The Reform School of Last Resort : Education: Four county agencies work together to help the Visions Interagency Program, or VIP, keep troubled youths in class.

For most of the 14 students in the Visions Interagency Program, the day often begins with an unusual sort of pop quiz: a drug test.

Failure could mean being asked to leave the Ventura school for troubled youths, which is run by the County Superintendent of Schools.

After the drug test--administered at random to 10 of the students who are on probation in the county’s Juvenile Court system--the entire student body is assigned to draw up contracts similar to legal documents.

The contracts are hour-by-hour accounts of how students spent the previous day and projections of what they intend to do that day, with space for their comments by each entry.

The contract “makes you think of how you’re feeling today,” one student said. “I used to let my feelings build up, and if you have no outlet that will eat you up.”

In part an exercise to help them recall what they did the day before, and in part therapy, the contract and the drug testing are designed to lend structure to the program, known as VIP.

For some Ventura County students, VIP is the school of last resort.

VIP students, who range from seventh- to 12th-graders, are referred either by corrections officials or by the county’s public social services agency. Members of the student body are runaways, dropouts and students who have exhausted their options with alternative programs at other schools.

School officials say VIP is unique in Ventura County, and unusual in the state, because it is one of the few programs that combines the efforts of four county agencies--the superintendent of schools office, the Corrections Services Agency, the Public Social Services Agency and Mental Health Services--in its attempts to keep students in school. A similar program is run by the Santa Clara County office of education, said William L. Rukeyser, a spokesman for the State Department of Education.

Students are bused from all over the county to the program at Ventura’s Boswell School on Loma Vista Road, near Ventura College. Several other county-run programs, such as those for the mentally retarded, are also housed at the school.

Head teacher Steve Burkhart said many VIP students “have either been thrown out of every high school they’ve been in, or they’ve never been in high school . . . they haven’t liked school. It’s been a place of repeated failure, and it’s not pleasant.”

VIP students attend school three days a week on a year-round basis, even now with summer in full sway.

Founded three years ago by Phillip Gore, head of the county’s Gateway Community School, VIP is a special branch of Gateway that offers independent study, counseling and support for students who have been through many of the other programs offered by various school districts.

Students who take physical education classes at Ventura College or the YMCA are required to meet the same academic standards as at other public schools. When VIP students are not in school, they are required either to hold jobs or to volunteer in a community organization.

In addition to Burkhart, a teacher’s aide and an art teacher, there are two probation officers, two mental health social workers and a public social services worker assigned to the school.

Many VIP students have served time at the Colston Youth Center, a Ventura County prison facility for juveniles. Some have serious problems with parents or other family members and are living in foster homes. Some have been kicked out--or have dropped out--of alternative programs offered by other districts and have been referred to VIP from continuation schools and other programs.

The aim of the VIP program is to provide a bridge back to the regular school setting for students fresh from Colston and other lockup facilities, or to bring back students who have been runaways or generally out on their own.

VIP “provides all the services the students need in one setting,” said probation officer Edith Moore. Moore and other staff members provide family and individual counseling, help students find jobs and assign them to volunteer duties at nonprofit organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club.

Students must spend a minimum of six months in the program, but ideally it takes nearly a year for students to acquire the study habits, social skills and self-esteem to make a return to regular school possible, officials said.

Typically, VIP students lag at least a semester behind grade level and some have fallen as much as a year behind, Burkhart said.

Despite the efforts of VIP’s staff, a few students still slip through the cracks. Last week, for example, one VIP student was missing and presumed to have run away, while another was locked up, back in detention for 30 days for a probation violation, Burkhart said.

“The hope is to bring them up to their grade level so when they go back to school, they’re not behind,” Burkhart said. “In some cases, that’s not possible. In many cases, it is.”

Many VIP students say that, despite some of the school’s unusual requirements, they find more freedom to study at their own pace there than at other schools.

Mia, 16, is one such success story. (Mia’s last name cannot be used because, like several other VIP students quoted in this story, she is a minor with a criminal record.)

Two years ago, Mia was a sophomore at Oxnard High School who claimed membership in the notorious Crips gang. She took drugs, spray-painted graffiti on neighborhood walls and rumbled in occasional street brawls with female members of opposing gangs. During her rare appearances at school, she earned mostly Fs, she said.

Eventually, Mia was caught when a policeman spotted her spray-painting graffiti on a wall. Charged with vandalism and public drunkenness, she landed at Colston, where she was locked up for three months.

“When I first came to this program I was pretty much trying to claim a gang,” said Mia, who after 10 months is one of VIP’s veterans. “Now that I look back on that, I think it was pretty dumb.”

Now a B student, the former truant rises at 6:30 a.m. three days a week to catch a bus to the Boswell School. On days off, she works at an Oxnard fast-food drive-in. She hopes to enroll as a junior at Rio Mesa High School this fall and eventually become a police officer.

Another VIP student, Jerry, 17, said he ditched classes continuously for two years at Hueneme High School, where he earned straight Fs. He had been in Juvenile Hall a dozen times when he was finally arrested last year after he and a group of friends burglarized a house and destroyed much of what they couldn’t take with them, he said.

When he got caught--”I was ratted on,” he said, “and they found fingerprints” at the burglarized house--Jerry was locked up at Colston for four months.

From there, he was referred by county corrections officials to VIP.

“I’ve been in situations since I’ve been in VIP where I could have broken the law, but I didn’t do it,” Jerry said. “It’s not my lifestyle anymore.”

Students usually transfer back to regular high schools and receive their diplomas there, although a few earn enough credits to graduate while at VIP.

Some students, such as Julie Brown, 17, go on to other alternative programs after leaving VIP, rather than returning to a traditional high school. Julie, who had lived in a variety of group homes and foster homes since age 12, was a runaway for 10 months before going to VIP last November.

While in the program she got married, and earlier this month had a baby boy, Codi. She is now in a program for student parents at the Gateway School.

VIP “had its ups and downs,” Julie said. The downs included potential personality clashes that were defused by the structured atmosphere. “A lot of the kids I was going to school with there, if we knew each other on the street we’d probably kill each other,” she said. “But at school everybody got along.”

But the ups made the program worthwhile, Julie said. “You have to take the same subject as at other schools, but you get to choose your own books and work at your own pace,” she said. “If you needed help, Steve was always there to help you. He was the first one I told when I found out I was pregnant.”

Best of all, she said, even though she is married and a mother, she can proceed with her plans to get a high school diploma and eventually go to Ventura College.

“I can graduate next year if I work hard,” Julie said. “And I do plan to work hard.”