Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 23, 1995 TAG: 9505230071
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
GREG BUNDICK is literally in a class by himself.
He single-handedly produces the alternative education school's student newspaper, The Flavor News, where topics range from his recent jail sentence to ``creeping,'' which is slang for dating more than one girl at a time.
From 1 to 6 every afternoon, Greg works on the newspaper and takes his final high-school English class - earning the remaining two credits he needs to graduate from William Fleming High School next month.
If his afternoons prepare him for college in the future, it's his mornings that reflect where he's been: He starts his days by checking in with a probation officer downtown, then performing community-service work at the Transportation Museum of Western Virginia.
Greg dropped out of William Fleming High School the fall of 1993.
``I just started hanging with the wrong crowd, smoking weed and skipping,'' the 19-year-old says.
The skipping progressed to dropping out. The dropping out progressed to trouble.
Greg was arrested last summer for possesion of cocaine and marijuana. A few months later he was caught driving without a license.
The judge sent him to the afternoon Drop-In Academy program, where he's one of a dozen former dropouts who have dropped back in. The program, housed at the Noel C. Taylor Learning Academy (formerly called the Alternative Education Center), is a last resort for students who have dropped out or gotten behind in school.
Most of the 120 students there have failed a course their junior and senior years and attend Drop-In after school to catch up and graduate on time. But Drop-In is also the place where the schools hope to recapture some of the students who quit. Eight percent of Roanoke's high schoolers dropped out last year.
Three former dropouts are taking GED classes at Drop-In now. And four, including Greg, attend Drop-In as their only school. Drop-In has even found a spot for an eighth-grader who was kicked out of his home school for hitting a teacher.
Recapturing dropouts requires intensive, one-on-one work. ``Parents have to make sure their kids get to school, but schools need to make it interesting when they do,'' says Rebecca Sears, Greg's journalism teacher and the program director.
Greg works by himself editing the school newspaper, but Sears checks in on him regularly. She takes photographs for his stories, runs him to the central office to computer-scan the photos, and helps him with grammar, printing and distribution.
She calls herself his ``adoptive mother,'' prodding him to fill out his college applications, fussing over him when he comes to school ``looking scruffy,'' and consoling him after a date gone awry.
``He's an honor student now,'' she says proudly. ``And he's a real computer wizard.''
If Greg gets the scholarship administrators are trying to arrange for him at Central State University in Ohio, he'll be the first in his family to go to college - and among the first from the school.
While he says he's scared to leave home and his friends, ``I'm dying to get out of Roanoke so I can stay out of trouble,'' Greg says.
He says he tries to encourage his friends who've dropped out of school to return, but they don't listen. One of his friends, a 20-year-old, was killed last month in a fight over a girl, he says. More than a dozen other friends his age or older are in jail.
Of his other friends, he says, ``I tell 'em there ain't nothing better'' than school.
``Hanging out in the streets, it ain't worth it. They're headed either back to jail or to an early grave.''
|n n| Next month Teresa Harmon will be the first in her family to graduate from high school. ``My mom, my sister, nobody has graduated before,'' she says.
The 20-year-old was following that path herself, having dropped out after her first child, Joshua, was born three years ago. ``I just got more and more tired, and I couldn't come to school,'' Teresa recalls. ``And when I did have the energy, it seems like I always had to take the baby to the doctor.''
Teresa has a second child, Cierra, now. She took GED night school classes once last year, but quit because she couldn't manage child care.
Now a woman babysits for Teresa's kids, and social services pays the bill. Sears is looking for a grant for in-school day care for teen-mom students at the learning academy because she believes it's a leading cause of school dropout.
``It's just so necessary,'' Sears says. ``It's like people would prefer not to know that it's a problem. But once they've made the mistake, they still need to go to school.''
Teresa has attended half-day classes at Drop-In since December, taking independent studies in office assistance and geography, and small-group classes in English, biology and government.
``I used to get D's when I was lucky,'' she says. Now she's on the honor roll.
She wants to take classes at Virginia Western Community College for a year before going to a four-year school. She'd like to be a veterinarian's assistant.
Sears is trying to interest her in Lawrenceville's St. Paul's College, which enrolls young mothers with children.
Teresa still stings from the memory of being turned away from her scheduled graduation in 1992. She'd been jailed for 10 days that semester on petty larceny charges, and Patrick Henry High School failed her for the unexcused absences.
She says she tried to get the absences appealed, but she couldn't locate the judge to sign the form.
``I went to graduation that year in my cap and gown, but they wouldn't let me graduate,'' she says. ``I cried and cried.''
It took her two years to muster the courage and resources to come back. She still has the old graduation gown and plans to wear it at commencement ceremonies next month.
``Being turned away from graduating, it made me feel read stupid. And the people in my family, they still tell me I can't do it.
``I'm gonna show them they're wrong.''
by CNB