Alternative schools
Will they be special places for 'disenchanted youth'
or warehouses for disruptive kids?

During the early 1980s, when Patrick Nizzi was beginning his teaching career, he learned a harsh lesson about expectations for "special education" students.

Nizzi was working at Urbana High School with "disenchanted youth" — young people who weren't motivated to learn. "I remember the principal leading me up to this isolated tower room," Nizzi recalls. "He said, 'All you need to do is keep 'em in the classroom. You don't need to teach them anything; just keep them in the classroom.'"

It didn't take long for Nizzi to realize this attitude was selling his students short. "I saw that the kids had a whole lot more talent," he says. To tap into those talents, Nizzi decided to try a creative approach rather than traditional classroom techniques: He started a small business, working with students to make and sell small leaded glass ornaments. In doing so, Nizzi certainly deviated from the standard classroom curriculum. But he managed to interest his students and give them a few business tools they could apply in their lives.

Now Nizzi is director of an entire school in Champaign devoted to nontraditional educational approaches. It's called CARE Learning Center, and it has been open since January. Funded by the Champaign school district, which appropriated $400,000 in start-up funds and rents the building space from a local nonprofit group, CARE serves 70 students who haven't been able to succeed in the traditional public schools. Many of these students have been deemed "at risk" or "behaviorally disabled," and educators see them as likely dropouts.

State Rep. Rick Winkel, a Republican from Champaign, was so impressed by CARE that he sponsored the "Safe Schools Act" during the spring legislative session, which Gov. Jim Edgar signed last summer. The new law would create alternative schools like CARE throughout the state. It requires districts to consider offering nontraditional educational programs; they would get the funding from the state.

Winkel says alternative school programs, which already number as many as 300 in Illinois (19 of them certified by the State Board of Education), are a new trend in education. Their goals are to keep students from dropping out of school and to improve the learning atmosphere in classrooms by removing students who distract teachers and detract from other students' education. When students disrupt classrooms and end up dropping out, it "does us no good and does them no good," Winkel says. "We need a different approach to engage these kids for the first time and hopefully get them back on track."

CARE came about after the Champaign school board decided an alternative school was needed to help students struggling to learn in traditional classrooms. Many such students were expelled from or dropped out of school. "Champaign [school officials] wanted an alternative school for quite some time because they knew the way they were dealing with some at-risk populations was not as effective as they wanted it to be," says Karen Decker, a former teacher who helped develop curriculum at CARE.

A school is born

In the summer of 1994, a committee of teachers, administrators, counselors and special education workers got together to determine the school's mission and plan its strategy. Over time, that mission has changed somewhat.

"The district envisioned a bright, compliant student that needed a nontraditional place to learn," says Nizzi. "We became a school for problematic students." The students range in age from sixth-graders to seniors in high school. Some are characterized as having extreme behavior problems, while others have little or none.

The school provides some stability and safety to children whose lives outside school may be laced with trauma. It bills itself as a haven from drugs and gangs, and a nurturing alternative to often abusive home lives and dysfunctional families. "We know they have problems," says the Rev. Roland Brown, who works in the school as an aide to science teacher John Blair. "We know some of them are on drugs. But they're here. We'll go from there and teach from there."

That means adapting to students' needs. Teachers devote time to individual instruction. Brown, for instance, has worked with as few as two students at a time just trying to interest them in observing and analyzing worms. It also means leniency when necessary. Students crack jokes, drink cherry colas and walk around during class when they get restless. They may leave the building briefly if they need a smoke.

Perhaps most important, the bulk of class work is finished in the morning to accommodate students' schedules. "Alternative school attempts to be flexible for young people who have jobs and young people who have children," Decker says. "It's a tough job."

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Poignant payoffs

From the first day CARE opened, school officials knew they had a challenge ahead of them. The fights in the streets that day probably tipped them off.

"We face almost daily some issue or some instance that diverts student and staff resources," Decker says. One day, it was a fight that drew police to the school. Another day, it was the violent death of a young student's brother.

Through it all, says Nizzi, patience and support are key. "The kids came to us in their very raw states," he says. "You have to understand, every one of these kids was thrown out of their schools for one reason or another. But we take time to build relationships. We just keep loving them. Unconditionally."

This nurturing attitude seems to have paid off. What might seem like minor achievements in most public schools — things like getting kids to show up for class — are celebrated at CARE. When the school opened, the daily absentee rate hovered between 30 percent and 35 percent. As the year went on, though, attendance was up to 90 percent in some cases.

And students have started to trust the adults who want to help them enjoy learning. "We've seen students attaching to administrators and to teachers — kids who were once very distrustful of those kinds of people," Nizzi says. Decker agrees. "They're beginning to believe that they can be successful because these people who they trust are telling [them] that they have a world of potential," she says. "The students have bought into this concept that this is a safe environment for them to be in.

The extra effort it takes to instill that kind of trust is more than worth it, says Nizzi. He points to a student's poem with a gripping final line that speaks volumes.

"Please," it implores, "don't give up on me."

Erin E. Reep is a journalism student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

28/Month 1995/Illinois Issues