A first class pact

An unusual private school nudges its first nine boys out of the nest - still keeping a protective eye on them - and vows to also give their successors "what's missing, things that have to do with parenting and life experiences, and time and time and time.''

[Times photos: Cherie Diez] Andrew Williams, left, Paul Gaines, foreground, and Vasjah McDonald adjust their caps prior to the start of Academy Prep's first-ever graduation Tuesday at the Palladium. All nine graduates will attend private high schools on full scholarships next school year. "We can't change the world," school co-founder Jeff Fortune says, "but we can change a few lives."

By LENNIE BENNETT

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 7, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Today begins the test of Academy Prep's promise.

Three years ago, Academy Prep Center for Education, a private school for disadvantaged boys in grades five through eight, opened with 30 students. It pledged to do what few schools can or will do: Bring at-risk children back from the brink of failure by using whatever resources, whatever time and money, assuming whatever role, even that of parent, needed.

Not always the best or the brightest, the boys chosen to attend had the potential both to be lost in the vast public school system and to succeed in the rigorous, protective structure of Academy Prep. Most of all, they had the drive and desire to be more than what their lives of narrow hopes and limited chances of success predicted for them.

[Times photo: Jim Stem] Justin Middlebrooks, Vasjah McDonald and Paul Gaines play chess on a board Paul found in a trash can. "I've had so many new experiences here," Vasjah says. "Scuba diving, sailing. Until I went to this school, I never left the state of Florida. It's changed my whole view of life, where I want to be and where I want to go."

Some of the original class of 2000 were lost along the way, but nine boys stayed. They graduated last night in a ceremony at the Palladium Theater.

Each has a full scholarship to a private high school, some local, some out of town.

But they will never really leave Academy Prep behind. For the school, which will continue to monitor their lives, has said to them: You have done your best here, and we will never give up on you. We will be your surrogate home and, if need be, your family.

You are marked for life as one of our own.

The difference three years makes

They began every school morning on the basketball court, beneath a canopy of old oaks alive with the rasp of blue jays, the plangency of mourning doves.

On an early May day, like so many others at the school at 2301 22nd Ave. S, a ball is launched, caught, contested. Fledglings drifting down from the trees scatter, their cries mingling with the whoops and shouts of boys roving from one end of the court to the other.

Then a grown-up steps forward and booms, "Gentlemen, it is time to begin our day."

It is 7:45 a.m.

Wordless, they form four lines, one for each grade, and the court is silent again as the boys wait expectantly.

Paul, Vasjah, Justin, Teddy, Jonathan, Greg, Eric, Andrew and Russell, class of 2000, line up in the center. They are Pollux, the first and smallest class, named by John Effinger, Academy Prep's headmaster, after the Greek god, a son of Zeus, who became a star in the sky.

Three years ago, they were nine among 30 hopefuls selected for a summer session that would test their ability to succeed in the Academy Prep model. Only 15 made the cut to return for the fall session. Five dropped out along the way, and one is repeating seventh grade.

"It has been a tremendous amount of work for just nine boys," said Jeff Fortune, co-founder of the school. He resolved at the outset to keep the school small for financial reasons, knowing that many would be turned away.

Still, he says, "the impact, the value to the community, is worth any amount. They weren't "normal' boys three years ago. It was so obvious, their anti-social, protective behaviors. You saw it when they played basketball, and they all had their defined space. When others would intrude, there would be a reaction. It is just the opposite of what you see today. They care about each other."

"We're like brothers," says Jonathan Ford, 13. "The whole class."

They admit to having been ambivalent at first about attending Academy Prep. All say now they are grateful they were accepted.

"I wanted to go to Southside Fundamental," says Andrew Williams, 14. "This is stricter. Smaller. Not a lot of sports. I can't hang out with my other friends, because I'm at school so much. But I am glad I am here. I'm lucky."

A rich helping of attention

"At school so much" describes the Academy Prep program, which is based on the philosophy that to succeed in school and in life, children need a lot of attention. At Academy Prep, they get attention 12 hours a day, six days a week, 11 months a year.

Effinger and three of the eight teachers live on the campus, which is never closed. He and faculty members take the boys on camping trips and to museums, the theater, the beach. A guild of black and white women plan parties and holiday celebrations for the students. Volunteers teach them gymnastics, music, art appreciation, cooking, dental hygiene and etiquette.

Such educational immersion is not cheap. The first year, when the school had only two classes of boys, the cost of educating them was about $12,000 each.

