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The
following article by Mensah M. Dean appeared in the Philadelphia Daily
News on November 12, 2002
'We're a different kind of school'
Young offenders are thriving at this city campus
Selling cocaine got
Phillepe Bibbs in. Theft did it for Jamir Moore.
Knocking out a woman on a SEPTA bus was the ticket for Tabitha Lee.
And joy-riding in a stolen car was Daniel Camacho's price of admittance.
They're among the first Philadelphia teens to be sent straight to
an alternative school - instead of city classrooms - after doing
their stints in the Pennsylvania juvenile-justice system. That's
due to a change in state law this year, following a series of Daily
News reports on the number of young offenders who left juvenile
institutions and went directly into neighborhood schools.
The abrupt transition had been tough on those kids and scary for
the schools, where kids found guilty of rape and assault could end
up seated next to innocent students.
But now, the former troublemakers are sitting next to each other
in a school run by a Tennessee-based for-profit company, Community
Education Partners.
And they're thriving.
"Everybody works at their own pace here. And the teachers really
do try to get you on the right track," said Moore, 16, whose
stealing got him kicked out of a charter school and into a boot
camp for three months last year. "They make the lessons fun."
Inside the new program, at 12th Street and Allegheny Avenue, classrooms
are brightly painted. Uniform-wearing students stay on the quiet
side, as they use computers during 20 percent to 30 percent of class
time. They move from class to class in single file. It all belies
the thug-life backgrounds of many in the fast-growing student body,
which numbered about 152 last week.
Principal Ron Cage is at the helm, and he wants to keep the environment
academic rather than penal, though his seasoned security staff of
three will grow once the school reaches its 400-student enrollment
cap.
"These kids are not incapable of learning," said Cage,
who spent 33 years with the district and now works for CEP. "Their
problem is behavior. If you get their behavior under control, they
will learn."
Cage uses some nontraditional methods to straighten out his students,
such as helping them get after-school jobs.
And as their reward for completing the orientation process at the
end of the second week of school, he allowed each student to order
food from McDonald's. Staffers picked it up and brought it back
to school.
"That was the best $117 I ever spent," he said. "You
have no idea the goodwill that that bought. The kids were saying,
'We like it here.' We're a different kind of a school."
All the students remain on court probation, said Gwen Morris, executive
director of the Philadelphia School District's Office of Instructional
and Behavioral Intervention.
Getting students to turn away from their criminal past is a theme
at CEP. Social-studies teacher Brent Johnstone recently used the
lyrics of "Street Dreams," a rap song by Nas and R. Kelly,
to teach his students about the dangers of getting involved in crime.
"The thing for y'all to do is stop dreaming that those streets
have something for you," he told his 11 students, between reading
lyrics. "The reality is, you are kids and you have a chance
to do better things with your lives. That's the lesson."
The district contracts with CEP to run the school. So CEP teachers
work for the company, not the district. Those who are not certified,
take classes from Arcadia University professors who come to the
school, Cage said.
"The teachers are more like us; they're from our neighborhoods,"
said Camacho, 16, who planned to play football at South Philadelphia
High before he took his spin in the stolen car. (He insisted that
he had not stolen the car but merely had been a passenger.)
It's the small classes that allow teachers to "listen to what
you got to say," said Lee, 15. "In a class full of knuckleheads,
they can't listen to you."
Jessica Vazquez, 16, is a ninth- grader who's supposed to be in
11th grade. She said the school's small size makes it impossible
to cut class and fight, two things that got her bounced from a regular
middle school to a district disciplinary school and eventually to
a boot camp in South Mountain, Pa.
"I don't get into all that stuff that I used to. I just do
what I got to do," she said.
Vazquez takes two buses from her Frankford home to get to school.
The commute reduces the time she can spend with her baby son, Mehki,
she said, but she has resolved to make CEP work for her.
"I'm getting too old. I ain't even gonna graduate when I'm
supposed to. I'll be 20 years old."
The district seems resolved to make CEP work, too. Though the district
sends some of its former offenders to other schools designed for
overaged and problem students - and to the 18 evening "Twilight
School" programs - the School Reform Commission is pouring
resources into CEP.
CEP has been running a school for disruptive students at Front Street
and Hunting Park Avenue since 2000. And this fall, the reform commission
approved a $7.9 million contract expansion for CEP to open its school
at 12th Street and Allegheny Avenue to former offenders, and to
open another school elsewhere in the city for troubled students.
But everyone is not happy with the new get-tough law's requirement
that all former offenders be sent to alternative schools.
Last month, two students snared by the law sued the district in
Common Pleas Court to have it overturned. They allege that the law
unfairly treats nonviolent students as if they were violent and
that it is unconstitutional because it targets only students in
Philadelphia.
And a Internet poll last month by Philadelphia Student Voices (www.student-voices.org),
a program funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, showed that
more than 70 percent of respondents oppose sending all juvenile
offenders to an alternative school regardless of the offenses.
The district wouldn't comment on the lawsuit or the poll.
But the controversy does not appear to have penetrated the imposing
stone walls of the 19th-century building where CEP teaches its former
juvenile offenders.
Among those now vowing to walk the straight-and-narrow is Phillepe
Bibbs, the former cocaine dealer. When arrested for dealing in his
North Philly community more than two years ago, Bibbs had already
dropped out of FitzSimons Middle School.
Eventually, he spent 22 months in boot-camp facilities for that
arrest and a second drug arrest. Today, he's president of his school's
student body.
Though drafted for the job, Bibbs said he has learned to embrace
the responsibilities.
"I keep everybody on task, make sure nobody slips off,"
the aspiring rap-music video producer said in his low, gruff voice.
"He's a good role model," Tabitha Lee chuckled.
Once CEP students improve their grades, attendance and behavior,
they can return to a district school.
"I take great pride in that fact," principal Cage said.
"That's what I want to do. I don't want to return a problem
to the district. Our job is to fix it."
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