Students Gain Skills as They Build Dormitory for Homeless Classmates : Education: A Bronx school turns an empty building into a haven. Vocational training is a large side benefit.

Call it Home 101.

In the South Bronx, where misfortune is a way of life, students at one high school are striking a blow for their less fortunate friends. They are building a dormitory for homeless classmates, and earning course credit for it.

The dorm is a project of Bronx Regional, an alternative high school for students who dropped out of other schools. At any one time, 20 to 30 members its student body of 350 are under foster care or living in group homes.

Principal Mark Weiss says this kind of homelessness happens “because of the ordinary battles adolescents have with their parents” and some of the more serious problems of living in the impoverished South Bronx.

“When youngsters come to us at 3 in the afternoon and say, ‘I don’t have anywhere to go tonight,’ we thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a place where kids could live?” he said.

In 1988, a committee of teachers and administrators came up with the idea of building accommodations where 20 students could stay for six months to a year, with counseling available 24 hours a day and a dining hall, weekend activities and tutoring.

It would be a place for students whose parents have kicked them out, for those who left home voluntarily to stay with friends or relatives and for those having difficulty in foster families or group homes.

It would be a place for someone such as Donita Chastine, whose mother and father are separated and live in different states. She couldn’t get along with the aunt who took her in, and wound up living with friends in Westchester and New Jersey.

“It was so hard for me to concentrate on school,” she recalled. “You have all that on your mind, and then you worry about school, and sometimes you want to forget about it altogether.”

The school bypassed the Board of Education bureaucracy and acted on its own. It got nearly $1 million from the state Department of Social Services to pay for construction. And it enlisted the aid of Banana Kelly, a local housing rehabilitation organization.

A block from the school Banana Kelly found a vacant, five-story building that had been seized for back taxes. The city gave it to the school, and three construction workers were hired to teach carpentry.

In March, 1989, the students started gutting the building and carting out tons of debris laced with needles and crack vials. Renovation is now under way and Weiss hopes to open the dorm in mid-1992.

Students get academic credit for working on the dorm full time in a nine-week construction course. A city Department of Employment program for disadvantaged youths pays them minimum wages.

They spend another nine weeks in class, learning how to write their resumes and other skills they will need to find jobs.

“A lot of the students say, ‘I was the best one on the work site,’ ” counselor Clarence Boyd said. “I say, ‘Yeah, but you don’t know how to fill out an application.’ ”

The school has helped 45% of those who have worked on the dorm to line up full-time jobs--not all in construction--after graduation, Boyd said. Many graduates will go on to college.

Donita Chastine was one of the first to work on building the dorm. “If I had a lot of stuff on my mind, it was like a workout for me,” she said. “At the same time I enjoyed my work. It was fun.”

Now 20, she has a job with Metro-North Commuter Railroad--as a computer operator. Still, she says that mastering basic “demolition, painting, plastering and renovating” gave her the confidence to try something else she had never done before.

Angelo Ferrante, who supervises the work site, dropped out at age 13 and didn’t finish high school until he was 27. So he feels well qualified to motivate his charges, some of whom had never held a hammer.

“When we first started, we wanted for Angelo to show us. Now we just go and do it,” said Thomas Jenkins, 20, who dropped out at age 17 and dropped back in--at Bronx Regional--a year later.

Ferrante stresses teamwork, and Jenkins made a new friend in co-worker Dishon Cooper, 20, a father of two who dropped out at age 16 and returned to school last year.

“It teaches you to trust other people,” Cooper said during a break from building a wall frame with Jenkins.

Since careful measuring is essential to carpentry, Ferrante teaches math too. He told one student who was paralyzed by numbers: “All you gotta know is, an inch equals 16-sixteenths or 32-thirty-seconds.”

He beamed. “Now she’s on the honor roll in math.”

The course also demystifies one fixture on the South Bronx landscape.

“You may walk past a million and one abandoned buildings, and all of a sudden you’re on the inside of one,” said counselor Keith Roach.

“Students may not feel so hopeless after this adventure. The most important thing we can do is give them a sense of what is possible.”