Two articles about two different schools.
Jun. 8th, 2005 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One for homeless kids.
Teaching the Homeless, and Fighting a Trend
By TAMAR LEWIN
PHOENIX - Just after lunch at Pappas Regional Elementary School, where all 598 students come from homeless families, a small boy reported to Erin Angelini, the social worker, that he had no idea where to go after school. The night before, he and his mother were evicted from the motel where they had been living.
"At most schools, kindergarten kids don't know the word evicted, but here they all do," Ms. Angelini said.
After asking if the boy's mother had told him she would pick him up at school, and hearing that, no, she had been sleeping when he left, Ms. Angelini rushed to the motel to look for the woman. But the manager confirmed that she had left, unable to pay her bill. On a hunch, Ms. Angelini called the city's Family Services Center, where the woman was waiting in the lobby, and worked out an emergency plan that would allow her and her son to stay at the motel for one more week.
It was a stopgap. But then, the school itself is a stopgap for children whose families live in shelters, in parks, doubled up in cramped quarters with relatives, or in a strip of dingy motels long since abandoned by tourists.
By all rights, schools like Pappas Elementary should be near extinction. After all, a 2002 federal law prohibited separate schools for homeless children. The law also guaranteed homeless children the right to stay in their original schools, and required every district to name a liaison for homeless students.
Many districts have made tremendous strides in serving homeless children in mainstream schools, with social workers who help arrange transportation, clothing and food. And many districts discovered that when they trained school personnel to identify homeless students, they began to notice, and serve, many more such children in their classrooms.
But thanks to strong local backing in Congress, the Pappas schools - there are three campuses in Phoenix, serving more than 1,100 students - were exempted from the law, along with schools for homeless children in three California counties.
"The clear national trend is toward inclusion, as the federal law requires," said Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. "As a basic civil rights issue, children shouldn't be segregated because of their housing status. They need the stability of their home schools, which should provide the services they need."
But just as historically black colleges and women's colleges continue to draw students even after decades of integration and affirmative action, the Pappas schools are going strong. For some students, there is comfort in being at an institution shaped around their experiences and needs.
"We had the children going to another school, but we like this one better, because they get more attention," said Jose Cabrero, who sends four grandchildren he is raising to Pappas. "When the last two came, we didn't have any paperwork for them or anything, but they got right in."
The Pappas schools' very separateness makes Phoenix's homeless children highly visible, attracting a flood of community donations, enough to maintain a food pantry where students' families can get groceries, and a toy room for birthday presents, and a clothing room where every child can choose three new outfits a month.
The school has mentors and tutors who work with children individually. It has showers and a clinic, and every child gets breakfast and lunch. But there are more subtle nods to the children's situations, too.
For children in homeless families, who move frequently, transportation is often the biggest hurdle to school attendance. But the Pappas buses shift routes as children move, and outreach workers track where the families are living. Most of the students get off the bus in the morning carrying nothing - no backpack, no books. Teachers know that homework is hard to manage in the students' living situations.
"If a child falls asleep at a regular school, you wake him up and tell him to pay attention," said Dina Vance, the principal. "But when I taught here, I'd pick up the child and carry him to a spot where he could sleep for a few hours. This is a place where these kids feel comfortable, where they're free to pop up and say, 'I need a shower.' "
Pappas is not academically outstanding - no surprise, since most of the 25 or so new students who arrive at the school each week are two or three years below grade level.
Classes are large, and in one squirmy first grade, the teacher spent an interminable half-hour on a simple worksheet with pictures of things that started or ended with "k" - an activity that engaged no more than a handful of the children.
But last year, Pappas, previously an "underperforming" school on state report cards, met state and federal standards.
Sandra E. Dowling, who founded the school 25 years ago with eight students and is now superintendent of the Maricopa County Schools, said that in principle, it would be better for homeless children to stay in their old neighborhood schools.
"I would love to see these kids in mainstream schools getting all the support and help they need," Dr. Dowling said. "But as a practical matter, that's not what happens."
In Phoenix, she said, about 95 percent of the homeless children attend the Pappas schools. And that, Ms. Duffield said, is part of the problem. Separate schools, she said, make it much easier for shelters and social workers to refer students there than to fight for the transportation and support they need to stay in a mainstream school.
"When I first started in the field, 20-some years ago, the fact that children were homeless seemed like a temporary crisis, a problem that could be eradicated," said Steve Banks, attorney in chief at New York's Legal Aid Society. "What's so shameful now, whatever the programs to help them, is the national acceptance that there are homeless children."
