A New Breed of School For Troubled Youths

By Jessica Portner

Escalating violence in public schools--and mounting pressures from teachers and parents to do something about it--have politicians and educators scrambling to find a solution. Unruly students, they say, have become so disruptive in conventional classrooms that other children's learning, and perhaps even lives, are at risk.

But from Boston to Los Angeles, a growing number of state and district school officials think they may have discovered a remedy: a new breed of school to get disruptive students out of traditional classrooms and into ones that better fit their needs.

Historically, educators set up alternative schools for chronic truants, teenage mothers, or students with learning disabilities, says Jay Smink, the director of the National Dropout Prevention Center in Clemson, S.C. Now, he says, educators are witnessing a major push to create programs for troubled youths who simply aren't "making it'' in traditional high schools. In fact, these alternative schools make up nearly 15 percent of the estimated 7,500 alternative schools currently operating nationally, according to Jerry Mintz, the director of the Alternative Education Resource Organization, a clearinghouse on alternative...