let back in.
Materialism and obsession with expensive athletic shoes bother Lewis a lot.
To get kids to think for themselves and to look past social pressures, he tells them proudly, risking their fashion disapproval, "My tennis shoes cost $30."
\ Late in the school year, a teacher says she's seen a male student put his hand on a girl's rear. That day, the Roanoke Times & World-News ran a front-page story saying 65 percent of girls across the country say they have been touched sexually in school.
Al Holland grabs a newspaper, then the boy. "You see this?" Holland says. He reads the story to the guy.
\ One day last winter, Alternative Ed students squeeze into their "boot camp" room to hear a choir from Patrick Henry High School.
A girl pops her gum. Guys slump in their chairs.
The concept of sitting attentively as an audience is not grasped, or accepted, by many students. "Some of them don't go to church," teacher Janet Claytor says.
The girl continues to pop her gum as a Patrick Henry history teacher talks about the spirituals the choir is about to sing. She says slaves used the songs to communicate safely about freedom.
Around the room, a guy has his hands behind his head. Another chews on a plastic straw. Another wears a ski cap. Several others wear their jacket hoods over their heads.
They watch the disciplined, robed choir rise in unison, sit in unison, then rise to sing again.
Fletcher Nichols, the Patrick Henry teacher, stands before the choir and tells Alternative Ed's students, "You are no different from the young people who sit behind me. I don't know who told you you were different . . . But I'm here to tell you you can learn anywhere you want to. Remember to listen to that still small voice in your heart because it will lead you on that path to good."
At the end, the choir wins rousing applause.
Afterward, a girl from Patrick Henry says Alternative Ed students are thought of as bad kids. She was surprised at how nice they were.
\ Roanoke Assistant School Superintendent William Hackley says many of the kids at Alternative Ed need social skills.
Face it, he said: Few families sit down at the dinner table and talk. When a kid eats, he said, mom may be at work, Lord knows where dad is, sister has the TV going, and the kid has his boombox blaring. That's why these kids are loud, Hackley says: They have to be to get attention.
Alternative Ed must start from the beginning on the social stuff. "It's not REhabilitation," George Franklin, the center's director, says. "It's habilitation. They didn't come with it."
\ Much of the good done at the Alternative Ed Center hasn't be documented.
How do you know about the kid who doesn't finish school but gets a job and leaves drug dealing behind? Or the ones who go into the military and get more training than they ever imagined? Or the kids who don't get killed, don't fall into crime?
\ Janet Claytor sees former Alternative Ed students at Virginia Western Community College, trade schools, nursing schools, hair academies.
One former student won custody of his daughter and is working two jobs - at Wendy's and in construction. "He's doing very well," Claytor said. "The ones you hear about are the ones in crime or who are deceased."
\ Stephanie Montgomery, 20, graduated from Fleming a year ago. She's in beauty school.
She says she owes her diploma to Alternative Ed. She was here off and on more than two years.
"People are more caring and everybody know everybody else. A nice atmosphere."
She has three children, and the staff was understanding about them. "When I had to take them on doctor appointments, they understood."
\ Roanoke School Board member Don Poff goes to Alternative Ed often.
Poff was abandoned by his parents - twice by his mother. He grew up in foster homes and on the street. He never got into trouble - "I was too scared" - but he tells the kids of his own rage and hurt.
"One of the things you're going to have to do is turn that anger into something positive," he'll say.
No kids in Roanoke need more attention than those at Altersative Ed, he says. He comes to the center's defense and is sensitive to signs that those students may not be seen as the equals of those at other schools. He noticed the smell from Addison's dumpsters, near the center's front door, and had the school system put covers on them.
\ Marion Crenshaw visited an Alternative Ed class in the spring.
"This school is nothing to be ashamed of," Crenshaw, Roanoke's youth director, told the students. "This is a special school for special people."
She asks students for three things they care about.
A guy: "Money, power and my son."
A young woman: "Myself, my daughter and building a better life."
Another fellow: "My son."
Another guy mentions his 3-month-old daughter.
There were nine students in the class, all teen-agers. At least four had children.
\ "Some of them are hanging in, against all odds and against all kinds of vibes on the street and everywhere else," Lewis says. "Kids are coming through this horrible thing that's going on right now."
He sees miracles. He sees tragedy.
"I've been to a lot of funerals and a lot of wakes. We aren't supposed to be burying young people. They're supposed to be burying us."
\ In February 1989, Ronny Grogan joined Franklin and Lewis for breakfast at a cafeteria.
Grogan, 18, had been a star tailback in high school. He had dropped out and was facing drug charges.
Franklin and Lewis wanted him to to enroll at Alternative Ed, Franklin said recently. But not until Grogan vowed to stay out of drugs.
They met many times and each time, Franklin said, Grogan said he was drawing nearer to making that promise. The night after that last breakfast, Grogan was shot in the head in a sidewalk dispute.
Seventeen other male teen-agers have been killed or charged with murder in Roanoke since 1990. Most had been dealing drugs.
Nine of them came to Alternative Ed, at least for a while. Franklin said he and Lewis were in touch with all 17.
If they can get those guys to come here, Franklin said, they will say of Alternative Ed: "That was one place that cared about me as a person, that wasn't afraid of me."
\ AUTHOR Mary Bishop and Keith Graham spent days at the Alternative Education Center from February to June _ sitting in classes, in a staff meeting, in special programs, hanging out in the hall, in the office . . . just about everywhere.
by CNB