'A WORK IN PROGRESS': SOUTHEAST'S CROWDED CHARTER SCHOOL HOPES TO EXPAND

Southeast Missouri State University's first charter school hardly looks like a school at all.

Lift for Life Academy is housed in a one-story, concrete block building just north of downtown St. Louis, in view of the Arch. A school by day, a children's gym by night, it's surrounded by vacant businesses.

The building at various times served as a pallet factory, auto repair shop and record store. With 64 sixth-graders crammed inside, it's crowded, noisy and chaotic at times.

Students sit at long tables wedged into four makeshift classrooms. There are no doors or walls to the classrooms, no class bell, no lockers. A chalkboard, eraser boards, wire screens and cabinets serve as room dividers in the concrete-floored building. Weightlifting equipment sits stacked in a corner.

Lift for Life operates both the school and gym. The academy grew out of the organization's weightlifting program. These hybrids of non-profit programs and schools are becoming more common as the idea of charter schools gains support in the state.

In Missouri, charter schools -- run with taxpayer dollars but not bound by regular Department of Elementary and Secondary Education bureaucracy -- get charters through state universities.

Southeast's Board of Regents chartered Lift for Life Academy in April as a middle school for kids at risk of dropping out. In September, it chartered a second school in St. Louis. That school, an elementary and middle school known as the Garden School, plans to open next fall near the Missouri Botanical Garden.

But since Lift for Life Academy opened at the end of August, the university has had little direct involvement with the school.

Southeast's provost, along with a member of the university's charter review committee, attended the opening-day celebration. The review committee, headed by former Sikeston, Mo., superintendent Robert Buchanan, now a member of the university's education faculty, is fixing a teacher certification problem at the charter school -- working to get the teacher in question the additional course work needed for state certification.

Buchanan said he plans to visit Lift for Life Academy in January and, at the end of the school year, work with his committee to evaluate student achievement. As with other schools, that will be done by reviewing standardized tests that the students will take, he said.

Independent status

Charter schools are public schools. They operate with state money based on enrollment, the same as Missouri's school districts, as well as any private money they raise.

But unlike school districts, they operate with their own boards of directors. They don't answer to school district superintendents. The idea is that they're free to try new, different methods to target specific types of students.

Missouri's 1998 law allows charter schools to operate only in the St. Louis city and Kansas City school districts, and only with the approval of the particular school district or certain colleges. Missouri's first charter school opened in Kansas City in July 1999. Kansas City currently has 17.

Lift for Life Academy was the first of four charter schools to open in St. Louis this semester.

While it chartered Lift for Life Academy, Southeast isn't involved in the day-to-day operation and doesn't fund the school. Still, the university's review committee does plan to keep tabs on its progress, making sure it meets its purpose and obey the rules as set out in the charter.

"The committee is going to be there a little more than what most people would think," Buchanan said. "I could see us there four, five or six times a year."

With the school just beginning its operations this fall, there has been little to evaluate so far, Buchanan said.

Crowded conditions

But after three months of operation, problems are beginning to emerge. The biggest may be the lack of space. The school wants to move into a larger building in the neighborhood by the start of the 2001-2002 school year and is looking for one now.

Principal Jo Ann Perkins' office is little bigger than a closet and barely has room for her desk.

"We only have two chairs," she tells a visitor. "That's all we can fit."

An adjoining office houses the school's social worker and counselor, Jeanne Godar-Kriss, who spends much of her time counseling students to manage their anger and avoid fighting. Her office doubles as the teachers' lounge, computer center and library.

Several lunch tables sit at one end of the building in the shadows of basketball goals at either end. It's well lit, outside light flooding the room through frosted window panes where once there had been two garage doors.

Students' coats are piled on the floor. Many hang carelessly from a wire, fence-like divider. A few feet away sits the school's administrative assistant, Edith Crossland, who has a desk but no walls.

The parking lot isn't just for parking cars. Students do jumping jacks and run race relays under the watchful eye of teacher Carl Whitney, who spends most of his school days teaching math. But he also is the physical education and art teacher in a school where flexibility is the order of the day.

Students spend 90 minutes in a class rather than the more traditional 45 minutes. That, plus class sizes of about 15 students, give him and the other teachers more time for individual teaching.

Whitney is one of the school's four classroom teachers. Godar-Kriss, Crossland, Perkins and a part-time custodian round out the staff.

A step at a time

In this urban setting of poor, mostly black students, education is often seen as an endangered species.

Perkins and her small staff say they are trying to make a difference. Success, Perkins said, comes a little step at a time. There are no big victories here.

Perkins recalls the day one of the boys showed up late looking like "a drowned rat." He had walked to school after missing the bus. "He wanted to come bad enough that he walked in the rain," she said.

Another boy was so eager for school that he rose at 4:30 one morning, dressed and then went back to bed.

Incidents like these encourage Perkins, who has been in education for more than 30 years. She served for a dozen years as a middle school principal before retiring and signing on as the Lift for Life principal a year later.

Perkins said she couldn't pass up the opportunity to run a school where teaching wasn't shackled by administrative red tape.

The opportunity has its challenges. Keeping order is a constant battle. Over and over again, social studies teacher Ed Newbern patiently tells his students to sit down and put their book bags away.

But sprinkled in with all the instructions, there is plenty of teaching. Students have studied about ancient Greece and are learning about ancient Egypt. For a project on mummies, they wrapped one of their classmates in toilet paper. They made death masks out of modeling clay.

Newbern taught at a traditional public school for five years. Walls or no walls, he prefers the creative, hands-on teaching at Lift for Life Academy. "There are no limits," said Newbern, who takes his students on field trips.

Carla Scissors-Cohen founded the school along with her husband, Marshall. She serves on the board of directors and calls the academy "a work in progress."

New things are being tried, she said. Upcoming plans include taking the students to a community center for swimming and yoga lessons.

Inside most important

Lift for Life has an 11-month school year and contracts with a bus company to transport the children to school. There is a school uniform. Students wear khaki pants and blue or white shirts.

Josh Lane, 13, said he didn't like the school at first, primarily because there was a mandatory after-school program that kept him there until 5 p.m. The program was eliminated, and now he lauds the good things about school.

"They give us recess," he said. At the public schools some students used to attend, they didn't get recess for security reasons.

Michelle Wright, 11, was surprised to see makeshift classrooms, but she likes sitting at tables rather than separate desks. "We can help each other work," she said.

With the help of a volunteer tutor, 11-year-old Megan Robinson is improving her reading skills. "It's getting much better," she said, flashing a broad smile.

Despite the chaos that sometimes marks their children's school, parents say they're excited to be a part of the program. Tonya Lloyd is thrilled that her daughter, Richelle, is enrolled in the school. "I was praying I could find something like that. It is such a blessing," she said.

She said her daughter would have been "lost" in the regular public schools where classes are routinely large.

Bettye Wilson, bundled up against the cold, said she doesn't worry about the vacant buildings and boarded up windows and tiny grass playground. She said her daughter, Anitra, loves the school.

"It's what is on the inside," she said.