Northpinellas: For school, one-on-one teaching equals success

PALM HARBOR -- With its column of glass blocks two stories high and Mediterranean-style touches, the home of Robert and Kelly Boles is distinctive, but the view from the street doesn't begin to tell the story of the place.

It is a home to the Boleses, their two teenage sons, their baby daughter, a cat and a rust-colored poodle named Algebra.

It also is a high school, Palm Harbor Preparatory.

For the past 13 years, Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Boleses have let students 16 and older into their home two at a time to instruct them in math, English and other subjects they need to know to get into college.

The Boleses tutor each student in two-hour sessions twice a week, with homework assigned between sessions. The instruction is one-on-one, intense and often confrontational.

The curriculum sometimes telescopes years of high school credits into months, and no one is allowed to progress without scoring at least 80 percent on all tests and homework.

In the end, students who pay $500 a month to be run through the academic wringer and who never may have met before come together at a yearly graduation to celebrate earning diplomas accepted by universities and the military.

Because the Boleses are dealing with at-risk students, getting them to that point usually means wrestling with more than just their scholastic performance.

The Boleses understand that because they've been there, through learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, dropping out and indiscretions with drugs.

"We've gone through it, we can look them in the eyeball and tell them why not to do it," said Mrs. Boles, 38, president and principal, whose beach-bleached hair and sunniness belie a drill sergeant's temper. "We can get down and dirty, and talk about subjects that in public school you couldn't talk about. This is a very non-traditional school."

Mrs. Boles says she hides nothing when meeting with parents applying to place their children with her, including words that might come up in open discussion.

"In consultation, I always use the words s--- or b----," says Mrs. Boles, who has a master's degree in education from the University of South Florida. "If those things are going to bother them, it's not the place to put their child."

Sitting in her office in her usual work clothes, an oversized shirt over tapered pants and leather slip-ons, Mrs. Boles says she used to dress up more. One big reason she doesn't anymore is that she's a new mom again, to Belleaire Reiss, born Nov. 19.

To her left, in a student chair with oversized desk arm, sits Laura Kantner, 17, of Clearwater. In sweat pants and sandals, dark hair pulled back, she keenly follows hieroglyphical cube root formulas Mrs. Boles is writing on a board with a marker.

At Kantner's feet, her baby, Samantha, gurgles in a baby carrier. Samantha was born a month and a day before the Boleses' new baby.

"It kind of worked out," Mrs. Boles said. "We went through our pregnancies together."

Kantner, whose father died two years ago, had expected to marry her baby's father. But they since have broken up.

"One thing about being here, you don't get picked on -- except by Kelly and Robert, for example, for going out with the wrong person," says Kantner, who wants to be a Coast Guard helicopter pilot. "Pretty much, if one wants to do wrong things, don't come here because they'll pick on you and tell you you're not supposed to be doing them."

Still, the Boleses pick their battles. In the "student lounge," a patio with a fountain, cigarette butts stick up from an ashtray.

"We're not policemen," Robert Boles, 46, says of the tolerance for student smoking. "That happened before they came here."

Rather than dwell on the past, the Boleses focus on the future, and they emphasize both the rewards of education and the cost of indolence. A poster above Mrs. Boles' desk is titled "Justification for Higher Education" and shows a house on a bluff with a five-car garage stocked with sports cars.

"We talk money to them," Mrs. Boles says. Being prepared is a requirement spelled out in an enrollment contract. Not being prepared results in forfeiting that day's session. If students come in without their homework done, they are likely to hear, "You just blew 60-some dollars," which is what the tuition breaks down to for one two-hour lesson.

"We keep pounding: Do your homework, come in on time, pay on time," says Robert Boles. "What we're teaching is what the world is going to expect when they get out of here." Nor are psychological disorders, which many students have, an excuse. The Boleses have been there. Robert Boles is dyslexic; in the seventh grade, attention-hyperactivity disorder was diagnosed in Mrs. Boles. She attributes her intensity to the disorder.

"If kids catch on that a label will cut them some slack somehow, they will milk it to the end," Robert Boles says. "I think they appreciate that we don't cut them any slack, don't let them play dumb."

Palm Harbor Preparatory grew out of Charis, a Christian counseling and substance-abuse treatment center in Clearwater that went belly up in 1988, stranding students Mrs. Boles was teaching there.

With the help of Jerry Forrester, who was principal of Clearwater-Largo Christian School, Mrs. Boles set up shop at home and soon had more business than she knew what to do with.

Robert Boles, in real estate at the time, hung around for safety's sake whenever Mrs. Boles tutored young men. In late 1989, she told her husband, who already was handling the business end of things, "Grab a pencil, dear." They've been teaching together ever since, graduating more than 300 students, she says.

Though Robert Boles studied at the universities of New Mexico and Southern Illinois and has accompanied his wife to classes at St. Petersburg Junior College and the University of South Florida, he does not have a degree.

"I guess I should go to school to be a teacher, there's no doubt about that," he says. "But I feel I'm a good teacher because I can transfer information I know to somebody who doesn't."

He also says brushes with drugs that the two of them had in the past -- Mrs. Boles with marijuana before she was 20, he a three-week fling with cocaine in his 30s -- make them more accessible to troubled students.

On the other hand, their own teenage sons "are straight and narrow," Mrs. Boles says.

"They're in sports, they're on the honor roll," she says of Forrest and Garrett, both students at Palm Harbor University High School.

"We're advocates of the public-school system," Boles said.

Originally, Mrs. Boles had thought Palm Harbor Preparatory's students just wanted to get diplomas. But soon she learned these bright but wayward "square pegs in round holes" wanted to go places, too. So the Boleses concentrate on making them college-ready, hence the "preparatory" in the school's name.

The school, which has an enrollment of 16 to 18 with a waiting list, goes year-round except for two weeks in the summer. Palm Harbor Preparatory students get out when their work is done, which depends on how many high school credits they already have when they arrive and how quickly they can pass the tests and do their homework.

Mrs. Boles says with this sort of self-determined pace, she can teach all kinds of students.A typical stay for a high school junior who transfers in is eight months, Mrs. Boles says.

Marilynn Odum, who published a now-defunct magazine called Florida Private Schools, the Alternative knows of no other school like Palm Harbor Preparatory.

"It would be wonderful if you could find other people doing what (the Boleses are) doing. They're very hands-on, very involved, very in your face with these kids," Odum said.

"But if they're having a problem, they'll work with them until they get it," said Odum, who sent her own learning-disabled son to the school and now is friends with the Boleses.

A former student, James Welch, left home at 14 and dropped out of Dunedin High School two months shy of graduation, but discovered fast food was not his ticket to security.

After graduating from Palm Harbor Preparatory in 1989, he rose to the rank of sergeant in the Marines. He now works for DuPont Teijin Films in Florence, S.C., and is pursuing his electrical engineering degree with the goal of joining a U.S. embassy overseas.

"He responded," says his mother, Jan Welch of Dunedin. "The individual attention makes all the world of difference sometimes."

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