In the end, advocates say, no school can solve the most fundamental problem facing homeless children.
"Study after study shows that lack of housing affects kids' ability to do well in school," Mr. Banks said. "Ultimately, this is a housing problem, not an educational one."
One on a school for "troublesome" kids.
Melee Keeps Spotlight on Hard Life at Academy
By KIRK SEMPLE
OGDENSBURG, N.Y. - The melee at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a boarding school here for troubled teenagers, began at about 10:15 p.m. on May 16 when someone pulled a fire alarm in the boys' dormitory.
Within moments, students were smashing windows, overturning furniture and fighting, with some trying to help the academy's security guards squelch the disturbance. Eleven students fled the campus, near the Canadian border, and bolted into the night.
Ogdensburg police officers, state troopers, St. Lawrence County sheriff's deputies and the United States Border Patrol were called in and the uprising was quickly put down. Those who escaped were rounded up, and the police arrested and jailed 12 students on rioting, assault and other charges; the academy expelled 48.
Administrators say the uprising was not a result of systemic problems in the academy but of the mixture of combustible characters in a severe disciplinary environment meant to rehabilitate teenagers who have run afoul of the law and their parents.
Jason Finlinson, 33, Ivy Ridge's director, said in an interview at the academy last month that with the expulsions, the school had shed its most troublesome residents.
Still, the violence brought more unwanted attention to an institution that, since opening three years ago, has drawn the scrutiny of state investigative agencies and attracted a loud chorus of critics, including former students who have accused the school of mistreatment.
The office of Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, is investigating whether Ivy Ridge violated state law by issuing diplomas, since it is not accredited by the state. The state police are investigating two cases involving allegations of child abuse and one case stemming from the riot.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators say all allegations of abuse are false and the invention of disgruntled former students and competitors in the potentially lucrative industry of so-called specialty boarding schools.
Mr. Finlinson said the school was offering a valuable service for parents who feel they have run out of ways to help their children. It's also an expensive service. Tuition and fees are about $3,500 per month.
"We're in a pretty controversial industry," said Mr. Finlinson, who oversees about 500 students and a staff of about 230. "When you're trying to change people's lives, there's controversy. If I didn't want the controversy, I'd go wash cars."
Ivy Ridge comprises a cluster of nondescript brick buildings and a playing field on the campus of a former junior college overlooking the St. Lawrence River. The campus is on the outskirts of Ogdensburg, a small town set amid farmland, about 128 miles northeast of Syracuse.
Its white cinder-block hallways and classrooms are remarkably quiet, and the students - the boys, with close-cropped hair and uniforms of khaki trousers and white shirts; the girls in plaid skirts - move around the building in single file. The children, who are high school age, come from all over the country and abroad and arrive with records of drug and alcohol use, tangles with the law, truancy, domestic violence and splintered families. But they share one thing in common - parents who, at wit's end, have decided that the academy's steep tuition is a small price for a last-ditch effort to straighten out their children.
The academy is affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, a chain of six behavior modification programs in the United States and abroad run by a small group of businessmen in St. George, Utah. In recent years, local governments and the United States State Department have investigated allegations of physical abuse and immigration violations leveled against World Wide-affiliated programs. Affiliates in Costa Rica, the Czech Republic and Mexico closed under pressure from local authorities, and one in Western Samoa closed for "business reasons," according to James Wall, a public relations representative for World Wide.
Ivy Ridge's program, which Mr. Finlinson said was based on a plan developed by World Wide, is highly regimented and emphasizes discipline. Students try to progress through six levels based on a system of merit points. Privileges are granted at each level. Residents are not allowed to receive telephone calls from their parents until they attain Level 3, which can take several months.
The program includes an academic curriculum, though it is primarily computer-based and self-directed: students spend several hours a day in front of computers working silently on programs.
In the days after the disturbance in May, Mr. Finlinson said, a few parents withdrew their children. But he said that the school was now stable and running smoothly.
Nevertheless, his troubles - and the threat of more damage to the academy's reputation - have not disappeared.
Mr. Spitzer, in his investigation of the academy's status as an accredited school, has forced Ivy Ridge to stop issuing high school diplomas. The academy was accredited until recently by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools in Boise, Idaho, which is not a registered accrediting organization in New York State. As a result of the investigation, Northwest Association suspended the academy's accreditation.
The New York Department of Education has determined that it does not have oversight of the academy. "It is a behavior modification center," said Jonathan Burman, a department spokesman, "and not a school."
