Monte Vista Class Helps Troubled Kids Find BEST Results

Quiet miracles occur in Candis Enriquez’s classroom at Monte Vista Intermediate School.

A shy eighth-grader who read at the sixth-grade level in September is now parallel to his peers. A quarrelsome young man has yanked his grades from the gutter to above average. A 13-year-old who used to skip school as often as he attended it is going to graduate come spring.

“These kids, they could be the heads of gangs or the heads of corporations,” Enriquez said, looking at her eight polite, bright charges. “I think they should be heads of corporations.”

In the fledgling BEST program, Enriquez and a teacher’s aide are doing everything possible to ensure that outcome.

An acronym standing for “Believe in yourself, Educate yourself, Succeed for yourself and Trust in yourself,” the BEST program is a second-chance school within a school for students with a penchant for trouble. It started with $75,000 in school district money, but Enriquez often finds herself begging for money from local business owners to keep the program afloat.

“It’s kind of like that movie ‘Dangerous Minds,’ ” said one 14-year-old boy who first arrived at the program with a mohawk, knee-high combat boots and chipped black nail polish. “We used to be not very good kids, misfits. But she challenges us to do better.”

The BEST students are among the toughest middle-schoolers in the Pleasant Valley Elementary School District. They landed in the program for a litany of offenses: carrying fake and real weapons, skipping school, fighting, using drugs and alcohol and vandalizing.

Most arrive at the program as a last stop before expulsion or the county’s Gateway Community School for troubled students. To be considered for the program, which began in September, the young teens and their parents sign contracts agreeing to daily weapons searches and even random urinalysis if the students appear to be drunk or stoned.

In return, they get an intensive academic program and at least four hours of paid community service work weekly. The teens also receive personal attention from Enriquez and teacher’s aide Brian Cruise, who share classroom duties.

All the BEST students are boys now, but there have been female students. The minimum BEST stay is a semester; after that, students who are ready to return to regular classrooms can do so.

Looking at the wood-paneled classroom, set at the back of the leafy campus, it’s impossible to tell that these 13- and 14-year-olds were ever anything but good students. The young men are freshly scrubbed and offer their hands to shake. One minute a teen will knit his brow in frustration and the next, he’ll swap jokes with his teachers.

*

The teacher-to-student ratio would make most parents salivate. Calculating the volume of three-dimensional shapes, Cruise is a mere two feet away from his pupils. Every day each boy sits directly across from Enriquez and reads “To Kill a Mockingbird” or a history text aloud.

The talk turns to self-esteem and decision making. Students are reminded that they have the power to change their errant ways.

And change they do.

Wearing a brown T-shirt and jeans, one hazel-eyed young man shaved his mohawk as a Christmas present for Enriquez. With daily nurturing, his grade-point average has skyrocketed from 0.6 to 3.1.

“It makes me feel a lot better to know I’m getting good grades,” he said. “When people ask me about them I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I don’t remember’ anymore. I say, ‘I got all Bs.’ ”

The schoolyard scuffles are over, and he is trying to keep his temper in check.

Many of the students’ social troubles at school stem from academic difficulty, Enriquez said. Being behind in lessons prompts the adolescents to ditch school or to prove themselves by bullying.

“When I came here, I was probably mad, frustrated all the time because I couldn’t do my work,” said the baby-faced 14-year-old whose reading has improved.

“But she taught me,” he said, grinning. “Now I’m happy and I get my work done.”

Another boy, 13, has found himself by working at a bike repair shop, his community service. When the class adopted a needy family over the holidays, the eighth-grader, who was a chronic truant, agreed to refurbish old bicycles as gifts. He stayed at the bike shop until after midnight Christmas Eve making sure the primer and paint were perfect.

And he rarely misses school anymore. “If you can get them hooked on something other than hanging out and kickin’ it, they’re fine,” Enriquez said.

The program isn’t perfect. Sometimes students do stagger, stumble and start from scratch again.

“The way I measure success is that no one’s in jail,” Enriquez said. “They’re all in school.”

And, at this rate, they are all going to graduate.