At risk

School is out, and a mess of Roxbury high-school students, having just endured yet another frustrating day of statewide exams, are climbing over each other to collect backpacks and puffy coats so they can get the hell out of the building. In the chaos, a senior's leather jacket goes missing. This teenager -- call him kid number one -- is livid: somebody stole his jacket, and he thinks he knows who. Within the hour, kid number two is wearing the stolen jacket around Dudley Station, dauntless, even amid other students who know it doesn't belong to him. Kid number one spots him and wants to make him pay. Here comes the showdown.

Kids have killed each other for less. During the worst years of this city's juvenile-homicide epidemic, a sideways glance, a misheard comment, an imagined dis, was enough to end a life. In that milieu, a stolen jacket was almost grounds for justifiable homicide. But no one gets taken out today at Dudley Station. No knives or guns are pulled. Not even a punch is thrown.

These seniors are students at Community Academy in Roxbury, an alternative school for students with the kinds of behavior problems that have gotten them suspended or expelled from mainstream Boston public schools. The leather jacket incident doesn't end in disaster because an academy staffer makes sure to go down to Dudley Square with the senior, and intervenes to persuade kid number two to return the jacket. If he doesn't, this incident could prevent him from graduating in a few weeks.

The academy's signal achievement has been to make that a persuasive argument: to make the system's at-risk kids care about whether they get a high-school diploma, and to think twice about throwing it away over something trivial. So kid number two gives up the jacket, agrees to do a week of community service, and apologizes. A fragile peace is restored. Everybody stays off the six o'clock news.

In two weeks, Boston's public school students will be going into summer vacation. For many, this means losing the structure -- and safety -- the school year provides and returning full-time to their neighborhoods, which can be dangerous places. Five years ago, when juvenile crime was pandemic, and before Community Academy was founded, the city could be certain that some of those students would have brushes with the juvenile-justice system -- or worse -- over the summer.

But most of the kids at Community Academy, many of them written off by the rest of the school system, have a better chance of coming back in September, or of going into higher education and jobs after graduation, than they ever would have had without the program. At the academy, students who were the regular schools' most intractable discipline problems wear ties and open doors for visitors. Kids who spent not weeks but months away from their regular schools last year have been absent from Community Academy for only days this year. Most of this year's graduating seniors are college bound. And the program has become one of the jewels in the school system's crown.

So it's ironic that this alternative school is running into so many problems. For the past year, Community Academy has had temporary, and completely unsuitable, digs in a community center: every day at 12:45, the school has to erase itself for aerobics junkies and ballplayers. The city had found the academy a building, but it fell through last week, according to a schools official. Its replacement is not yet definite.

Meanwhile, as word of the program's effectiveness spreads, its population continues to grow; consequently, its resources are stretched, and it becomes more difficult for it to do what it does best. And now the city wants to expand the program even further. At a time when the school shootings in Arkansas and Oregon and a resurgence in gang activity in Boston have upped the ante on the kind of work Community Academy does, staffers are wondering whether the school system is going to ruin their experiment.

It is 10:30 a.m. on a warm, student-free Friday, and 15 Community Academy staff members are gathered in a big circle for one of their regular meetings. The first topic of discussion is a student who has proved more intractable than most.

Severely learning-disabled, he disrupts classes and just ups and leaves the room when he feels like it. Fracturing classes in his mainstream school got him expelled, and now he's doing the same thing here, frittering away his last chance. A couple of male staffers say they've had to save him from fights outside the school because he seems unable to stop himself from antagonizing other kids. Earlier this week, somebody pulled a knife on him.

"As a black man in this country," says one of the teachers, "if he goes on with that foolishness, he will get locked up or shot or killed."

Finally, after a full half-hour of discussion, staffers decide that it would be more dangerous to cut the kid loose than to keep him. They resolve to bring him before all of them on Monday morning, tell him how high the stakes are, give him one more chance, and make him agree to a written contract to behave better.

This concentrated, individual attention, combined with constant reinforcement, is key to Community Academy's success. The strategy isn't easy, but it's simple: convince kids you're sufficiently invested in them, and most, even the truly troubled ones, eventually will come around.

Brenda Love, Community Academy's principal, polices a corridor at the changeover of classes, together with three other staff members. The kids, all of whom conform to the school's dress code (no sneakers, no hats, no pagers, no cell phones, and shirts and ties for the boys), move as with cement feet through Jell-O -- inching their way from one room to the next, stopping at the candy machine, finding excuses to avoid the inevitable. Sometimes Love yells "Go to class!" or "Come on, ladies!" Mostly, though, she gives the students hugs, asks them how they're doing, and treats them with such sweetness that they cannot refuse her when she moves them along.