The state police are also investigating three cases involving the academy, a state police spokesman said. He declined to reveal the nature of the cases, except that one was concerned with the May 16 disturbance.
Mr. Finlinson said he believed the cases involved allegations of child abuse.
On Internet sites that criticize Ivy Ridge and other World Wide affiliates, abuse allegations abound, including charges that staff members punched children and deprived them of food as punishment.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators deny all the allegations. "We go to great lengths to make sure it's a safe environment," the director said, listing a number of precautions, including staff training, security cameras throughout the school and a rule that forbids private one-on-one interactions between adults and students.
He pointed out that no criminal charges have ever been filed against the school in spite of numerous police investigations into abuse allegations.
Leah Swigert, 20, of Eastin, Md., was a student at two World Wide-affiliated programs, including Ivy Ridge, which she left in 2002. Her parents committed her to the program because, she said, she had become unruly and was smoking a lot of marijuana.
On some level, it appears, the program worked. Ms. Swigert is about to graduate from community college and is working as a paralegal. But her memories of Ivy Ridge are entirely negative. She called the program "a scam," noting particularly the academic curriculum.
"I'll still have bad dreams and wake up sweating and crying," she said in a telephone interview. "Nothing really terrible happened. But I think that just about every single day I wanted to run away."
Still, Ms. Swigert says that she never once witnessed any of the kinds of abuses that are regularly posted on the Web. "I never saw anything like that," she said, speculating that many of the allegations probably came from former or current students "who are mad and are trying to get the place shut down."
In interviews at the academy last week, six students - four selected by the administration and two randomly chosen by a reporter, said, in the presence of other students, that they had never been victims of physical abuse or witnessed physical abuse of any kind. They said the staff was allowed to use force on residents only when they became violent and, even then, they used a restraint technique resembling a bear hug.
"I heard about the investigations, but I think it's ridiculous," said Houston Woolery, 18, of Cottonwood, Calif., who has been at Ivy Ridge for nearly nine months and was one of the students selected by the administration for the interviews. "This is the best thing that ever happened to me."
Five of the students said they had initially hated the academy but eventually came to appreciate and, to a certain degree, embrace its tough-love approach.
The sixth student, Gabrielle Sorenson, 14, of Ava, Mo., had been sent to the academy only three days earlier. With her eyes lowered, she said, "This is probably the best choice for me."
Teaching the Homeless, and Fighting a Trend
By TAMAR LEWIN
PHOENIX - Just after lunch at Pappas Regional Elementary School, where all 598 students come from homeless families, a small boy reported to Erin Angelini, the social worker, that he had no idea where to go after school. The night before, he and his mother were evicted from the motel where they had been living.
"At most schools, kindergarten kids don't know the word evicted, but here they all do," Ms. Angelini said.
After asking if the boy's mother had told him she would pick him up at school, and hearing that, no, she had been sleeping when he left, Ms. Angelini rushed to the motel to look for the woman. But the manager confirmed that she had left, unable to pay her bill. On a hunch, Ms. Angelini called the city's Family Services Center, where the woman was waiting in the lobby, and worked out an emergency plan that would allow her and her son to stay at the motel for one more week.
It was a stopgap. But then, the school itself is a stopgap for children whose families live in shelters, in parks, doubled up in cramped quarters with relatives, or in a strip of dingy motels long since abandoned by tourists.
By all rights, schools like Pappas Elementary should be near extinction. After all, a 2002 federal law prohibited separate schools for homeless children. The law also guaranteed homeless children the right to stay in their original schools, and required every district to name a liaison for homeless students.
Many districts have made tremendous strides in serving homeless children in mainstream schools, with social workers who help arrange transportation, clothing and food. And many districts discovered that when they trained school personnel to identify homeless students, they began to notice, and serve, many more such children in their classrooms.
But thanks to strong local backing in Congress, the Pappas schools - there are three campuses in Phoenix, serving more than 1,100 students - were exempted from the law, along with schools for homeless children in three California counties.
"The clear national trend is toward inclusion, as the federal law requires," said Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. "As a basic civil rights issue, children shouldn't be segregated because of their housing status. They need the stability of their home schools, which should provide the services they need."
But just as historically black colleges and women's colleges continue to draw students even after decades of integration and affirmative action, the Pappas schools are going strong. For some students, there is comfort in being at an institution shaped around their experiences and needs.
"We had the children going to another school, but we like this one better, because they get more attention," said Jose Cabrero, who sends four grandchildren he is raising to Pappas. "When the last two came, we didn't have any paperwork for them or anything, but they got right in."
