Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 14, 1993 TAG: 9306140326
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Does it slap a stigma on them?
Could the intensive attention that Alternative Ed teachers beam on students be worked into home schools, so students wouldn't have to leave?
Or do they need a small, separate setting like Alternative Ed to bond with teachers, learn self-control and regain their academic bearings?
The staff at Alternative Ed is eager to hear the thinking of Wayne Harris, who takes over as Roanoke's school superintendent next month. He wouldn't say this spring what he thinks about it.
Harris hadn't been to Alternative Ed yet, and he didn't want to make judgments before Superintendent Frank Tota leaves office.
Questions about alternative education - its purpose, its many forms - have been debated nationally for years.
In her travels around the country, Mary Anne Raywid, a the Hofstra University education professor, has found three kinds of programs that are called alternative education:
"Holding pens for the losers," or "soft jails" that warehouse students who can't make it elsewhere.
Well-meaning, humane places that nonetheless treat students as deficient and unfairly hold them responsible for their predicaments.
Programs that are both caring and challenging. These, exemplified by New York City's Alternative Education schools, offer creative classes that turn students into success stories.
Raywid has studied, visited and helped start "Alternative Ed" programs for 20 years.
The best ones do two things, she said: They make kids feel a strong connection with the staff and the school. They present education in a way that helps kids find learning meaningful when they didn't before.
The second part is the rarer. "Not all of the people who are humanely inspired look at new kinds of content and instruction," she said.
But that is essential for engaging the youngsters, she said, because simply "isolating them and segregating them in a school that everyone recognizes as a school for losers adds insult to injury."
Joe Nathan, an educational innovator at the University of Minnesota, said alternative education was born of civil rights-era demands for higher academic goals for minority children and of progressives' demands for more open, flexible and challenging schools for all children.
In the '70s, he said, some systems began to aim alternative education at young people in trouble at their home schools.
That's the way alternative ed has been used in Roanoke since the Alternative Education Center began seven years ago.
Many Roanoke educators, including Peter Lewis, Alternative Ed's founding director, think those kids need a separate place like the center. "We can make a kid feel comfortable. We can make them feel wanted."
He and others at Alternative Ed want their own free-standing building. That way, they could avoid the discomfort of being in a wing of Addison Aerospace Magnet Middle School.
Addison parents were alarmed when an Alternative Ed senior was shot in the school parking lot in September.
Beverly Burks, Addison's principal, says a student transferred out of Addison after the incident.
Even though other students in Roanoke think of Alternative Ed kids as troublemakers, Lewis says: "We have less fights and trouble-trouble than other schools."
Alternative Ed's students are not allowed to use Addison's hallways. When they eat lunch in the Addison cafeteria, they go at at 10:10 a.m., before Addison kids eat. They walk around the outside of Addison to enter the cafeteria.
"Now if it's raining, thundering and lightning," Burks said, "we don't mind" them using Addison's halls. "That's only happened a couple of times."
It's awkward, but William Hackley, an assistant school superintendent, thinks sending Alternative Ed kids to a separate building would seem like exile.
He and George Franklin, Alternative Ed's director, may give Alternative Ed a new name, something without the ring of banishment to it.
Some Roanoke educators, including some at Alternative Ed, think the center should have separate programs for discipline problems and academic troubles.
Philip Trompeter, a juvenile court judge in Roanoke, says the school system must deal with class disruption, truancy and other problems earlier in a child's schooling and not dump them on Alternative Ed when they reach their teens.
He also worries about what becomes of the kids after Alternative Ed. "What happens is, when they leave that womb there, they return to a world of chaos, to no nurturance. It's amazing to me that these kids manage as well as they do."
But at least for a few months or a few years, they have a home at Alternative Ed.
by CNB