Community Academy's success is bound up with Love. She is both good cop and bad cop: unabashedly attached to her charges, she gets teary-eyed when she describes their backgrounds. But she can also reduce kids to stunned compliance when she needs to, getting right in their faces and yelling at those who are most out of control.

"The key to dealing with them," Love says, "is setting up high expectations of them, and building relationships with them." When the Education Reform Act of 1993 expanded Massachusetts principals' power to expel students and mandated that public schools educate students after expulsion, the school department set up Community Academy, and Love -- who as a suburban teacher was enormously successful with disruptive students -- was the obvious choice to head it. She agreed to do it on the condition that she be allowed to handpick her staff: she took a couple of teachers from Boston Latin and a math teacher with a doctorate, among others. Some members of the academy's staff were already working in fields that brought them into contact with the kids they now teach -- the juvenile justice system, for example, or community programs for youth.

Eighty percent of Community Academy's 118 students have been expelled from public schools all over Boston for offenses that include bringing a miniature plastic meat cleaver to school, throwing acid in a teacher's eyes, and packing a loaded Smith & Wesson. About 10 of the students here have been involved in gangs. A couple are sixth graders, about 25 are middle schoolers, and the rest are high-school students, mostly juniors and seniors.

Every one of those students is better off than before. At the academy, some have gone further than they'd allowed themselves to dream when they were in regular schools. Of the 30 students in this year's senior class, 12 will graduate next week. Another eight will qualify for diplomas after summer school. Twelve of the graduating students have been accepted to college; another will join the Marines, and one will go to City Year. Of the 400 students to walk through her doors in the last four years, Love estimates that as few as 20 have been charged with additional offenses.

Sometimes, the school fails to reach a kid, or can't protect him. Eric Paulding, the first juvenile to be murdered in Boston in two and a half years, was a Community Academy student. And six months ago, another student was stabbed on the way to Dudley Station even though the school and police were watching the area. But these are exceptions.

Community Academy, as its name suggests, places a high premium on true community-based education. From the start, it was vital that the academy not be housed in a school building but in a separate space, close to services in the Roxbury neighborhood. Community groups and social-service providers set up student internships and help with facilities problems. Judges, probation officers, local police, and the city anti-gang unit all visit the school regularly. Folks in Roxbury know these kids.

Academy staffers are required to put in much more time here than they would in a regular school, many of those hours outside the building. Love will usually go to court with a kid who's gotten into trouble and promise to keep him or her in line in return for leniency. And all the academy's staffers are expected to make home visits to ensure their charges' progress and to involve parents in their children's educations. "We don't leave room for kids to make excuses," Love says. Because of those visits, academy parents are more involved in their children's educations now than when the kids were in regular schools.

More important, most of the staffers live among the kids, in the local community. That makes dropping in on a student's family easier. And if staff members are accessible and visible in the neighborhoods where students live, those students have good examples to aspire to and someone to go to if they're in trouble. "These students have role models," says Love. "The teachers live in the community. Can [schools officials] from Court Street come to Dorchester and have kids hug them and say hello?"

By very deliberate design, more than half the program's staffers are black men with master's degrees. "A lot of these kids have never been around positive black role models who aren't judges or probation officers," says math teacher Richard Williamson. "That is the major factor here."

To these supports, Love and her staff add expectations. The rhetoric drilled into these mostly minority students is twofold: give nothing less than 105 percent in everything (quiz scores are marked out of a possible 105), and "get off the plantation": in other words, make a life for yourself, because nobody else will do it for you. Academy students often talk of buying homes and starting businesses, and they seem to mean it.

Most of the battle is convincing kids that their success or failure affects someone beyond themselves. Love is certain that kids will improve their behavior if they feel an adult is invested in them, and many of the academy's students agree. Andre Roberts, a 19-year-old senior in a brown suede shirt and gold-rimmed glasses, was disruptive at his high school because, he says, "I wasn't getting enough attention from the teachers. I was at the point where I didn't want to go back. They looked at me like I'm an ignorant person." That was part of Roberts's problem, but not all of it. Before he came to Community Academy, he also got busted for a gun offense. He was locked up after he started at the school.

"I went away for a year," he says. "It didn't even take that long for me to realize. Ms Love cried and made me feel bad. I knew I had to come back to school."

All this is possible because Community Academy is so small. Since there are only about a hundred students in the building most days, the teachers and students all know one another, and they keep tabs on one another.

And the staff to student ratio is much healthier here than in the mainstream system: one teacher for every 15 students, compared to one for every 30 or so students in regular schools: that allows the teachers here the time to get on students' cases constantly. Many of these kids were passed up through the grades without knowledge of basic skills. Ask them the best thing about the academy, and they consistently answer that here, teachers do not let them slide. In a recent class, a senior hands in an incomplete mythology quiz; the young teacher, Darius Green, pulls his paper from a pile and stands over him till he gets it done.