Headmaster John Effinger helps Jonathan Ford during a keyboarding lesson. "I want to raise kids that are so powerful," he says, "they go beyond the sense of having to be something on white people's terms."

Now that the school has grown to four grades and 48 students, it costs about $7,300 per student. That number will level off to $7,000 once the girls school next door, currently under construction, is fully operational in a few years.

The ratio of teachers to students is one to six. Pinellas County public schools spend about $3,600 a year per student, according to the Pinellas County Schools' Budget Office, and their ratio in middle school averages one teacher to 30 students.

As high as the numbers might seem at Academy Prep, the school is a bargain by other local private school standards, which have an average ratio of one to 20 and can cost as much as $8,000 for a much shorter school day and year.

Like public schools, Academy Prep is free.

'Remember, gentlemen, we are a family'

The daily routine, established by Effinger and school principal Jesse Williams, rarely varies.

"Good morning, gentlemen," says Williams, calling them to order. "What is today's date? Mr. Gaines?"

"May 5th, sir," Paul Gaines, 13, replies from his place in the eighth grade line. "Cinco de Mayo. It's a Mexican celebration."

"Very good," Williams says.

They have to say the Pledge of Allegiance twice. The first time they rush through it, and he scolds them.

The sixth grade is called to task.

"You left your room a mess," Williams says. "You will clean it this morning."

He deals with an altercation between two fifth-graders involving a few dollars.

"Can this be worked out between the two of you?" he asks. They nod.

"Remember conflict resolution," the principal says. "You do not use your fists. Remember, gentlemen, we are a family."

He leads them in prayers, and they call out individual ones. Some are generic: "Please pray for my family." Some are poignantly specific: "Pray for my dad, who got out of jail last Friday."

After each request, Williams says, "Lord ..."

"Hear our prayer," the students answer back in unison.

One of the younger boys asks for prayers on behalf of eighth-grader Justin Middlebrooks' great-grandmother, who has Parkinson's disease.

"That explains his absence," Williams says later. "You learn a lot on the basketball court."

After announcements, they have breakfast at picnic tables, then re-form lines and go to their classrooms. For the next six hours, with only a brief recess and lunch break, they will have math, science, language and composition, literature and speech, history and Latin.

At 3 p.m. classes end and they clean the school bathrooms, dust furniture, weed, and then proceed to activities that range from baseball to art. At 5 they go home for two hours. Unless they are on the honor roll, they are required to return for study hall until 9 p.m. On Saturday, they come for half a day.

A summer program keeps them in school through July. They get a break of about three weeks and then return in late August.

The only public funding the school receives is federal money for free lunches and breakfasts, for which all the students are eligible. The only cost to the students is their uniforms (shirts with the school logo are $7.50) and a monthly activity fee of $10, which is often forgiven. The $400,000 needed to keep the school open each year comes from individual and corporate donations.

That the donors are primarily white, for a school with an almost total black enrollment, is not lost on school leaders.

"It's more complicated than white man's guilt," says Jack Painter, a retired advertising executive and board member who has led two successful fundraisers for the school and visits the school at least once a week to help with chores and odd jobs. "Some people get left behind very early on. Here is a chance to change that."

In 1995, Jeff Fortune and his wife, Joan, who had sold their lucrative beach resorts, met retired educators Bob and Barbara Anders and began exploring a mutual vision to start a school for at-risk children. Fortune said his motivation came from years of working with low-income employees.

"I learned that everyone has aspirations for their kids, but many haven't had the experiences to know how to help them get further than they, the parents, had."

Research led them to Nativity Mission School in New York City, an inner-city middle school, founded in 1971, that offered intense instruction to disadvantaged boys. The Fortunes and Anderses chose to call their new facility a "center" rather than a "school."

"We realized early on," Fortune said, "that the traditional school is such a tiny part of a child's life. What we're doing here is providing a place to meet the special needs of a group of kids, to give them what's missing, things that have to do with parenting and life experiences.

"And time and time and time."

The gates are always open

A chain link fence surrounds the 7-acre Academy Prep campus, in one of St. Petersburg's poorest neighborhoods, where churches barely outnumber package stores and taverns and the Department of Corrections has a branch office for probation and parole services.

Two low-lying buildings, one for administration and the other for classrooms, are divided by ponds, lushly landscaped and populated by ducks and a rabbit. A third, identical building is being built for the girls school, which opens in the fall with a fifth-grade class.