The Pappas schools' very separateness makes Phoenix's homeless children highly visible, attracting a flood of community donations, enough to maintain a food pantry where students' families can get groceries, and a toy room for birthday presents, and a clothing room where every child can choose three new outfits a month.
The school has mentors and tutors who work with children individually. It has showers and a clinic, and every child gets breakfast and lunch. But there are more subtle nods to the children's situations, too.
For children in homeless families, who move frequently, transportation is often the biggest hurdle to school attendance. But the Pappas buses shift routes as children move, and outreach workers track where the families are living. Most of the students get off the bus in the morning carrying nothing - no backpack, no books. Teachers know that homework is hard to manage in the students' living situations.
"If a child falls asleep at a regular school, you wake him up and tell him to pay attention," said Dina Vance, the principal. "But when I taught here, I'd pick up the child and carry him to a spot where he could sleep for a few hours. This is a place where these kids feel comfortable, where they're free to pop up and say, 'I need a shower.' "
Pappas is not academically outstanding - no surprise, since most of the 25 or so new students who arrive at the school each week are two or three years below grade level.
Classes are large, and in one squirmy first grade, the teacher spent an interminable half-hour on a simple worksheet with pictures of things that started or ended with "k" - an activity that engaged no more than a handful of the children.
But last year, Pappas, previously an "underperforming" school on state report cards, met state and federal standards.
Sandra E. Dowling, who founded the school 25 years ago with eight students and is now superintendent of the Maricopa County Schools, said that in principle, it would be better for homeless children to stay in their old neighborhood schools.
"I would love to see these kids in mainstream schools getting all the support and help they need," Dr. Dowling said. "But as a practical matter, that's not what happens."
In Phoenix, she said, about 95 percent of the homeless children attend the Pappas schools. And that, Ms. Duffield said, is part of the problem. Separate schools, she said, make it much easier for shelters and social workers to refer students there than to fight for the transportation and support they need to stay in a mainstream school.
"When I first started in the field, 20-some years ago, the fact that children were homeless seemed like a temporary crisis, a problem that could be eradicated," said Steve Banks, attorney in chief at New York's Legal Aid Society. "What's so shameful now, whatever the programs to help them, is the national acceptance that there are homeless children."
In the end, advocates say, no school can solve the most fundamental problem facing homeless children.
"Study after study shows that lack of housing affects kids' ability to do well in school," Mr. Banks said. "Ultimately, this is a housing problem, not an educational one."
One on a school for "troublesome" kids.
Melee Keeps Spotlight on Hard Life at Academy
By KIRK SEMPLE
OGDENSBURG, N.Y. - The melee at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a boarding school here for troubled teenagers, began at about 10:15 p.m. on May 16 when someone pulled a fire alarm in the boys' dormitory.
Within moments, students were smashing windows, overturning furniture and fighting, with some trying to help the academy's security guards squelch the disturbance. Eleven students fled the campus, near the Canadian border, and bolted into the night.
Ogdensburg police officers, state troopers, St. Lawrence County sheriff's deputies and the United States Border Patrol were called in and the uprising was quickly put down. Those who escaped were rounded up, and the police arrested and jailed 12 students on rioting, assault and other charges; the academy expelled 48.
Administrators say the uprising was not a result of systemic problems in the academy but of the mixture of combustible characters in a severe disciplinary environment meant to rehabilitate teenagers who have run afoul of the law and their parents.
Jason Finlinson, 33, Ivy Ridge's director, said in an interview at the academy last month that with the expulsions, the school had shed its most troublesome residents.
Still, the violence brought more unwanted attention to an institution that, since opening three years ago, has drawn the scrutiny of state investigative agencies and attracted a loud chorus of critics, including former students who have accused the school of mistreatment.
The office of Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, is investigating whether Ivy Ridge violated state law by issuing diplomas, since it is not accredited by the state. The state police are investigating two cases involving allegations of child abuse and one case stemming from the riot.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators say all allegations of abuse are false and the invention of disgruntled former students and competitors in the potentially lucrative industry of so-called specialty boarding schools.
Mr. Finlinson said the school was offering a valuable service for parents who feel they have run out of ways to help their children. It's also an expensive service. Tuition and fees are about $3,500 per month.
"We're in a pretty controversial industry," said Mr. Finlinson, who oversees about 500 students and a staff of about 230. "When you're trying to change people's lives, there's controversy. If I didn't want the controversy, I'd go wash cars."