"Question 10. Is it Athena's fault or not?" he asks the student, whose energy seems to have been completely spent on one through nine. The kid mumbles yes. "You just answered the question!" says Green, pleading, kneeling before the kid. "I'll even give you the pencil! Write it down! An opinion is neither right nor wrong." The kid completes the paper, and Green is exhausted: in a regular school, there simply isn't time or staff enough for this kind of concentration. But without it, many of these students have foundered.

In a way, Community Academy is too successful. The more acclaim it garners, the more students it attracts, and the further its resources are stretched. The program is filled beyond its capacity: even though Love has space for just 65 students, 118 are in the program. And the waiting list is 180 names long.

Regular schools don't stop expelling students just because Community Academy is at capacity, and the program is required to take most kids kicked out of other public schools. Theoretically, kids are supposed to stay here for just one year, but most of the students who come through Community Academy stay for two, three, or four years, until graduation. Most of them simply don't want to leave, and it doesn't make sense to send them back anyway: other schools aren't equipped to give them the attention they need, and many of them feel safer in the program. Love can't bring herself to return her charges to regular schools when they're finally thriving, and nobody -- not the kids, not the schools that sent them, not the school department -- wants her to.

But it's not just other schools that send students to Community Academy: judges, probation officers, and street workers, impressed by the program, direct kids there, too. "Lawyers try to push their clients through the red tape to get them in," says Love, "because judges recommended the school instead of getting kids committed [to state custody]."

All of this only accentuates the facilities problems that have always plagued Community Academy: right now, Love isn't sure where her school will be come September. When the program began four years ago, it was housed in the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club building, where maintaining autonomy was a battle. At the end of the 1996-97 school year, the club decided not to renew the academy's lease. So, as a one-year stopgap, the program moved to the city-owned Shelburne Center, on Washington Street in Roxbury.

There, the academy must operate around the community center's schedule. The building is completely unsuited to educating children, especially children with learning difficulties. Classrooms are set up every morning and broken down every afternoon -- chairs piled up into huge towers, records and assignments stored in portable plastic file boxes -- to make room for aerobics classes and basketball games. Some days, the gymnasium houses two or more classes, and there's no way for the kids to avoid each other's noise. None of the teachers has a permanent desk, let alone an office.

The school department, plagued by facilities problems across the system, just can't seem to get it together for Community Academy. Al Holland, the department's point man on facilities, who was involved in the founding of the academy, told a group of teachers a few weeks ago that the city was all set to move the program into the Council of Elders building on Seaver Street, in Roxbury, until a permanent home could be found. The teachers, who tend to believe the school department is treating them badly, were temporarily placated.

Two weeks later, the deal was nixed: the required renovations would have cost more than the city is prepared to spend. So Holland and Love are looking at yet another property, on Shirley Street, also in Roxbury. But with the school year ending June 23, the principal is starting to get nervous. "I am worried," she says. "It's May 29, and I have nothing in writing. I'm getting applications for next year, and all I can do is put them in a cardboard box that says `lock in storage.' "

Holland says he is certain that Community Academy will be housed come September, and Mayor Menino says the facilities problem is "taken care of." But as the directors of most pilot schools know, City Hall has trouble putting up the money to back Holland's good intentions, even when a school is as beloved as this one, and even when a property has been spotted. People close to the academy aren't holding their breath.

For her part, the usually indefatigable Love is disheartened. "I've been hired to educate these kids," she says, "and we're doing that. But this is very hurtful. We've got people coming in from all parts of this city and from other states. They see our innovations, but they also see our facilities problems."

The city and the school department have made life difficult for Community Academy, but they hold the program in high esteem. Love's achievement -- restoring expelled students', and their families', faith in the public school system -- is no mean feat, and the school department knows it. Many of the students who come to her arrive with bad attitudes and worse intentions, with little incentive to stay in school and out of trouble. That she has kids graduating at all, let alone going to college, is remarkable. And they do so despite the physical environment in which they must learn.

That's why there have been calls to expand Community Academy: the school department, understandably, wants to capitalize on the program's success by bringing its benefits to more kids. But in a system where every cent of the schools' half-billion-dollar budget is stretched, and there's no money for another expensive alternative program, funneling more kids into Community Academy may not be the best way. Simply enlarging the academy overlooks an important opportunity to bring the program's lessons to the rest of the system, denying regular schools a chance to help kids rather than expel them.

Certainly some students, especially the most disruptive, need to be taken out of mainstream schools. But others could benefit from some of the academy's methods before they reach that point. There should be more room in regular school environments for a sense of consistency and community, for higher expectations, for staff willing to make that trip to a student's house.

But Brenda Love says regular schools haven't been that interested. "We need a closer relationship with the schools," she says. "We need to have the alternative programs do training with traditional middle and high schools to show them what's been working. The invitation is there, but it hasn't been capitalized on."

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.