Fortune says that when they canvassed the area, attending neighborhood association and church meetings, they were greeted with skepticism.

"They would say, "It's nice you're doing this, but it won't last,' " Fortune says. "That was what always had happened in this neighborhood. Programs would come and go. They couldn't rely on anything. We needed to show them they could count on this school."

The school has become an oasis of structure and safety for many of the students.

"Some of them would sleep here if they could," Effinger says. "Some of their lives are so dark and closed in."

He says that the lure of the world beyond, the street life, the old friends and associations, the unacceptable behaviors, remain powerful influences that staff members and parents constantly mitigate.

"I hate to lose them even for three weeks every summer," says Effinger. "Even on weekends, there is recidivism."

For that reason, the school never locks its gates, never declares itself off-limits.

"You're never really alone here," says Kate Turnbull, a recent college graduate who is classified as a volunteer teacher, living rent-free in an apartment above the classrooms. Turnbull, the math and science teacher, Sidney Kirkpatrick, who teaches language and speech, and Amy Estes, who teaches social studies, are not paid, but receive a stipend for expenses, a car and health insurance.

Even on Sundays, she says, "I'll come down to make breakfast, and someone's usually here, wanting to talk or trying to get me to play basketball."

Caught before a fall through the cracks

"Do you remember when I used to be not so honest, Ms. Estes?" Justin Middlebrooks asks his teacher during a class discussion.

"That was so long ago, I don't remember, Justin," she says.

Justin, 15, has probably had one of the more tumultuous lives, but its broad outlines are similar to those of most other Academy Prep students: Quiet and well behaved in the early elementary school years; by fourth grade, bored and distracted, with increasingly low grades, discipline problems, family and financial exigencies. Like all but two of the students at Academy Prep, Justin does not live with his biological father. Justin says he has never known his father.

For most of his life, he has lived with his mother and older brother in a rental house, always on the edge financially, at one time evicted by a sheriff's deputy.

Justin's older brother dropped out of school and Justin, in a public elementary school, was, in his words, "a bad student. My attitude and stuff like that was bad. I'd get into fights a lot if somebody would mess with me."

Placed in special classes because of a speech problem, "he would get up like a robot and go through the motions. He had no hope. He had no dreams," says his mother, Angelera Middlebrooks.

A newspaper ad led them to Effinger, who was interviewing boys for the first summer school session.

Justin was accepted.

"That first summer," said his mother, "He was bringing home A's and B's. He had been getting D's and F's. "Mama, they take the time to explain things,' he told me."

Keeping Justin on track at Academy Prep has been a challenge sometimes, says Effinger, because "he has a lot of anger, and he sometimes doesn't know how to channel it."

The Middlebrooks' life has stabilized and mother and son are preparing for Justin's departure in the fall to Rabun Gap-Nacoochee, a private school in Georgia that is giving Justin and classmate Vasjah McDonald full scholarships.

"I always wanted to go to college," Justin says. "Now I think I will."

Safety net remains in place

"If you are going to do what is necessary in life, you have to do all of what's necessary," Fortune says. "Lesser things may contribute to the success of children. What we have is a model that works because we do all the things, 100 percent, of what it takes."

What it takes, besides enormous time and attention during the boys' four years at Academy Prep, he believes, is unflagging time and attention once they leave.

Public schools, even those with magnet programs, were not considered because school leaders felt the boys would once again get lost in that system.

"It would be like putting the rabbit back in the briar patch," says Bob Anders. "Private schools can make demands on them and follow through."

"Only about 27 percent of the kids in this neighborhood graduate from public high school," Effinger says. "I can't send my kids there."

Each eighth-grader will go to a school that can render the same level of support as that of Academy Prep. St. Andrew's, the school in Delaware that accepted Andrew Williams, is paying for his mother to fly back and forth for visits. Shorecrest Preparatory School in St. Petersburg, which is giving full scholarships to Jonathan Ford, Paul Gaines and Teddy Thompson, will assume responsibility for their transportation to and from school if necessary. Also written into their contracts is the requirement that they continue to attend the nightly study halls at Academy Prep.

If any gaps open, Academy Prep will fill them.

Greg Stokes' mother, Rhonda Williams, says "Academy Prep will pay for what I can't afford," such as books for her son when he goes to Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale.

"Everything that the high schools mail to parents will also be mailed to us," Effinger says. Sandi Pearl, who has been school administrator since its opening, will keep up with the boys through e-mail and phone calls. They are committed to helping the boys find another high school if this first one does not work out, and to getting them through college and on career paths.