Ivy Ridge comprises a cluster of nondescript brick buildings and a playing field on the campus of a former junior college overlooking the St. Lawrence River. The campus is on the outskirts of Ogdensburg, a small town set amid farmland, about 128 miles northeast of Syracuse.
Its white cinder-block hallways and classrooms are remarkably quiet, and the students - the boys, with close-cropped hair and uniforms of khaki trousers and white shirts; the girls in plaid skirts - move around the building in single file. The children, who are high school age, come from all over the country and abroad and arrive with records of drug and alcohol use, tangles with the law, truancy, domestic violence and splintered families. But they share one thing in common - parents who, at wit's end, have decided that the academy's steep tuition is a small price for a last-ditch effort to straighten out their children.
The academy is affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, a chain of six behavior modification programs in the United States and abroad run by a small group of businessmen in St. George, Utah. In recent years, local governments and the United States State Department have investigated allegations of physical abuse and immigration violations leveled against World Wide-affiliated programs. Affiliates in Costa Rica, the Czech Republic and Mexico closed under pressure from local authorities, and one in Western Samoa closed for "business reasons," according to James Wall, a public relations representative for World Wide.
Ivy Ridge's program, which Mr. Finlinson said was based on a plan developed by World Wide, is highly regimented and emphasizes discipline. Students try to progress through six levels based on a system of merit points. Privileges are granted at each level. Residents are not allowed to receive telephone calls from their parents until they attain Level 3, which can take several months.
The program includes an academic curriculum, though it is primarily computer-based and self-directed: students spend several hours a day in front of computers working silently on programs.
In the days after the disturbance in May, Mr. Finlinson said, a few parents withdrew their children. But he said that the school was now stable and running smoothly.
Nevertheless, his troubles - and the threat of more damage to the academy's reputation - have not disappeared.
Mr. Spitzer, in his investigation of the academy's status as an accredited school, has forced Ivy Ridge to stop issuing high school diplomas. The academy was accredited until recently by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools in Boise, Idaho, which is not a registered accrediting organization in New York State. As a result of the investigation, Northwest Association suspended the academy's accreditation.
The New York Department of Education has determined that it does not have oversight of the academy. "It is a behavior modification center," said Jonathan Burman, a department spokesman, "and not a school."
The state police are also investigating three cases involving the academy, a state police spokesman said. He declined to reveal the nature of the cases, except that one was concerned with the May 16 disturbance.
Mr. Finlinson said he believed the cases involved allegations of child abuse.
On Internet sites that criticize Ivy Ridge and other World Wide affiliates, abuse allegations abound, including charges that staff members punched children and deprived them of food as punishment.
Mr. Finlinson and other administrators deny all the allegations. "We go to great lengths to make sure it's a safe environment," the director said, listing a number of precautions, including staff training, security cameras throughout the school and a rule that forbids private one-on-one interactions between adults and students.
He pointed out that no criminal charges have ever been filed against the school in spite of numerous police investigations into abuse allegations.
Leah Swigert, 20, of Eastin, Md., was a student at two World Wide-affiliated programs, including Ivy Ridge, which she left in 2002. Her parents committed her to the program because, she said, she had become unruly and was smoking a lot of marijuana.
On some level, it appears, the program worked. Ms. Swigert is about to graduate from community college and is working as a paralegal. But her memories of Ivy Ridge are entirely negative. She called the program "a scam," noting particularly the academic curriculum.
"I'll still have bad dreams and wake up sweating and crying," she said in a telephone interview. "Nothing really terrible happened. But I think that just about every single day I wanted to run away."
Still, Ms. Swigert says that she never once witnessed any of the kinds of abuses that are regularly posted on the Web. "I never saw anything like that," she said, speculating that many of the allegations probably came from former or current students "who are mad and are trying to get the place shut down."
In interviews at the academy last week, six students - four selected by the administration and two randomly chosen by a reporter, said, in the presence of other students, that they had never been victims of physical abuse or witnessed physical abuse of any kind. They said the staff was allowed to use force on residents only when they became violent and, even then, they used a restraint technique resembling a bear hug.
"I heard about the investigations, but I think it's ridiculous," said Houston Woolery, 18, of Cottonwood, Calif., who has been at Ivy Ridge for nearly nine months and was one of the students selected by the administration for the interviews. "This is the best thing that ever happened to me."
Five of the students said they had initially hated the academy but eventually came to appreciate and, to a certain degree, embrace its tough-love approach.
The sixth student, Gabrielle Sorenson, 14, of Ava, Mo., had been sent to the academy only three days earlier. With her eyes lowered, she said, "This is probably the best choice for me."