As he did the year before with the eighth-graders, Effinger, in early May, loaded up one of the school buses with seventh-graders and their mothers for a tour of out-of-state private high schools. He is already negotiating scholarships for that class.

"If they work as hard as they can, we will be there for them," says Jeff Fortune. "Whatever happens, we'll be there, like a family. They cannot divorce themselves from Academy Prep."

The white boy who fit in

Until he left, Russell Curry was the only white student at Academy Prep.

He entered his new school, Milton Hershey in Hershey, Pa., a semester early because he was having emotional problems, says Effinger, which were translating into discipline problems. With the increasingly poor health of his grandmother, who has raised him, his brother and his sister, Effinger asked Milton Hershey to admit him with the hope that new surroundings would help him settle down.

Being a minority at Academy Prep never seemed to bother him or the other boys.

"He fit in," says Teddy Thompson.

"I think it was neat," says Russell, who visited Academy Prep in early May during spring break. "They took me in like a stray cat. They nourished me, taught me how to do things."

Of leaving early he says, "I like my new school. I had problems before I left. I've reflected back through my childhood. It's been a rocky road. I never had a father or mother. My mother has four kids with three fathers. When I was 3, one of my brothers was taken away when he was 1 month old. I've never seen him again.

"I never had a role model. I did here. I realized I was smacking these people in the face who were trying to help me. They care a lot about us. Now I have hope for a better life."

A center for whom exactly?

Effinger says the school is constantly misperceived.

"We're accused of having only the best students. Others think we're a school for special needs or troubled kids. Or that only black kids can apply. The bottom-line requirement is that they be eligible for the federal government's free or reduced lunch program."

Fortune says that by virtue of the school's location, everyone knew that most of the students would be black, but they wanted a site within the Challenge zone formed after the 1996 disturbances, precipitated by the shooting of a black teen by a white police office that opened a racial chasm in the community.

"Most all of our kids have at least two of the criteria that target them as probable dropouts," Effinger says: "frequent change of schools, low grades and test scores, suspensions. These are the kids who are falling through the cracks, not succeeding in a class of 30, getting into trouble. And yet they still have the desire to be something more."

Test scores seem to have validated the Academy Prep philosophy that time and attention for each student, paired with a solid, basic curriculum, are the answers to academic achievement for these at-risk students.

At the end of their first year as sixth-graders, the graduates took the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, until recently used by Pinellas County public schools. They showed average gains of a grade level.

"They continue to test a grade or two above grade level," says Effinger.

"If you ask if I'm surprised by this," says Jeff Fortune, "the answer is no. I expected it to work academically. The real thrill is seeing that the kids really do change with this kind of full-time experience. This is the alternative money can buy."

Fortune and Effinger say they want to start other schools based on the Academy Prep model, possibly in northern Pinellas and in Hillsborough County. Even so, schools like Academy Prep, small by design, can only serve a fraction of at-risk students. Fifty-eight boys have applied for the 15 spots open to a new fifth-grade class. Thirty candidates have lined up for two openings in the sixth grade. (The school does not accept new students in seventh and eighth grades.)

"Of course it's hard turning children away," Fortune says. "But 15 is better than zero."

Effinger, Fortune and Anders are skeptical that the public school system could replicate their program.

"Class size is the foundation for improvement," says Effinger. "That's money. Lengthen the school day. Lengthen the school year. That's more money."

"I'm a great supporter of the public school system," says Anders. "I came from it. But you cannot do in 61/2 hours what is done in 12 hours."

Look 'em in the eye

On an afternoon in May, Amy Estes, the social studies teacher, reviews the chapter on post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South with the eighth-graders in preparation for a test.

Estes and her students go through the Freedmen's Bureau, the 13th and 14th amendments, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

"The slaves, when they became free, could do a lot things they'd never been allowed to," she says. "What were some of those things?"

"You wouldn't have to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed," says Paul Gaines. "You could twirl a cane and keep walking. You could look a white person in the eye."

"Just teaching them that, to look you in the eye," says Jesse Williams, "is a major thing."

As they always do after school and chores, the boys congregate on the basketball court. They joke with each other as they pass and shoot, never seeming to tire of this game of loss and retrieval.

Paul Gaines, class of Pollux, takes a break. He turns and sees a visitor nearby, approaches with purpose and holds out his hand.

"Good afternoon," he says, and looks the stranger in the eye.

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.